Turner prize shortlist welcomes Nobson and Spartacus, via voting hell



There are several things noteworthy about performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd: she renamed herself after the gladiator partly to annoy people, she claims to live and work in a south-London nudist colony, she once reinvented Jabba the Hutt as a smooth-talking ladies' man and as of today she is one of four people shortlisted for this year's Turner prize.
Chetwynd, who stages humourous and thought-provoking pieces of what could be called hallucinatory folk theatre, joins two film-makers – Elizabeth Price and Luke Fowler – and Paul Noble who has spent the last 16 years on an elaborate technical drawing project based around a fictional metropolis called Nobson Newtown.
The four artists are on the list for the 28th year of the £40,000 prize (the winner receives £25,000) which returns to London following last year's trip to Gateshead, where it prompted record crowds at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain and chair of the judges, said if there were any emerging themes this year then it was that the four artists brought a "slowness" to their work. "You have to spend a lot of time with the works. None of them are something you can 'get' in a few minutes, you have to spend an hour or two with these pieces in order to really understand them whether that's film or drawing or performance."

Chetwynd's twice weekly show, Odd Man Out, at Sadie Coles HQ in London last year, explored the themes of democracy and the alternative voting system in a five-hour performance piece. It was meant to be fun – although voters who made the wrong choice found themselves catapulted down an inflatable slide into a Dante-esque vision of hell.

Judge Andrew Hunt, the director of Focal Point gallery in Southend, said the show was "exciting" bringing together installation, performance and sculpture. Chetwynd, who says she lives and works in a nudist colony, changed her first name from Lali to Spartacus in 2007 and said she would change it back again once it stopped annoying people. She is an artist who makes extensive use of homemade props and costumes and might be known to some as the artist who had people dressed up as blubbery seals at the Frieze art fair in 2010; or for a 2003 performance piece in which she recast Return of the Jedi gangster Jabba the Hutt as a cocktail-loving smooth guy.

At 34, Fowler is the youngest artist and is shortlisted for an exhibition at Inverleith House in Edinburgh which showed his third film in a trilogy about the late Glaswegian psychiatrist RD Laing who, from the 60s onwards, espoused views that challenged the psychiatric orthodoxy.
The second film-maker is Price, for her show at the Baltic in Gateshead, where she presented three video installations in pitch darkness notable as much for their music – catchy pop, church choirs – as their visual strengths. One was inspired by the 2002 sinking of a ship in the English Channel with a cargo of 2,897 luxury cars; another explored the aftermath of a 1979 fire at a Manchester Woolworths which killed 10 people and the third was part of a series in which Price constructs a fictional museum. Curtis said she spent hours at the show: "People want to find things they will engage with and Price does that very naturally - the music draws you in, the images draw you in and you're willing to spend that time with her. As soon as you do that you get something back."

The fourth artist is Northumberland-born Noble who began his drawing project around a fictional metropolis called Nobson Newtown, in 1996. The results are monumental pencil sketches of what is a strange city where, as one judge put it "people are turds and turds are people."

Judges have spent the last year scouring gallery shows for British artists at home and abroad. Curtis said they had seen a lot of film work and a good deal of performance this year before deciding on the two men and two women aged between 34 and 48.
Last year there were – shock of shocks – two artists who could be described as painters. This year there are none. Curtis said one or two jurors did have painters on their own shortlists "but we didn't get enough concensus around them. My job as the chair is that we end up with a list that all four jurors can support and there wasn't a painter in that category."

Previous Turner winners have included Gilbert and George, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and last year Martin Boyce. All four shortlisted artists will now prepare work for the Turner prize exhibition which opens at Tate Britain in London on 2 October. This year's £25,000 winner will be announced on 3 December.