It’s not often you laugh in a contemporary art exhibition, but I did in Jesse Darling’s room at the Turner prize show. There’s an energy and wit to his sculptures, made from crash barriers and red-and-white plastic tape; to his jaunty, priapic candles attached to walls; to his hammers bound up with ribbons and bells and placed in glass cases (their inherent masculinity spoofed and transformed, as if they were fetish objects from some future religion). “This was the most public gig I’m ever going to do in Britain,” he says of the exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne gallery. “I mean, the British public reasonably don’t care about contemporary art, because they’ve got plenty of bad things to deal with, especially at the moment. But the Turner prize does feel a bit like public property, and rightly so. So the whole British thing in this show is quite on the nose. I won’t do it again.”
Darling, 41, lives in Berlin: his observation of the state of Britain is that of someone who has become something of an outsider. He has talked of his shock at coming back to a post-Covid UK that seemed dilapidated and run down. Berlin, with its decent childcare system and welfare support, feels more hospitable. But the exhibition is not only about Britain. It is, more generally, about the impermanence of things; the fragility of what we take for granted. The unusually engaging film produced to accompany the show (such films are an annual part of the Turner prize, usually a dutiful studio interview to contextualise the work) makes that clear.
In this little movie, Darling and his crew roam around coastal England for three days, visiting container ports, pausing to look at messed-up, trash-filled car parks, and picking the blackberries growing in profusion on a roadside. Everything is so beautiful and interesting, he says delightedly at one point. But it’s also decaying and collapsing. “The zombie apocalypse is now. This is it,” he says. Later, half-quoting author William Gibson, he adds: “The apocalypse is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
This mood – a sort of intrigued millenarianism – comes from a deep place. Just over a decade ago, Darling was suffering from serious mental and physical ill health. He became gripped by a fear that the world really was ending. “I wasn’t alone,” he says, mentioning interpretations of Mayan prophecies that the world would end in 2012. Recovery was slow – “I changed my diet and I made myself a rule of no internet after 7pm” – but he gradually got himself steady again.
“I knew intuitively what my body needed to get out of this very vigilant state,” he says. “But I still had to come to terms with the end of the world.” To do so, he read a lot, and came out of it more philosophical: the world is ending right enough, or at least the world we recognise, but on the other hand: “You can say that the colonised indigenous have already experienced the apocalypse, if not several apocalypses. In other words, the world has always been ending for somebody.”
He goes on: “Our empire is coming to an end. But it’s had a good run. The good times are over, but that’s all right. Come on, it could be worse. We’re not in Gaza right now. And maybe there’ll come a time when the forever war comes here as well. And in that case, we’re going to have to take the lick.”
Darling’s route to becoming an artist was far from straightforward. He grew up in Oxford – one of the shows that secured his Turner nomination was a survey of his work at Modern Art Oxford. His childhood there sounds salutary, and has clearly informed his work, which often riffs on ideas about private property and enclosure, as well as colonisation. “The university owns most of the city,” he says, “so you’d be walking by the river and looking for those beautiful dreaming spires. But if you live there, you can’t actually access them. You have to peer over the walls to see them, these beautiful walled gardens. I think it gave me a class politics quite early on.”
He remembers a sort of parochialism, in which boys who had behaved in a certain way at their private schools then blithely made the city their own club, marauding through the streets, taking up space “as if they owned the whole town, the whole world. That’s not true of all of the students who attend Oxford – but these are the people who now run the country.”
As for his time at school, he says: “I have always been something like an artist. I’ve always made things and told stories. It’s been like a compulsion.” Yet becoming an artist didn’t feel like a route open to him. A first try at art college, in Amsterdam, ended in his being “kicked out after a year. I was too young and taking too many drugs.” He worked as a cook for a time and lived in squats: “Living in a sort of ‘city under the city’ where I didn’t pay rent, taxes or anything like that until I was about 27.”
His catalogue of occupations is fairly remarkable. “I was a circus clown. I’ve been a painter-decorator. I’ve been a research assistant. I’ve worked briefly, at different times, in different areas of the sex industry. I’ve worked in retail but I was bad at it. I’ve been a barista and a barman – and I was bad at that too. I’ve been a life model. I’ve been a dancer, working with kids and adults with physical and developmental disabilities. God, you know, I’ve really done a lot of things.” Does he want to say more about the sex work? “No,” he replies. “Let’s just put it there and leave it.”
At the tail end of his 20s, he talked himself into a theatre design course at Central Saint Martins in London – and quickly switched to fine art. “I was in sculpture and had no idea what the hell was going on. I looked at all these amazingly dressed kids just ‘making work’. I was like, ‘Wow, someone really believed in you, didn’t they?’ And I just had nothing going for me except that I’d had a life – but I was very defensive and tricky.”
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Any Turner winner will go home not just with £25,000, but with a fistful of opportunities, often to produce and sell more of the same kind of work that won them the prize. Darling isn’t interested, though. “I don’t think I was really put on this Earth to make luxury objects for a class of people who have nothing in common with me and mine, and who, frankly, have contempt for everything I love. And so I’m like, ‘How can I use my limited skill set, my unemployable psychotic logic, to do something else?’”
He wants to make more films, he says, if he can find people to fund them. And then – and I certainly didn’t see this coming – there’s his idea for a musical. “It’s in the very early stages,” he says, “but we’re thinking to make an end-of-the-pier, pantomime, Punch and Judy version of Our Lady of the Flowers” – referring to Jean Genet’s autobiographical novel of underground queer Parisian life, written in prison in the 1940s.
If that weren’t a cultural handbrake turn enough, the next minute he’s telling me about his love for the Bond movie Skyfall. “It’s sort of James Bond in drag. It’s completely clear in that film that the empire is necrotic and the old man’s past it – he fails his physical and M’s on her way out too. M is Queen Victoria, she’s Britannia, she’s the mother of a nation. She’s also just a ratty old bag and she’s not long for the world.”
Call it psychotic logic, or just an unusually well-tuned sense of the interconnectedness of things, but all of this – Punch and Judy, end-of-the-pier shows, necrotic empires, queerness – is visible in Darling’s work for the Turner prize. He says of the exhibition: “What I’m trying to do is to make visible the fact that all the big stories and big structures that we really believe in are just flimsy and arbitrary. They may all fall down – but that also means things could one day be otherwise. And that for me is hopeful. And funny, as well.”