Audio Transcript: Gillian Carnegie introduction

Verity S:
This is Jim Lambie’s room. He’s been shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his glamorous and dynamic installations and sculptures, full of references from everyday life, music and pop culture. He transforms spaces and familiar things using found-objects and ordinary materials - including the carefully measured and applied sticky tape that you can see on the floor here.

Jim Lambie has made this installation specially for this year’s Turner Prize show and we talked to him at work as he planned the room:

Jim L:
“The actual tape is cut to the exact width of the floorboards so really with the cross-hatching you can see the shape of the floorboards running underneath the vinyl tape. The most simple sort of idea was to allow the floor to look as if it’s shifted somehow, that it’s not quite right.

The floor is the main piece in terms of scale. The floor creates a kind of bassline, kind of bass and drums on a piece and the other works almost float over the top of that - in the way that maybe a guitar and a vocal would float over the top of a piece of jazz music.

There’s another piece I’m making at the moment that’s a scaled-up version of an ornament, a bird, that you’d see often in these junk shops. I guess I do connect with a lot of materials in junk shops. And I guess the idea that I’d maybe use something that’s been thrown away. I kind of like the idea that people can respond to that, something they can immediately connect with in the work. I’m not an information-artist, I’m not like a schoolteacher, I’m just working with materials and hopefully allowing people to have their own ideas about the work.” (1’23”)

Verity S:
If you’d now like to hear Jim Lambie’s champion, writer Michael Bracewell, on why his work is the contemporary art world’s equivalent of glam-rock, please press 40 and play now. And to hear Turner Prize judge Louisa Buck, on why Jim Lambie’s work has been nominated this year, press 45 and play.

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Audio Transcript: Michael Bracewell- champion - on Jim Lambie

Michael B:
"One of the things I find most particularly seductive about Jim Lambie's work is the fact that everything he uses - once it's been turned into the artwork - just is full of glitter and gorgeousness and a sheer sort of visual delight really. He's an artist who has absolutely no worries whatsoever about completely overloading the surface of an artwork with texture; he loves working with patterns which are very mesmeric, he likes working with the whole palette of what you could call the hot pop colours - it's a bit like the visual arts equivalent of glam rock!

He's making art at a time when maybe we feel a little worried when we confront contemporary art, you know, we're afraid we haven't solved it, we're afraid we don't know what it means or something - and Jim kind of cuts through all that because I think that one of the most rewarding experiences you can have of his work is simply to enjoy the colour and the surface and the texture of it and to delight in the sheer wit of it: the fact that he'll use very unexpected elements within his pieces, or he'll use materials from very humble origin.

He's an artist who's incredibly generous to the viewer. There's no sense in his work that he's trying to proposition us with a high-intellectual concept about the way we live now - all those things do come into what he does but he wraps the whole of it in a generous, colourful, entirely bewitching form of aesthetic and that in itself makes looking at his work a complete joy." (1'47")

Verity S: And if you’d now like to hear Turner Prize judge Louisa Buck, on why Jim Lambie’s work has been nominated, press 45 and play.

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Audio Transcript: - Judge - Louisa Buck on Jim Lambie

Louisa B:
“Well, you certainly know you’re in a Jim Lambie room! I mean he’s well-known for making these floors and sometimes up the walls as well using multi-coloured or sometimes black and white strips of vinyl tape, but using to them to extraordinary effect. So in a way, he’s kind of taking the Op Art of someone like Bridget Riley say, and just exploding it into a whole environment. You just feel engulfed by it, it’s sort of exhilarating, it’s a bit like walking onto a dance-floor where you get the sense of this optical fizz all around you. But then being sort of choreographed and counter-pointed by the sculptural pieces that he puts into this environment, which may be sparkly and extraordinary themselves or they might be really quite formally sculptural - strange lumps of something or other - or a bit like furniture. He’s endlessly inventive but it’s not just sort of bonkers, tailspin, derangement of the senses, there’s also a real formal rigour and acuity here. So he’s very aware of how to keep things tight while at the same time letting things go.

I think we very much felt that his work has this tremendous sense of energy and spontaneity but also the more time you spend with it the richer it becomes and the more you realize that he’s actually a very serious artist as well as having a rather hedonistic streak. And I think we really liked this melding of popular art, if you like, and the sense of it being actually complex on a formal and aesthetic and art historical level as well.” (1’25”)

Verity S:
And if you’d now like to hear Jim Lambie’s champion, writer Michael Bracewell, on why his work is the contemporary art equivalent of glam-rock, press 40 and play now.

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