Mark Titchner

Audio Guide Transcripts

The Turner Prize 2006 audio guide is available from the ticket office outside the exhibition.
Listen to three clips from the audio guide below.

Audio guide transcripts: Mark Titchner Nicholas Bullen on Mark Titchner Andrew Renton on Mark Titchner

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Mark Titchner

(MARK TITCHNER) It asks you hypothetically if you are one of the tiny masters of the world, to come out. It’s a kind of like a rabble-rouser, to try and get you into a state of mind where you will take part in this kind of interaction.

And then you will see a group of eight tables, each of which has a box on the top of it with dials, so it looks, I suppose, a bit like a cross between a piece of laboratory equipment, and maybe like a home-made radio. What these boxes are, they are actually these sort of psychic amplifiers.

So you’ll see on each of these eight boxes and also on the kind of booth structure there are these slogans carved into them. And they’re actually slogans that I found from trade union banners, particularly the sort of beginning of the 20th century, and they all have this kind of zeal which has to do with the idea of building utopia, building a kind of better tomorrow, and the kind of success of the average person in the world.

The idea is that you enter into this booth, and you kind of focus and concentrate as hard as you can on the idea of bringing benefits and well-being and good things to the objects in the room that you’re standing within. You’ll see inside the walls are lined with magnets, and there’s a plate above your head that’s made of copper. And above that is a series of quartz crystals. The quartz crystals and the copper also are also components that are inside these boxes which you can’t see, there’s parts inside that. And then next to this piece you will see another cable going off towards a kind of tree-type structure. It’s actually based on the idea of the wishing-tree, which is something that’s found in Hong Kong in which people tie wishes or desires to pieces of fabric and they then throw them up into the tree, so it’s hung with these kind of wishes and desires that the people have sent into the branches.

Basically the whole thing is made out of sections of wood that have been carved. And I’m quite interested in the idea that by spending a lot of time investing effort and blood, actually, through splinters and such like, this kind of idea that it sort of empowers the object a little bit.

The question of faith and belief is really quite key in what I do, and I’m quite interested in this idea that we live in a sort of post-ideological word, where the things which people have believed in, in the past have become more difficult to sustain as beliefs. So in order to sustain yourself and our in-built need for faith, we find fragments all around us and we build our own systems of belief.

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Nicholas Bullen on Mark Titchner

NARRATOR: Mark Titchner chose as his ‘champion’, the underground musician Nicholas Bullen, a founding member of group “Napalm Death”. We asked him why he’s a fan of Titchner’s work:

(NICHOLAS BULLEN) What I like most about Mark’s work is the lack of fixed meaning. It’s very beautiful and at the same time it seems to make very complex statements about issues, yet you can never tell if it’s a heartfelt plea or an ironic gesture. It opens up discussion, because if there’s no fixed meaning it can at least lead us to discuss and talk about an issue.

The billboard itself, Tiny Masters Of The World Come Out, is very bold; when you look at that piece, the different colours and patterns, the repetition that moves across it, you get a sense of energy and power and power that isn’t directed to you as an individual, it’s directed outward for you to feel.

NARRATOR: And we asked him: what do you think your music has in common with Mark Titchner’s work?

(NICHOLAS BULLEN) I think in the work that I’ve made in the past in terms of music, we’ve always tried to be very dense, to distil, to compress sound into sudden bursts and forward movements, to try and move towards what we would perceive as the future, and I think Mark does that in the sense of, his work, whilst never stating a utopian vision, always hints at that and hints at a sense of joy of being alive.

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Andrew Renton on Mark Titchner

NARRATOR: We asked Turner Prize jury member Andrew Renton: what does it feel like to him, standing in the midst of this installation?

(ANDREW RENTON) It feels like I’m in a between stage; either long after these machines have lost their way and lost their function or just about before they’re going to start cranking up and becoming something extremely sinister, extremely menacing and, for sure, extremely powerful, because power is at the heart of the discussion.

It invokes all sorts of mystical references. It has elements in here from religious doctrine, from politics, from advertising, from corporate strategy. It has the implications of alchemy; it has the sense of black magic.

Mark was short listed this year because he made an extraordinary show in Bristol and this show really set him onto another level, and there was a very strong sense that he’d achieved something much more than we’d ever seen in, in his work before.

It’s very interesting that when the short list was announced Mark’s work probably got the least attention, and one of the reasons for that, I think, is because people don’t know how to categorise him. It’s a very difficult fit in terms of the rest of British art, and I think that’s rather exciting because it’s not sensationalist even though it uses the language of sensation.

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