Simpsons for the Turner Prize.

[Stew]

Usual load of crap up for the Turner Art Prize (the UK's most publicized art award).

CARTOON characters from The Simpsons and a female mannequin perched on a toilet have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

Four artists, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes, have been selected to battle it out for Britain’s most controversial art prize.

Leckey, 43, who is described as "a modern day dandy", featured The Simpsons in his work last year.

The Birkenhead-born artist spliced images of Marge Simpson walking out of the cinema and the artist himself with a Simpsons mask on in a performance lecture and installation, entitled Cinema in the Round (2007).

Leckey, who lives and works in London, also has "a slight obsession" with Felix The Cat who appears in the film and other pieces.

In the same work Leckey presented clips from Titanic, but interpreted Leonardo DiCaprio as a time traveller in a sci-fi movie, and images from Disney cartoons.

Jennifer Higgie, the editor of Frieze and one of the judges for this year’s prize, said that the artist explores "contemporary ideas of film, and film as sculpture" and that he was "very interested in how images present themselves to the wider public".

Wilkes, 42, who lives and works in Glasgow, uses shop mannequins in many of her installations.

As well as presenting a mannequin on the toilet she also displayed one holding a baby-buggy.

We Are Pro-Choice (2008) features a mannequin on a toilet with a bowl with left-over bits of dried porridge at her feet.

The bowl is apparently a reference to Walter Sickert’s painting Lazarus Breaks His Fast (1927), with the porridge the first meal after the resurrection.

Higgie said she used the "language of surrealism" and that her pieces were "very strange, poetic and very complex".

This year’s Turner Prize has taken a conceptual turn again after last year a political piece won the prize and the year before it was scooped by a painter.

It has traditionally been won by bizarre and controversial work and previous recipients include Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, and transvestite potter Grayson Perry.

Only three females have won the prize since its first year in 1984.

Three women feature in this year’s shortlist, including Islam, who was born in Bangladesh and lives and works in London.

She makes film and video installations.

In the film Scale 1/16 Inch 1 Foot (2003) she interwove footage of the famous Gateshead car park featured in the Michael Caine film Get Carter with shots of the architect’s original visionary maquette and a fictitious recreation of the unrealised restaurant as its summit.

In Be The First To See What You See As You See It (2004), a woman dressed in white wandered around the gallery space where fragile porcelain was on display on plinths.

The other female artist, Polish-born Macuga, 40, who also lives and works in London, often features artworks by her contemporaries as part of her own creations.

Judge Suzanne Cotter, a curator, said she was "an extraordinary artist" whose "dramatic and highly-staged installation ... encapsulates and embodies the spirit of today in terms of contemporary art-making".

She said Macuga’s work was highly original and "significant for us today because she is interrogating the history of other artists and the history of display".

The 25 000GBP prize is awarded to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work in the 12 months before May 6.

Last year’s title, won by Mark Wallinger, for his replica of the one-man anti-war protest in Parliament Square, was presented at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, rather than London, for the first time in its history.

This year, the prize is returning home to Tate Britain in London where each of the shortlisted artists will showcase their work in October before the winner is announced in December.

Link to article (this time, from the Sun 'cos I'm fed up seeing BBC links!).

On Leckey, the favourite to win according to William Hill: "his 2005 DVD installation Drunken Bakers, based on the Drunken Bakers characters from the Viz comic, is about drinking culture in the North of England".

Are we honestly accepting stolen cartoon characters as art? Maybe we need to submit some Flash to the committee. And shaky video of people in Guy Fawkes masks...

[Dario]

In pictures: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7397950.stm

How dull.

[Poison#X]

man...i'm totally winning that next year...