Boat, art or giant inflatable doll?

Lia Ditton lifts the lid on this year's Turner winner

While racing in the Northern Hemisphere wraps up for winter, leaving the appropriately titled frostbite series for the hardy, boatyards fill up and business for marine shrink wrappers experiences a boom! This year is remarkable in that two boats, America3 and Il Moro di Venezia, have made tracks as far inland as the Boston Museum of Fine Art...

As if to compensate for these displaced yachts, you might have caught a glimpse of Smithson's Floating Island, a piece of displaced land complete with trees, being towed around Manhattan on a barge. If you were tempted to shrug off these absurdities as American, you can’t, because back on British soil it’s happening too, also in the name of art. In fact, a boat [in disguise as a shed] has even made it inside the Tate Britain Gallery in Westminster. What ever next?!Your eyebrows raise; a yachting society at London gentleman’s club, ‘Home House?!’

“Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch,” is the title of the Boston exhibition currently hosting the two America’s Cup boats. Perhaps you guessed this on the knowledge that it was Bill Koch and crew who sailed America3 to victory in the 1992 America’s Cup, defeating the yacht Il Moro? Controversial as ever, perhaps you had even foreseen that 13 years later, the same two boats would once again do battle, albeit on the front lawn of the Boston Museum of Fine Art? “You have to show me why a museum that displays teapots cannot display boats, particularly if they're beautiful,” MFA director Malcolm Rogers argued to one critic. “Years ago, you got a little quiet thank-you note” for supporting a museum, wrote a former University museum studies professor. “Today, they put your boats outside!” But while issues regarding museum funding and philanthropy rack the critics, there were no lack of passers-by transfixed by the two race boats outside; their masts rising 125 feet in the air - nearly twice the height of the MFA's roof.

In addition to the two yachts, the exhibition features a full-scale replica of the America’s Cup trophy, as well as figureheads and same-scale, exact replica models of almost every challenger and defender to sail for the Cup since its inception in 1851. It’s a room certain to make any boat lover or racing enthusiast salivate. “I'm trying to picture another museum doing this,” said Tyler Green, art critic for Bloomberg News and the author of a popular blog called Modern Art Notes, in a phone conversation. “Yachts at the Art Institute of Chicago…? Yachts in front of the National Gallery…?”

Tyler Green might have enjoyed a visit to this year’s Turner prize, the prestigious British art accolade. With previous exhibitors offering up slices of dissected cow (Damien Hirst), an un-made bed (Tracey Emin) and glitzy Pop culture paintings propped up on balls of elephant dung (Chris Offili) our ability to be shocked, outraged and disgusted by anti-disestablishment practices of Modern Art, could be said to have died a death. What then do we make of prime exhibit ShedBoatShed - of Simon Stirling, yesterday announced as winner of this year's Turner prize. Prior to the winner being announced I went along to make my mind up.



Presented with a shed, we are surprisingly (the exhibit is in the Tate Britain in Westminster, London) allowed to walk into the Shed, perhaps to verify that ‘Yes! It is a shed,’ or should we say, was a shed and is again.

Now we are not talking about your average shed that can be bought in a flat pack from B&Q; the build-it-yourself kind known to litter English gardens nation-wide. Oh, no! This Turner prize nominee presents us with actually quite an impressive shed build from planks of two by six: think sit-and-ride lawnmower sized, rather than potting shed. Now there is a whole history of shed-use in modern art and my mental archive at this point begins to whirr like a scratched CD. Perhaps this artist has teemed up with Tom Friedman and the space has been blessed by a witch? Or is Cornelia Parker about to blow up the shed, complete with contents and go onto exhibit the shards?

Back in the gallery there is a block of explanatory text mounted on the wall under a small photograph. We’re at the Turner Prize private view, so the place is packed and I have to shuffle forward, peering over a tartan shoulder in order to read; Title: ShedBoatShed. The small photograph depicts the boat; a ‘Weidling,’ that the artist claims to have made with the planks I’ve just witnessed. In the manner of Angus Deaton in ‘Have I got News for You?’ I feel that the word allegedly, should be inserted somewhere. The ‘Weidling,’ a local German design similar to a gondola, is claimed by the artist to have carried the remains of the shed on a journey down the Rhine. On reaching the museum in Basel where Stirling’s exhibition was to be held, the artist “…unloaded the boat, and then rebuilt the shed pretty much as it was 10km up the river.” Nice idea, Global Challenge skipper Andy Dare and I inspect the shed for a second time. ‘Did he really…?!” The private view party tumbles out of the Tate and re-groups in the nearest bar. Between moving location, impressively, I manage to exchange the party of nominee Darren Almond, by whom I was invited, for that of another Turner prize nominee, Jim Lambie. It is circa three am when a mutual friend of Lambie and Stirling [they both studied at Glasgow School of Art] turned to me to disclose, that the shed planks voyaged to Basel not by hand-crafted ‘Weidling,’ but by Fed-Ex! Take into account that we had been drinking since eight and such statements can only be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. The exhibition remains open until 22 January. I suggest you judge for yourself!

There are comparatively no lack of eye-witnesses who encountered Smithson’s ‘Floating Island,’ on Manhattan’s Hudson river and voiced its effect on the internet. Robert Smithson, who shot to fame in the 1970s as an 'environmental artist', is best known for the work, 'Spiral Jetty', a 1,500ft long by 15ft wide spiral jetty at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. ‘Floating Island,’ was commissioned for the Whitney Museum of Art. The project team had anticipated more problems with the US Coast Guard, but to the USCG, ‘Floating Island,’ was just another barge as long as it is was free of people, signage and advertising. For tugboat operator Bob Henry, the experience was as good as when he towed a 65ft rubber blow-up doll through New York Harbour during a Steve Van Zandt-organised rock concert.

Is it a boat, is it an island or is it art?