The Turner Prize is Britain’s leading contemporary art award – or it used to be. These days, nobody much outside the quasi-incestuous bounds of the arts world itself pays the blindest bit of notice. Once upon a time, in the 80s and 90s, some of those shortlisted genuinely did break boundaries. Bizarre, Reeves & Mortimer-like performance-artists extraordinaire Gilbert & George, habitual elephant turd-abuser Chris Ofili, professional shark-destroyer Damien Hirst, comical transvestite (as opposed to transsexual – he’s never claimed he’s a woman, he just enjoys dressing up as a little girl for kicks) potter Grayson Perry: whatever you think of the quality of these artists’ work, they certainly had some original ideas.
Today, the situation is much different. Did you even realise the Turner had been won last week at all? Well it was, by a self-styled “transmasculine” artist (i.e., a woman with facial stubble) named Jesse Darling. She may pose as being anti-Establishment but, today, claiming falsely to be anti-Establishment is such a classic Establishment thing to do. So much so, in fact, that, during her acceptance speech, Darling ostentatiously waved a Palestinian flag about, “Because there’s a genocide going on and I wanted to say something about it on the BBC”. I think certain staff members of the BBC have probably already mentioned this dubious opinion of their own accord before, Jesse.
If she was really committing to being rebellious against the oppressive mores of those who rule us, she would have unfurled a Star of David. Rather than performing the genuinely Establishment-subversive act of praising Benjamin Netanyahu for killing terrorists, however, Jesse appears to prefer quite safely criticising Margaret Thatcher for “taking art out of schools” because it “wasn’t economically viable”, even though she didn’t, and in any case has been dead for 10 years now and was last in power when Ms. Darling was 11 years old.
Kill Your Darlings
In her past, Jesse has apparently been a dancer, a decorator, a shop-worker, a clown and a sex-worker. Some may argue she is still busy prostituting herself today: the Turner Prize comes with a £25,000 cheque attached. Her work adopts the medium of a sort of quasi-industrial pseudo-sculpture in which, for example, a faded Union Jack is fashioned from steel bars, or a maypole from police-tape. Such heavy-handed symbols are supposedly designed to “question dominant narratives about the world” – dominant narratives such as the idea that the nation state is a legitimate geopolitical construct, that borders are necessary or that the gender-binary is real.
Darling believes none of these eternal verities, preferring to critique the Evil Tory Government’s alleged “hostile environment” for refugees and immigrants (I wish it had one). She’s against Brexit too, of course, and her work also critiques this in any number of extremely tedious and predictable ways – as does her residency status. She actually lives in Berlin, not Britain.
Yet these “dominant narratives” that Jesse deconstructs are only dominant amongst the vast mass of ordinary people whose antediluvian tastes and aspirations the gatekeepers of the contemporary art-world so obviously despise, hence helping explain the recent collapse in public interest in the Turnip Prize in the first place. Amongst these elites disguised as egalitarians, ideas about nations being outmoded, or trans women being actual women, are in fact the dominant dogmas being pushed, not marginal or oppressed ones at all. The fact they chose Darling as this year’s winner of the Turner Prize due to her ideologically compliant focus upon issues like “identity and inclusion” and desire to question supposed “power structure[s] … [like] Britishness”, would tend to prove it.
Examining Darling’s explanations of her work, you can certainly see she speaks fluent New Labour:
These [found industrial] materials [that I use in my sculptures] have produced my body, in a manner of speaking, and they tell their own stories. You could say it’s autobiographical, but my autobiography isn’t just about me – it’s a story about the Enclosures Act, the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire, the transatlantic slave trade, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, the World Wars, mines and miner’s strikes, the welfare state and its dissolution, the failed sexual revolution, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, the Twin Towers, Brexit and COVID-19.
Obviously, being a transvestite, Darling also wishes to exploit her position to turn gallery-visitors gay: “I don’t want to perform the gesture of addressing the straight world from a queer place. I would rather that the work queers the viewer and not the other way around.” No thanks, love, I’d rather just go and look at some nice paintings and statues, if that’s all the same with you.
Painting a False Picture
Such ideologically queer guff is bad enough, but what is far worse is when contemporary artists and critics abuse their position even more to disingenuously queer the art of the past. There is a whole movement out there now devoted to trying to claim paintings of eras gone by surprisingly depict transexuals, as with the case of the Cambridge preacher who last year tried to tell CofE parishioners a Renaissance image of Jesus’s spear-wound actually showed him with a gaping blood-red vagina in the middle of his torso like something out of David Cronenberg.
On the other side of the canvas, recall the St. Ives branch of the Tate Gallery in Cornwall disingenuously altering the pronouns of the late female painter Marlow Moss to gender-neutral ones earlier this year, despite the fact she was not a sex-changer at all, just a very butch woman who dressed like a huntsman and died in 1958, long before homosexuality was even officially invented by Peter Tatchell. In a guide to Moss on its website intended for kids, the Tate lied (in words now detransitioned away into oblivion) that:
It’s very interesting trying to describe people from history like Marlow, because we have tons of words to describe gender now that didn’t exist in Britain back then. Perhaps if Marlow was alive today, the artist would identify as transgender, which means that your gender is different to the one that the doctors or midwives presumed you were when you were born, or non-binary, which means that neither the word ‘boy’ nor ‘girl’ are a good fit for you.
With ‘logic’ like this firmly embedded across the nation’s gallerists, is it really any surprise Jesse Darling won this year’s Turner Prize? Perhaps the worst example of such transphilic group-think came in September 2022, when some pathetic unnamed “transmasculine” curator at York Art Gallery (Jesse Darling herself, maybe?) decided to ‘queer’ a 17th-century oil-painting of St. Agatha – a female Christian martyr reputedly murdered by having her breasts sawn off whilst still alive – by claiming Agatha’s expression of agonised joy as her dying soul ascended Heavenwards was actually highly reminiscent of the “trans euphoria” unleashed upon genderqueer folk when first strapping on a chest-binder. As I wrote elsewhere at the time, “Just because Picasso… once had a Blue Period, it doesn’t make him a ‘person who menstruates’”. Picasso also famously once said that “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. Sometimes, though, it’s just a lie.
Canvases of Opinion
So, what other artistic ‘proof’ of the long historical existence of trans people can you find hidden away in bits of classic old art? As a bit of fun for the festive season, in an exclusive extract from xe’s new book, Painted Ladies, the Turner Prize’s in-house pet transsexual Jesse D provides readers of the Daily Sceptic with zir exclusive critical insights into the secret, hitherto-suppressed world of 12 of art history’s greatest masterpieces: we like to call it ‘The Twelve Gays of Christmas’. Enjoy!
The sense of disappointment of this vulnerable trans man at having accidentally had his arms rather than his unwanted ‘breasts’ removed at the hands of a typically transphobic ancient Greek health service is clearly discernible etched upon the very marble of his unacceptably white face.
Magritte is quite correct; this is indeed not a pipe. It in fact self-identifies as being a cigarette.
Founding Mother George Washington (‘Boy George’ to his friends) here audaciously crosses the gulf between two genders, as symbolically represented by the left and right banks of the river, so entering into a new, intermediate, non-binary zone somewhere in-between, thus explaining why he always wore a large powdered wig in public.
The most anatomically accurate depiction of the male body I have ever seen.
My typical emotionally proportionate response to being accidentally misgendered in public.
Why is she smiling? Because da Vinci has just had her fitted with a new male prosthesis.
The title says it all. “I possess not a window into the souls of men,” King Elizabeth I once famously said. But I do, thus allowing me to magically discern that he was one.
Yet another appalling historical example of an innocent infant being arbitrarily assigned an incorrect gender at birth by arrogant and heteronormative attending medical staff. Continuing to refer to this image by its traditional label is dead-naming, pure and simple. Accordingly, the painting shall henceforth be known by all right-thinking individuals as The Birth of Trevor.
The unspoken addendum to this question, “Because he has just transitioned into being your mother”, was of course unable to be openly presented to the general gallery-going public back in 1878 during the height of the reign of the evil and trans-exclusionary British Empire.
This daringly transgressive image does not depict the ‘real’ [sic] Napoleon of historical ‘record’, but in fact shows Mrs Herschel Baumgarten, of 1815 Waterloo Terrace, Paris, Texas, who bravely self-identifies as the leader of the Grand Armée since about 12.05pm yesterday, having just seen Ridley Scott’s new Hollywood film about him – a profound piece of self-knowledge WHICH IS VALID.
The greatness of this painting lies in the way that you can see it as being whatever you want it to be. I think it is a white triangle.
There is absolutely NOTHING transgender-related or queer about this image whatsoever, and to suggest otherwise in any way, shape or form would be highly offensive to the 1.8 billion members of a well-respected and wholly peaceful major world religion.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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An art critic par excellence.
“Objets d’Arse: The Turner Prize and Trans Art 101”
As soon as I read that title I just knew I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest! 🤢 🤮
Brings to mind this:
Philip Larkin on how Charlie Parker ruined jazz – GranneBlog (granneman.com)
Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by—or so they tell me—using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously. If I sound heated on this, it’s because I love jazz, the jazz of Armstrong and Bechet and Ellington and Bessie Smith and Beiderbecke. To have it all destroyed by a paranoiac drug addict made me furious.
I quite like Charlie Parker but I think this is a hoot.
Nightingales have a reputation for being fine singers among birds and Bird’s phrasing is pretty close to what they do (can easily be discovered during walks in the night). Neither of both ever composed national anthems, though. There’s also a good bit of In the eye of the beholder in here — a passage in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward compares the diatonic jazz of the day with the sounds made by a rusty shop sign swinging in its hinges in the wind.
Indeed. Parker is popular, not so sure about some of the “modern art” mentioned above. Yoko Ono doesn’t sell many records.
“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.”― Philip Larkin
Conformity was always masquerading as rebellion in the arts. The truly subversive people are those like my friend Tim, who was the only person amongst around half a million to attend the 1970 Isle of Wight festival in a tweed sports jacket and tie.
Mildy entertaining article. But I’m starting to suspect that at least some of them are just vehicles for Israeli propaganda. Anti-anti-semitism has been the establishment religion in the so-called West for the last 100 years or so (counting from 1918 when the possibility of founding a new state of Israel became real). The present government of Israel – ignoring its past achievements wrt establishing repeat-covaxxing as world wide fashion – is still taking German money with one hand while using the other to publish mostly-substance free anti-German propaganda whose only base in fact is that recent-import Arabs in Germany are staging the same kind of public pro-palestine trantrums they staging everywhere else, too.
I realize that I don’t belong to the group of people supposed to be made to feel sympathetic for distressing damsel of the middle-east by these stories and I actually don’t. If I had any say on the matter (which I obviously don’t), the outcome would be Keine müde Mark für diesen Laden.
An absolutely brilliant demolition job. Well worth the read. Pure class.
Many thanks Steven Tucker.
Yes it’s not often we get a proper laugh on this site, claims that covid jab are ‘safe an effective’ merely raise a wry smile these days
👍👍👍
Brilliant take down of the Turner panto Steve.i went to school with a Turner winner who made some sub whale music sounds whilst keening a Scottish lament over a discordant track. She doesn’t read music or u understand and it , She sings like a pack of impaled foxes However, she expressed something about womanhood in the 21st century or whatever. . Just as Jesse Darling cobbled up some old shit ( not originally like Offili), but as long as you hate Brexit and love refugees the high heid yins of the art world will smother you in roll up money. That’s especially so if you are a dull dyke who probably gets swiped off every app and you reinvent yourself as trans. Alistair Darling could probably have produced better art from his eyebrow shavings on his deathbed than this tedious dullard. The fact that they thinks they are “like well out there” because they think what everyone at Channel 4, the Beeb, the National Trust, the rest of the fekkin permanent establishment think is well risible. The fact that a decent piece of figurative art even banging on about Windrush didn’t win against the white middle class queer an intersectional joke. Objet D’Arse indeed.
Great article. But, as stated (just), Jesse Darling is a bloke pretending to be female, right? So why use “she” and “her” all the way through? Obviously the Guardian is unable to call a spade a spade; sadly the Telegraph seems to feel it’s in the same position (all articles on gender I’ve read giving in slavishly to the subject’s demand to be referred to by misleading pronouns and adjectives); but the DS? Quick example: “Some may argue she is still busy prostituting herself today” can very easily be written thus: “Some may argue he is still busy prostituting himself today”. That wasn’t very painful! A determination to use appropriately honest language would contribute to a deligitimisation of this weird sect’s bizarre claims. Might not get far, but it would be a start.
Now that was just brilliant. Thank you!