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Exposed: Turner sex that will cause uproar
David Smith, arts and media correspondent
The Observer
It has become a byword for shock, horror and howls of moral outrage. But this week art's most respected competition, the Turner Prize, invites its biggest controversy with a display of a graphic and sexually explicit sculpture by two of Britain's foremost artists.
The favourites for the £20,000 award, Jake and Dinos Chapman, will unveil a bronze work entitled Death, which has been seen by The Observer despite being cloaked in secrecy at London's Tate Britain gallery. It depicts a naked couple engaged in oral sex and incorporates a vibrator.
The organisers of the Turner Prize will take the rare step of displaying a 'health warning' sign outside the gallery doors, indicating that it contains explicit material unsuitable for children. Thousands of families visit Tate Britain to enjoy more traditional fare by Turner himself and the Pre-Raphaelites.
The controversy threatens to dwarf even the rows that have engulfed the Turner Prize over its past 20 years when Death goes on display on Tuesday. Grayson Perry, one of the other nominees for the award, said the Chapman brothers 'are going for the shock horror jugular'.
The artists will present another new bronze sculpture at the opening of the exhibition of the Turner prize shortlist entitled Sex, a sequel to their 1994 fake blood and latex representation of bodies and body parts hung from a tree. The new piece again finds victims bound to a tree, but the body parts have decayed to mutilated skeletons, while maggots, flies and rats run riot over the bark. Curiously, children's toys are visible.
On the wall behind Sex is the Chapmans' series Insult to Injury in which they committed the ultimate artistic taboo by systematically painting clowns' heads on 80 original etchings of Goya's Disasters of War .
Channel 4 is likely to be drawn into the row because it sponsors the competition and will broadcast the award ceremony live on 7 December. A spokesman said last night: 'Our Turner Prize coverage goes out pre-watershed, so we'll have to take it into account.'
Last year the Government was drawn into a heated debate when Kim Howells, then Culture Minister, commented: 'If this is the best British artists can produce, then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.'
Dinos Chapman admitted last night the new sculptures would have some people 'foaming at the mouth'.
He said: 'People don't respond to art in a very honest or truthful way. They tend to do what they are instructed to do by whoever they get their opinions from. Art is probably the last place where anybody's going to have an honest reaction.
'I think "shock" is not a very good word to describe art. They are inanimate objects placed in a sterile environment for the entertainment and education of the masses. I've been living with them for six months so if they were shocking on the first day they're not any more.
'We think they're entertaining, thoughtful, beautiful, classical. Expect to see what you expect to see. There's no discontinuity with any of our work. It's all related to everything else.'
In addition to the Chapman brothers, the other finalists include the potter Grayson Perry, whose vases carry images dealing with subjects such as paedophilia, child abuse and the 11 September, 2001, terror attacks.
The other finalists are Willie Doherty, a photography and video artist from Derry whose work is rooted in the tensions of the Northern Ireland conflict, and Anya Gallaccio, a Scottish-born sculptor who will exhibit a piece in which real apples rot on a bronze cast apple tree.
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