I make no apology that my personal favourite to win the Prize is Barber Walker. It was quite clear from the behaviour of the Press Pack that everyone crowded around Walker’s exhibit. With few remaining in any of the other exhibits for any amount of time, other than Rory Pilgrim’s hour long film.

One of the jobs of art, I’m not real fan of the art doesn’t have to do anything it’s useless arguments because though it liberates an artist from an often wrong headed dialogue it ignores the many thing it does do, is that of representation which is achingly lacking in the fine arts these days. The human figure is a sort of rare thing now, mainly because art schools don’t offer the training and school budget have been cut in such a way that you won’t encounter them as readily in Secondary Schools. At it heart thepolitics of the moment has at its essence the disappearance of the human subject, the person is tested to the point where their identity disappears behind bureaucracy, tested through endless exams, tested by squeezed jobs, and a squeeze on the recognition truth of their social and political reality. Social Media created a white noise from which the individual is essentially screened off from others and from deep personal conversations, and are instead now set up for the projections of parasocial relations – where Social Media companies act as middle men and create each individual person as a celebrity who is now at a distance from reality, now just out of reach. This has all been happening while at the same time the hand has been disappearing … collapsing manufacturing base, loss of skilled hand production whether luxury, technical or traditional, and a cost cutting move to outsourcing jobs and an economy that’s slanted towards low wage digital services. So that we now live at a time in the UK where the body, the hand, the face and the person have disappeared. Art’s jo sometimes is about embodying feelings, actions, effects, whether joy or the physical aftermath of terror. As well as situating that within a large historic context which is so often in the instant so difficult to picture. The great gift of the still picture, is exactly how it crystallises complex phenomena with multitudes of moving parts… the great gift is how a history and be filtered through the experience of one person and made pertinent to another.

At a time when we have so much biography – static cyclical repetition of random details, we have very little narrative that offers us hope or means to do a pattern recognition and push back again the propaganda and cheap sloganeering pitched at the mindless (the origin of the word means the chants/songs of the dead… basically songs are the murmers of zombies).

Rory Pilgrim’s hour long film is by all accounts it is a rather beautiful and tenderly crafted piece made collaboratively with a community choir, studded through with cuts to various images of mundane beauty in the community that would normally be over looked unless you had the eye to infuse these little happening with meaning. Unfortunately it a bit crazy to ask the Press to view 4 separate exhibits in under two hours with a much needed tea break after the 1:30 hrs trip from London and then the speeches from various curators. I pretty much missed most of Pilgrim’s video.

A possible reference to Jeff Koon’s consumerist series Leung’s display of children’s toys from the loans collection of a public library act as a counter point to the early years consumerist indoctrination where the value of an object is in it’s inherent social good.