The Emperor’s New Vocabulary

 

 

It was about nine-thirty, and the Teddy-Boy starlings had just concluded their usual morning assault on our bird feeders. A gang of juvenile tearaways in their flash coats and duck's-arse haircuts, stabbing each other off the peanuts in their morning feeding frenzy. A frantic lustred blitzkrieg that we enjoy every day from our own perches in the garden room.

 

Frances paused the WhatsApp chatter with her mates in the ladies' choir, and looked across at me over her spectacles with one of those looks that demanded attention. I dropped the bookmark onto page six hundred and twenty-seven of Cormoran Strike's latest tome and placed it beside me on the Ercol three seater, grateful for the respite. I've never been quite convinced it should take nine hundred plus pages to solve a case. Sherlock used to do it in half that.

 

'You know that item on Look North last night, the one about the Turner Prize award taking place in Bradford?' she enquired, daring me to respond in the negative.

'Well, why don't we just nip down there and have a look; we've nothing else on have we?'

 

Now, Frances and I met in our first term in college in 1964 and in the interim years I've learned a thing or two about surviving loaded questions. Which is to say that within thirty minutes, we were locked, loaded and flashing the car into life on the driveway. There was a time when we used to slide into it gracefully, like octopus pouring themselves into coral crevices. These days however, it's more of an exercise in choreographed, slow-motion origami, with added wince.

 

I set the sat-nav for Lister Park, Bradford and it wasn't long before we were annoying HGVs on dual carriageways and motorways like seasoned professionals. After over two hours of being escorted, overtaken and intimidated by forty-ton portions of instant death, we finally rejoiced in the safer waters of the Bradford ring road....a practice track for the angry, the inconsiderate, the inept and juvenile car thieves being pursued by the Interceptors.

 

I like Bradford, it's a Honey Badger of a city - honest, purposeful, inventive and single minded. It sets out each day in search of the wherewithal to feed its kids, and if you get in its way it will bite you on the backside. It's just built a three-and-a-half-thousand seater theatre, in spite of financial restraints and the 'what about the pot holes and homeless newts' brigade. It's got balls and vision and a reputation for producing the finest silks and wool worsteds in the world. Currently showcasing as the UK's City of Culture, what better place to start than Lister Park, that glorious Victorian Tardis that invites you to step through its gates and be transported wherever the fancy takes you.

 

Visiting Art Galleries has been one of the staples of our lives, and over the years we have delighted in the work of the masters in exhibitions all over Europe. We have reproductions of work by Lowry, Renoir, Monet, Turner and others hanging in our own home and it was against this background that I approached today's trip with some trepidation. The Victor Meldrew in me had shut out Turner Prize happenings over the years, as stories of unmade beds, piles of bricks and bananas nailed to the wall created the sort of psychological upheaval that I felt should be avoided at all cost. My 1964 edition of the  Oxford Concise Dictionary tells me that art is ' the use of imagination and skill to create works that express ideas or feelings appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.' There may be broader, more elaborate definitions elsewhere, but I've got by on this one quite happily ever since. I parked the car feeling strangely apprehensive.

 

I must start by saying that Lister Park is a fabulous example of Victorian munificence. Bought by Bradford Council in 1870 from the wealthy mill-owning Lister family, it was converted into one of the finest public spaces in the land. Twenty three hectares of fabulously kept parkland, gardens, boating lake and museum; and all free of charge. What more could a Yorkshireman ask for? We approached the Museum building with mounting optimism, following an excitable school party past the Versailles-style water features towards the imposing entrance portico.

 

The Turner Prize committee had selected four finalists, each with an exhibition room dedicated to their work. Fran and I agreed to put aside any pre conceived notions and try to interpret what we saw in as objective a manner as possible. We entered the elegant tabernacle to the arts and went with the flow.

 

It took us about and hour and a half to experience the fully monty - four exhibition rooms filled with twenty first century angst. One railed against the violence of right wing populism with photos of single sex couples snogging and a cupboard full of children's black dolls. Another tried to represent scenes 'familiar yet unplaceable' with paintings that 'deliberately lacked a clear narrative' and resorted to 'visual metaphors to offer possible readings.'

 

The third used painting, sound and textiles to 'explore links between ocean life, generational grief, shamanism and ghostly spirits', inviting us to consider what the inhabitants of the oceans would say to us if they could speak. And finally, a neurodiverse artist who draped waste materials, video tape, string, cling film and anything else to hand, around a frame to form bundles, sometimes resembling nests and sometimes not. This entry had been voted the winner the previous evening and awarded the Turner Prize of £25,000.

 

I gave the winning entry a little extra time and consideration, looking closely not just at the work itself, but at the faces of other visitors, so that I could hopefully gauge their reaction against my own. The consensus seemed to be one of carefully contained blank puzzlement and it was the carefully contained aspect that struck me most. Do we believe our own instincts when judging what is art, or do we prefer to believe what we're assured is art by others. The experts. The critics. The art establishment. The ones who make a living from it one way or another. I left Frances wrestling with her thoughts and nipped into one of the non-Turner exhibition rooms next door, for respite. It felt

like a breath of fresh air.

 

Goya, Sickert, Lowry and Hockney stared at me from the walls, grinning I imagined, at my distress. 'Come in here mate,' they were saying, 'you'll feel much better in a few minutes.' I sat down on one of the benches and gathered my thoughts. I felt just like that day someone rang me and said he was from my bank's fraud department and could I confirm my password please.

 

We regrouped in the museum cafe and ordered two hot chocolates. They asked if I wanted cream and marshmallows on them and laughed when I declined and said not when I was driving. Sitting at a small table for two, we stared at each other, neither wanting to open the batting. We just grinned and stirred the tall chocolates with long spoons.

 

Back on the motorway, as I jousted playfully with the juggernauts, Frances scribbled into her note book with serious intent. It's always interesting when she does that, because she's a retired English teacher and familiar with a lot of words. Only the other day, in a phone call to our grandson, it took her more than two hours to use them all up, and as her extensive vocabulary poured through the glove box's resident Biro onto her it-goes-with-me-everywhere jotter, I knew something of interest was imminent. The answer came as we merged triumphantly onto the A1 North.

 

'I've just invented a new game,' she declared with a broad grin, 'and I'm calling it, The Emperor's New Vocabulary.'

 

A silence ensued for some seconds as I attempted to absorb this information, broken only by an imposing array of National Express wheel nuts surging, within touching distance, through my peripheral vision.

'More information is required,' I quipped, after decades of experience in handling marital enigma.

 

'Well, listen to this verbiage carefully,' she said, 'and then tell me what I'm describing.....bloody hell, how fast is he going?' She suddenly exclaimed in horror.

'Faster than he should be able to.' I replied.

 

She quickly reset to default and raised the jotter to town crier height:

'A melee of mingled sin and discarded memory, sheltering the weight of human existence, woven from the threads of daily life and tarnished by time.'

'That sounds like a summary of our three years at Uni,' I quipped, as I read the words, 'I go right to the airport door' from the view now occupying our windscreen.

 

'It's a basket of dirty laundry,' she cried, ignoring my response with seasoned ease. 'Here's another one:'

'A solitary figure capturing the essence of stillness and poised at the edge of expectation. Her posture is the embodiment of time itself: an eternity suspended in the half-light of routine.'

 

I fell silent, unsure whether I could get away with another smart arsed reply.

 

'A black and white photograph of me sitting at the bus stop waiting for the 215 into town,' she grinned. 'Mounted on a white wall in the top gallery in Salts Mill and offered for sale at £750. The moment a picture of someone sitting at a bus stop transmogrifies into art.'

'And that moment being what exactly?' I enquired.

'The moment I dress it in the Emperor's New Vocabulary and enter it into next year's Turner Prize competition.'

 

That more or less said it all for the both of us, and the remaining miles back to chez nous were pretty much stress-free. That evening I slumped into my usual divot on the sofa and stared at the framed reproduction of Renoir's Jeunes Filles Au Piano that we have hanging above the fireplace. Three words came to mind immediately - the one's I had been fruitlessly searching for earlier that day: skill, grace and integrity. It had been a long day, and thirty seconds later I was communing with Morpheus.

 

 

The photograph is our own, showing the work of the 2025 Turner Prize winner Nnena Kalu