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From: blp
Category: Art
Date: 13 December 2005
Starling is a good artist, yes. I saw the show this weekend. It seemed quite clear that he was the most interesting artist there. You could work it out just from the free audio guide. Curator Kate Bush (not singer Kate Bush) and whatever critic they'd got to 'champion' Starling both communicated genuine enthusiasm for his work and it fit with the experience of seeing it. They talked about the inextricable relationship between thinking and making in his work and it fleshed out my interesting (to me) feeling of discomfort about Starling having to figure out how to make a boat out of a Shed or fit a fuel cell to a bicycle as well as defining a genuinely interesting twist on the history of objecthood in conceptual art. Kate Bush said she always came away having learned something new from his work and I agreed. Someone said something about the satisfying sense of circularity, both of process and concept in his work and that was clearly true too.
Starling's room is first in the show, so I went through all this barely noticing how unusually good it was. But the audio guides for the other artists were the usual empty art guff and this seemed to be a direct result of the work itself. By the end, what with the proverbial shortness of life, I couldn't even stand to listen to Michael Bracewell comparing Jim Lambie to glam rock. Did anyone else listen to it? Did I miss anything?
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