Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto has just won this year's Cartier award. According to Frieze magazine, his work "attempts to forge an alliance of acute commentary and serious intent with calculatedly fatuous yet memorable punchlines". I'm going to hold my hands up here. I didn't get the work they were describing: a banana skin on top of a bar of soap on top of some axle grease, called Grasa, Jabón y Plátano (Grease, Soap and Banana). Before you all write in; yes I get that you can slip on them, but it's not much of a gag is it?
The proposal that won him the Cartier award is for a site-specific work involving 100 oil-filled drums and a frog. It's called Pond. It will be installed in Regent's Park in the autumn, but in the meantime, you can see a preview of something very similar that he exhibited as part of the Greenwashing show in Turin.
A rather obvious problem is pointed out on the We Make Money Not Art blog: when they visited the show, the frog had hopped off (scroll about halfway down, to the Greenwashing post). And if it can escape from a Turin gallery, its chances of staying on its assigned barrels in a big park seem very slim indeed. Still, there's something tranquil about the piece that I imagine will work well in the space. It's not as arresting as Richard Wilson's famous oil-filled 20:50, but it's better than a bar of soap and a banana skin.
