Bear (S)

In 1994 Steve McQueen presented "Bear" (1993) at the Royal College of Art in London; it won him the Turner Prize that year. "Bear" is McQueen’s first film and shows a wrestling match between two men who alternate ambiguous relations and gestures of aggression and erotic attraction. As happens with most of his film installations, the physical interaction of the spectator with the projected image arouses a feeling of spatial dislocation which is heightened in this case by the fact that the film has no sound and it is the spectators’ breathing that completes the showing. Moreover, the alternation of the two wrestlers’ bodies, whole or in fragments, with scenes of the space of the action produce an effect of realism that was to be a constant in McQueen’s work, whether to expose it or to subvert it.