Turner Prize 2010 exhibition at Tate Britain: Susan Philipsz

Turner Prize 2010 exhibition at Tate Britain: Susan Philipsz

susan philipsz - i haven't experienced any of her work but I love the ideas. I heard about it quite a while ago and it stuck in my mind. I probably heard about it because she had been nominated for the turner prize but I didn't catch that bit at the time. I just scanned the other artists, I read that the painter who's nominated is ground breaking and all that but I'm just not that interested, I took a peek but it still looks like painting to me. It just didn't strike me in the way that, i hope, the first viewing of a cubist painting might have struck me were I around at the time. Maybe it would be different face to face. I suppose you could say, and i'm sure plenty of people are saying, that susan's work is just singing. This is true but it speaks to me! It's not about creating a musically beautiful sound, its about creating emotional responses to a place and hopefully inciting a response from the audience too. It's using voice in art. Its using sound in an almost non-musical way or at least in a non music establishment way. That works for me. Its almost the equivalent of an artist looking at, for example, the paintings nominated for the turner prize this year and seeing the complexity and quality within them but a lay person looks at them and just sees them as paintings. Susan is using music in that way in that it's a tool in her art, the art of site-specific installation. A musician might listen to it and hear that she's no musical professional, that she's not treating the music itself in any new or ground breaking way. In the same way I might use, for example, slackrope walking in a piece. I'm no great circus performer, just as Susan is not a trained musician. Its what we do with it that counts.