Art scene queen: Laure Prouvost

Everyone wants a piece of Laure Prouvost since she won the Turner Prize for her virtual world videos. She talks to Ben Luke about her new state-of-the-digital-art group show, her baby daughter and why Tracey Emin is wrong about mothers and art
Smashed it: Laure Prouvost (Picture: Adrian Lourie)
Adrian Lourie
Ben Luke15 October 2014

When Laure Prouvost won the Turner Prize last year it was impossible not to smile. The French-born artist was utterly astonished to have won, kissing her then 10-week-old baby on stage and making an ecstatic and heartfelt speech with exclamations — “Oh my God, I’m not ready!” — along with thanks to her child, partner and “everyone I have loved and love”. She also expressed gratitude to the British nation: “Thank you for adopting me.”

Prouvost’s immersion in Britain’s art world, and especially London’s, is reinforced next week in an exhibition that’s among the highlights of the annual contemporary art explosion around the Frieze art fair. Mirrorcity will fill the Hayward Gallery with work by more than 20 artists and collectives based in London, from upstarts Lucky PDF to senior figures such as Susan Hiller.

It’s a state-of-the-art show about artists making their way in the increasingly digital world, trying to make sense of our real and virtual existence.

Prouvost, who creates pacy, intense, colourful and atmospheric videos set in cluttered, visually chaotic installations, exemplifies this new spirit. And she’s drawing huge attention: since her Turner win she’s been ridiculously busy, with a show at New Museum, New York’s most dynamic gallery, as well as exhibitions in Paris, Antwerp and Naples.

She is still installing the Hayward show when we meet. It’s a beautiful morning so we wander out on to the South Bank and perch on a low wall with the sun on our faces and a chilly breeze from the Thames at our backs (“It’s like the feeling of skiing,” says Prouvost). I ask about her adopted city, where she still lives, though she has to divide her time between here and Antwerp as her partner, Nick Aikens, a curator, works over the Dutch border in Eindhoven.

“London is my home, I always want to come back,” she says. “I feel it’s really London that’s let me explore and try things.” She moved here from her native Lille to study at Central St Martins in 1999, where she started using film and video. It took her more than a decade to achieve any real success — including several years doing an MA at Goldsmiths — but she was able to tap into an experimental energy with artist friends and collaborators. “There are a lot of amazing brains here,” she says. “I call them adventurers: they come to London to try things.”

Show girl: Laure Prouvost with her installation The Artist at the Hayward Gallery (Picture: Adrian Lourie)
Adrian Lourie

She feels that the early struggle helped her. “The good thing is that it pushes you, you always have to try a bit more.” Her experience of being an outsider among other foreigners has also affected her work. Her texts, with their quirky misspellings and voiceovers in her lilting French accent and slightly wonky syntax are a feature of the films.

“London is full of people seeing things in their own way, from their own culture,” she says. “Often the characters in my films are foreigners; they spell everything wrong or they misunderstand, and that has a lot to do with where I live.”

Her Turner Prize-winning work was Wantee (2013), the story of her fictional grandfather (though she protests he’s real), a conceptual artist who lived in a Lake District cabin and eventually built a tunnel underneath it, down which he’s disappeared and still dwells. The cluttered cabin, filled with Granddad’s artworks and Grandma’s wildly impractical teapots, was built by Prouvost and filmed for the work.

Then, for the Turner Prize show, she reconstructed the cabin interior in the gallery and showed the film alongside it, thrusting the audience into the heart of her surreal story.

The Artist, her reworked 2010 installation going on show in Mirrorcity, is the prelude to Wantee, featuring her grandfather’s studio at an earlier stage. “The idea of The Artist is playing on what we expect the artist to be,” she says. She mocks the idea that there’s now a Citroën Picasso. “[Picasso] would never have planned to have a Picasso car,” she laughs. “So, it’s how society takes your work and takes what they want, and makes mugs from it.”

Again, the work is a mixture of video, painting and sculpture. In the film she gives a behind-the-scenes tour of the studio. Surrounding it are objects including her grandfather’s paintings, reflecting his fetish for bums, and her grandmother’s adjustments to his works, adding suns and flowers to what she sees as inscrutable minimalism and conceptualism.

“It’s playing on the situation of a couple in art,” she says, and particularly the dominant male artist and subservient woman. She’s interested in artistic clichés, the idea of artists as figures of God-given genius — and what happens if you don’t have it. “Then you’re always the loser,” she says. “With my family, when I was studying art, it was like, ‘Oh, she’s an artist, she’s never going to do anything, she’s the loser of the family’. Of course, they were also supportive but the bigger image was ‘She’s never going to make it’.”

How did they respond to her winning the Turner? “My grandma is constantly watching the prize on a loop,” she says, proudly. “But she’s in hospital now because she broke her leg.”

I express sympathy as she says this. “She was trying to get in the tunnel,” she adds.

Ah. So we’re not talking about her real grandmother, but the one in her work. “She’s a bit too big, she just eats crisps all the time,” she deadpans, “because since he’s gone she just gets deliveries of crisps from Tesco.”

In Prouvost’s interviews, as well as in her work, you’re never sure where fiction and reality begin and end. “In everyday life it’s like that as well,” she says. “We think we know what’s what, but it’s all very constructed.”

But her aim to foster confusion and misunderstanding isn’t aggressive — there’s something of the old-fashioned yarn-spinner about her, wanting to send us on flights of the imagination. “I’m interested in how film could be smelly, how it stinks,” she says. “How do you translate the sun on our face now? How do you make that feeling?”

With this desire to immerse her audience in a sensory rush, her videos often include written or narrated instructions — she admits she can be bossy. But this is what makes her work an antidote to the experience we’ve all had of walking into a contemporary art gallery and wondering what you have to do. “You feel like you’re being judged: ‘What are you doing here?’” she says. And while she likes “sharp and minimal” works she is “attracted to emotion and sharing”, she says. “I love how brains interact and how art is a tool to communicate anxiety or happiness, and I use it quite straightforwardly — I talk and I point. It’s maybe a reaction to that kind of distant art that’s being made.”

In the past two years she has clearly caught the imagination of curators across the world, and she admits that it has been a rollercoaster, especially with her daughter, Celeste, arriving amid it all.

So I wonder what she feels about Tracey Emin’s assertion this week that mothers don’t make the best artists? She doesn’t want to get into a scrap with Emin, but says, “You just use your time better, you have to really be focused and also have enough support there, financial or whatever. Here, there’s a big problem with childcare, it’s just far too expensive and so a lot of people — a lot of women — stop work. And if women stop work then they’re out of the loop and when they come back four years later they’re not even connected to their work. I’m talking about artists but I think it could be anyone. It should change — in Europe childcare is four times cheaper.”

She admits she’s lucky to be able to afford for someone to look after Celeste. “I need my day, because it’s true you can’t work with a child,” she says. “She’s not interested in the videos!”

A lot of people are, though. After the Hayward show opens she will busy herself recreating one of her fictional sets at Frieze, where she is being represented by one of London’s discreet but powerful galleries, MOT. Then she moves on to shows in The Hague, Mexico City and Berlin. But despite this clamour for her work and having a Turner Prize, Prouvost is at pains to remain an adventurer. “I still feel I’m not sure what I’m doing, I’m always trying,” she says. “Hopefully, I will never know and I can always try more.”

Mirrorcity is at the Hayward Gallery, SE1 (020 7960 4200, southbankcentre.co.uk), from Tuesday until January 4, £12, concs available

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