“Get it out of the way,” says artist Simon Starling. Again, poor fellow, he’s trapped in an interview that starts off with questions about his famous Shedboatshed but, unless you were in London in 2005, you could have missed all the brouhaha from the unkind British press when he won the Turner Prize on the strength of a shed he turned into a boat, sailed a few kilometres down the Rhine and turned back into a shed.
That, and the gas-fired bicycle he made and rode across a Spanish desert, painting, with its wastewater, a watercolour of a cactus he came across on the way.
The unsympathetic Observer had already called him “the most tedious artist in the show” and The Independent, meanly, “a thumping bore”.
The media don’t necessarily understand what he’s about, and those sort of comments are almost par for the course for Turner prizewinners.
“Being ridiculed – they do that about everyone, not just me. It comes with the Turner Prize. They’re almost being set up for it by the Tate Gallery [which gives the prize and is home to the shed]. They don’t care. They want column inches. I’ve got used to it. One journalist went to a DIY store and bought a garden shed and tried to build a ship and failed miserably. It was a mickey-take but also a celebration. I thought it was quite nice.
“For me, the Turner Prize happened fairly late in my career. If you’re younger, it has a bigger impact. My practice was fairly well established. The nice thing is the bigger audience. It is something that registers with people. If I go and talk anywhere in the world, people turn up.”
With his