Berlin-based, Oxford-born artist Jesse Darling believes in community but openly reckons with Western colonial history, artistic appropriation and the ugliness of modern manufacture. Darling won the 2023 Turner Prize—one of the art world’s most prestigious awards since its inception in 1984—for his sculptures built from ordinary objects like Union Jack bunting and pedestrian barriers. He’s in good company, as past winners of the prize presented to an artist born or working in Britain include Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans and Grayson Perry.
Darling, who studied at London’s Central Saint Martins and Slade School of Fine Art, was awarded the prize for his solo exhibitions “No Medals, No Ribbons” (his largest show to date) and “Enclosures”, which were presented at Modern Art Oxford and Camden Art Centre respectively. He’s known for artistic output that elevates everyday objects: what was cheap, free or easily accessible in the realm of man-made materials like steel, plastic and silicone. Darling completes his creative thinking with a lot of reading, under the imperative to understand and situate what humanity has done and reaped.
Observer spoke with the artist about reimagined fairytales, having lived-in experiences with objects and saying no to the traditional studio visit.
When you won the prize, Tate Britain’s director described vast categories that your work encompasses (e.g., Brexit, nationality, identity, bureaucracy, immigration, austerity). When you conceive of a work, how much are those guiding you? Or does the narrative come later?
They always say that my work is about identity. To which I would say: everyone’s work is about identity, not mine in particular. It’s just the dog whistle. I’m not a conceptual artist, so I don’t work from concept. I work more or less site-specifically. If I’m making some public output, it’s like, Well, where’s the show gonna happen? Who’s likely to see it? In this case, it was the most public show I was ever going to have in the UK. It’s also the only show that I’m ever going to have in the UK that the public has any kind of stake in. For that reason, I wanted to make something that was very accessible to that public—and I genuinely believe that the work is accessible. The trolls don’t think so; they think it’s a bunch of rubbish that alienates people, but then they say that about everything, which is fine. I think that literally anyone with any amount of educational knowledge, or none, can walk into that and see something that will be a correct read.
It’s not that deep. In some ways, it’s really unsubtle. If you’re talking about the UK and you are talking about Brexit, land enclosure, coloniality, the necrotic empire… that’s part of what that country is right now. It’s not that my work is about Brexit. I am interested in telling fairy tales back: the fairy tales that we grew up with as naturalized meta-narratives—things are this way or that way. I want to tell them back as fairy tales so that the completely arbitrary, constructed nature of things becomes apparent.
I think about everything and read about things and care about things and what I say to my students is: what you’ve been reading and what you’ve been living and what you think about is in the work. There’s no need to insert it as a concept; it’s in there. I would say the same of this work. I study a bunch of things at the same time. I’m not very interested in art at the moment. I have a reading group. We’re reading a lot of Palestinian authors. Before that, the Black radical tradition: Sylvia Winter, Frantz Fanon, Cedric Robinson. I’m interested in psychoanalysis, so I took up a seminar group in that, and I studied theology a bit on the side. All of those things: they’re all technologies to understand what the hell’s going on. I’m engaged in that work of trying to understand what the hell’s going on.
Right—art is not just about self-expression, but about looking at the world with a critical eye. How do art and criticism work together from the point of view of the artist? Can art be activist?
It’s the kind of question that I wish people asked more often within this gig. I think critique doesn’t exist anymore. Your rigor as an artist is down to you alone. Do I think that art can be activist at the moment? No, I don’t. I think there are big shifts of power happening. A lot of old ways are being exposed as completely corrupt and violent. All of these things produce crises in people and cultures. Art… is not a form of self-expression. Or it shouldn’t be. You can be kind of ambiguous and ambivalent; you can talk on a lot of levels at once. You can’t on Instagram. The creative arts have the special ability to hold complexity. And that’s what we really need.
On the other hand, I think that the operating system of contemporary art, as we know it, is very conservative, as we’ve seen recently with the spate of firings and cancellations. It’s basically about tax breaks and a kind of Bonfire of the Vanities and it’s a rich man’s game. I was very heartbroken and now I’m kind of over the heartbreak. I think that people at large are kind of structurally disempowered from feeling that they can access [art], feeling like they can understand it. I don’t think it’s that difficult. But then, you know, I did need a fucking Master’s in art to know that there’s nothing to know when it comes to looking at art. It took me that long to figure out: You know what? Just look at it. Do I like it or not? That red makes me feel a bit weird. It’s as simple as that.
For whatever reason—like with many things—the most fundamental truths have somehow become alienated from the average person on the street. So, no, I don’t think I can do anything, really. But that’s a roundabout way of saying that I also think that good work—and I believe that there is still some good work being made—I believe in that space of creative expression, which needs a formalism. But I do think that, when it’s good, you don’t need to come from a particular position. I feel like I’m getting better at what I do because everybody who responds to it is right about what they have to say about it—even when they hate it. As in: something that I was trying to say has been communicated.
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For a Tate show I made a few years ago, one of the Info Wars guys went and did a whole YouTube about degenerate art and how contemporary art is just fucked. And I was like, Well, if this alienates my friends the fascists, then they’ve also understood it. He was irritated by these unskilled objects being in a vitrine. In other words, he understood very well the juxtaposition, the deadness of the object that I was trying to vet. He completely got it, and it pissed him off. The general public, they all have something to say about it, and they’re all correct. I only wish that people felt more empowered. It’s not just visual literacy, it’s emotional literacy—to trust that the feeling that you have about something is correct.
In terms of formalism, can you talk about how you work through that for yourself? How do you intuit what kind of materials feel right for articulating something that’s almost inexpressible?
I do believe in embodied knowledge, which is not intellectual knowledge. Maybe your hands start to access it; they completely bypass your thinking ego. These are probably not the right psychoanalytical terms. All subject positions can be used to good effect if you know what you’re doing, or you’re trying to stay attentive. Our generation’s problem is how to tell a story: whose story, how should it be told? I think that’s a formal problem.
The kinds of objects and materials that I’m drawn to: I need to feel a genuine intimacy with that thing. I know what it is, inside and out, and I know it because I’ve been proximate to it. I’m careful to stay within this probably pretty limited remit of things that I know that I have a personal relationship with. I have started to learn to see in myself and in other people when you’re reaching, when your concepts are trying to cross too many air miles. Leave that alone; go closer to home. That’s how I work with things in the first place: things come into my mind or they come into my life or they come into my hands. But some of the objects, where I’d really like to do something with X or Y thing, I still have to live with for a long time and think about it. Especially if I’m using found or acquired or secondhand things out there, that had a life already. I can’t just grab something.
For example, in the Turner show… you know, Eastbourne is ‘God’s Waiting Room,’ they say. I found a lot of these walking sticks that end up in these sculptures called The Grandads. I went to a charity shop looking for some lace curtains, which I thought there’d be lots of, but there weren’t any, and I found six walking sticks, all wood, some hand-carved. Some old man had died, and they’d cleared out his place and these had been his sticks and some of them were pretty old, easily 20 or 30 years old, and I spent some time with them. Because they’d already had their life and they have things to tell me—not the other way around. There’s a lot of things that don’t make it to a show or end up in the studio and they’re not willing to talk. I learned not to push my will on objects or ideas, because it just doesn’t work.
I love this idea that they have stories to tell—that it’s key to be attuned to some wavelength to hear that.
You have to take seriously this animist idea, and I say animist idea like it’s a belief system, but it feels to me that is how things work. They have their own… almost a frequency. They have literally their own songs and materials have their own kind of formalism. When I started working with plastic bags, for example, if you apply heat to plastic… how exquisite its dance, but also suddenly, plastic works like skin. But then, what is plastic? It’s a zombie; it’s a kind of walking corpse. These objects contain their own past and history.
In the accompanying Tuner Prize video, you visit a site and talk about manufacture and investigate these huge storage units. How did that come about?
They called me up at the Tate and said, Can we come to your studio? I was like, No, please don’t. Because I don’t work that way, and I knew it was going to be really awkward and self-conscious; everything about it sounded cringe. So I pitched them: Can we make a road movie instead? Let’s look at the world—that’s the true story of my work at its absolute best. And we went on this trip.
All of this petrochemical chemical toxic waste that we inherit, the wasteland which is everywhere, and the not-yet-to-be wasteland which fills up every fucking Walmart and TK Maxx… sometimes you walk into a big shop anywhere in the world and you’re just like there’s just too much stuff here. There’s too much stuff for anyone to need. There’s too much of it made, there’s too much of it used, bought… while others have nothing. It’s just so obscene. You could stay with the obscenity and get very angry and you could go on a personal quest to consume less and all the rest of it.
But talking about animism: I came to think that what we need is to take lessons from Indigenous pedagogy and thinking and ways of living that understand that we are a part of the world. The hippies and shamans and pagans and back-to-the-landers of the Western world do feel aligned with the land and the
But if we perpetually disavow the spirit of crude oil, which runs through all of us, and is in everything we wear and throughout our houses… what would that deity look like? If we spent time thinking about that guy, it’s a bit like the devil itself, like a seducer, a trickster. I mean, the spirit of crude oil! I’m not interested in disavowing things. Where possible, I’m interested in looking at them, illuminating them and thinking about them—even though that really hurts. I’m also a white European with settler ancestors. It’s not nice to think about all that stuff. But that is our toxic waste. That’s what emerges.
In the video, you use a particularly striking phrase: ‘The apocalypse is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.’
I don’t think I originally came up with that phrase, as people on YouTube have spent time in the comments making sure people know. I don’t know who said it, but I probably didn’t coin it. This kind of language, the fire and brimstone shit, is not universal. This is particular to Christian countries. The linear idea of apocalypse is also very culturally specific and not talking about the Indigenous who continue to experience apocalypse—and the Palestinians. There isn’t the same rhetoric. But in the global north, it’s the big libidinal obsession. A general disavowed understanding of what we have already done to others, and then also the Christian Hell, the End of Times. This is how I healed my own apocalypse fear: to be a bit more relativistic and be like, Oh, yeah, this is me being a Protestant. It’s good to remember that it’s arbitrary. It’s just the fairy tales I grew up with. I can also just not believe in them anymore.
You’re speaking about Western culture as a chunky ensemble, as opposed to looking specifically at the U.K., but I don’t know if being Berlin-based gives you extra perspective, not being on native turf.
I’m coming out of the closet about actually being, in some ways, really an Englishman, or at least a Brit. But for a long time, I was like: I’m cosmopolitan. I can live anywhere! I have not lived in England for a lot of my life, or Britain, I should say. Honestly, Germany is like the king of Fortress Europe. For years, I thought it was important to understand this thing called the West because it’s going down. It’s important to let go gracefully. If we all go down with that ship, so be it. We had a good run.
But I feel like some of the more extreme manifestations of the crisis of right-wing populism, and other madness: this is what happens when you don’t think through what is being lost. I just don’t identify with any particular nation. There are deep and incredibly dysfunctional belief systems at work. It’s those belief systems that I’ve been trying for years to understand and take apart, not just for myself, but for everyone—well, not for everyone, like not to be messianic. There’s a lot of work to do right now, isn’t there? That’s how I feel.
