Since reviewing the Turner prize exhibition as it opened, it is Assemble’s project that has stayed with me – though at the time I enjoyed Bonnie Camplin’s project, with its evocation of paranoia and conspiracy theories, very much. Nicole Wermer’s arrangement of Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus Cesca chairs, each of which had a luxuriant fur coat draped across its back, felt like a particularly chilly academic exercise. Watching Janice Kerbel’s Doug – with its black-clad singers and its limp, sometimes winsome doggerels – ­I kept thinking of the toe-curling acapella concert amusements the King’s Singers provide. It was dreadfully overwritten.

Urban regenerators Assemble win Turner prize Read more

Assemble’s win signifies a larger move away from the gallery into public space that is becoming ever more privatised. It shows a revulsion for the excesses of the art market, and a turn away from the creation of objects for that market. Their structure that was on show at this year’s Turner exhibition must be seen not as a work, but as a model of work that takes place elsewhere; not in the art world, but the world itself.

For the exhibition, Assemble recreated a full-size, wooden mockup of one of the houses in Granby in south Liverpool they have been refurbishing with locals. They filled it with the ceramics, fireplace surrounds, stools, doorhandles and furnishings they and the residents have been making both to use in the houses and to sell in order to generate income. The overall aesthetic was stripped-down and clean, without being conspicuously forced or arty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stripped-down and clean, without being too forced or arty ... Assemble’s Turner exhibition. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

When this year’s shortlist was announced, I wrote that Assemble raised questions about whether their work is in fact art, or instead a kind of socially-engaged design practice. In some ways, their activities mirror Theaster Gates’s efforts to regenerate a corner of South Chicago, just as his recent project in Bristol was a joyous social intervention. Unlike Gates, Assemble do not make artworks to supplement their larger projects – though the fireplaces, benches and ceramics do make some money for Granby. Assemble are also indebted to the utopian 19th-century projects of William Morris; they extend their artfulness into everyday life.

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Winning the Turner prize does not necessarily depend on one artist delivering a knock-out exhibition. Juries consider each artist’s work as a whole (though the show itself can make or break their chance of winning). Assemble don’t really do gallery shows. Their art ignores the art market. Useful and inspiring, Assemble demonstrate how artists and architects can engage with communities, and work creatively in the wider social sphere.



During the 1970s and 80s many artists, living in short-term properties (most famously through the London artist’s housing and studio co-op ACME), temporarily regenerated patches of east London destined for the bulldozers. With studios and housing unaffordable in London now, such ventures are vital. But Assemble isn’t just about artists doing it for themselves. Their work can be seen as part of a battle against social division, and against the precariousness of life under neo-liberal capitalism. How right-on, you might say.

The danger of projects like theirs is that it will be seen to replace government intervention, leading to further withdrawals of public funds and further atomisation. (They might easily have been instrumentalised by David Cameron’s bullshit talk on The Big Society had he had the chance.) But not every community has an Assemble round the corner on hand to help.

I am unsurprised that Assemble have won, given that one of the current Turner judges, Alistair Hudson, director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), views his museum as a service to the community, a facility rather than a place where big-shot artists have major shows. How good is Assemble’s work? It is full of invention and ingenuity. It has purpose. What they are not doing is following a familiar artistic career pattern. It is art if they say so, and I don’t care if it is art or not. Winning the Turner prize is a vindication of their work.