Phil Collins

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: Phil Collins Annie Fletcher on Phil Collins Andrew Renton on Phil Collins

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Phil Collins

Hello, my name is Phil Collins; and I absolutely have a horror and a intense antipathy to talking about myself. We can but try.

If you look through the window you might actually be able to see my sweaty arse bending over a desk or me hurriedly working, or me with a bunch of people in what looks like an office. So what we’ve created is a fully functioning research office called Shady Lane Productions, which over the span of the Turner Prize will work Monday to Friday, 10 till 6, office hours, researching three different projects, elements of which we’ll realise throughout the span of the exhibition.

So, the projects are looking at how media influences behaviour, by its very nature it influences the behaviour that it seeks to record. (Seg 3) A large proportion of Britain would actually want to be on the television, is something which I completely understand: that our image within the television broadcast media somehow makes us more valid, legitimate, credible, and yet our participation is also a gamble. The gamble that they’re entering is one where they will end up in the position of potentially not recognising themselves, of having a shape or a cartoon drawn of them, and this interests me. I often wonder what happens the next day when you go down to the bakery and you’ve told everybody that you’re a transsexual hooker who doesn’t look after their children, dot, dot, dot, dot. You wonder what impact that has on the local aspects of people’s lives, because there is a temporary transcendent joy? Some kind of release, I imagine, in sharing secrets in a national context.

NARRATOR: We asked him: does this tie into the media circus that tends to surround the Turner Prize?

Well, it identifies the artist in that situation as being part of that. The way I would see the Turner Prize, absolutely, is also as a spectacle, so it’s an engagement with that spectacle, in some ways.

For me, I approach the construction of every work from a position of envy. So, whether it’s dancing in a disco dance marathon or singing at a karaoke or telling your life story to a camera that this is the thing I wish I could do. Somebody has set value on it merely by looking at it. I wish that was me in the frame. I wish I could kill you and occupy your space.

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Annie Fletcher on Phil Collins

(ANNIE FLETCHER) My name is Annie Fletcher, I’m a independent curator based in Amsterdam and I organise art projects. And I know Phil Collins because we have worked together on and off for many years. I find it critically exiting and interesting.

NARRATOR: And so we asked her about the office we’re looking at here. It’s an arena for a on-going process, a project he designed for this exhibition:

(ANNIE FLETCHER) And I think it is really interesting what he is doing at the Tate. For me one of the most interesting things about how Phil works and why I respond so much, is that he is always asking the question: What is necessary, what is appropriate here. Ultimately you could say the Turner Prize is like a race or a spectacle where the artists are supposed to compete. And Phil is by producing a project and almost working as a kind of parasite within the Tate and making them host his office to produce a new work, is asking very interesting and critical questions about the idea of a finished work rather than actually a process. But he’s also directly challenging a prize like the Turner Prize and how one might display oneself as an artist in it.

NARRATOR: If you’re visiting on a weekend you may be wondering: where is this process? We asked her about that:

(ANNIE FLETCHER) Not seeing the action throws you into a moment of being in a kind of symbolic space -- which a museum is. So you’re going to se the apparatus of an office. The emptiness is also part of the strategy or the process of his work because it is a real life situation. We all go home. So if you are sitting there and looking at the fact that the office is ostensibly shut, it is also the fact that these are workers, this is a real project, and they have gone home to take the day off.

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Andrew Renton on Phil Collins

(ANDREW RENTON) Phil’s been nominated not just for his most recent work but really a body of work that’s evolved over the past couple of years. That takes in video, that takes in photography.

I think if there was an adjective that one was going to talk about in terms of Phil it is that he is a generous artist, his gift is this ability to draw people into his space, the space where something is going to happen, he taps into that and we all feel that we have something to say about the structures that Phil has set up.

So the great, great piece from the past couple of years, “they shoot horses” which is the eight hour disco dancing marathon in Ramala, which were it done in a less delicate way, would be cumbersome and overly political. It is an absolute joyous celebration of humanity. Phil is operating partly as a kind of curator, partly as a DJ, and partly as just your mate who is able to just be in the corner of the frame, but really he is not trying to over-assert his position within his work. It’s not a work that is about his ego; it is a work that gives space for other people to operate in and that is an consistent way of working throughout all of his different projects.

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