With the demise of churchgoing and rave culture, the Turner Prize is one of the few collective experiences left in contemporary Britain. It’s a contemporary art version of Poppy Day (Remembrance Sunday), where the whole nation, or at least a relatively large proportion of it, unites and spares a few minutes to think about contemporary art. The newspapers devote columns and features like this one to it. Armies of school-children turn up to see the shortlist show. Everyone leaves a piece of their opinion on that neatly designed minimalist noticeboard that concludes the exhibition. The debate about whether contemporary art is crap is ritualistically and infuriatingly rehashed for the millionth time.
Admittedly, the prize got off to a wobbly start. Established in 1984, the first prizes went to already older-generation artists such as Malcolm Morley, Tony Cragg and Richard Long. But in the early 1990s Sir Nicholas Serota and Waldemar Janusczek, then arts commissioning editor at Channel 4, revamped the event by televising it and restricting prizes to artists under 50. The average age of Turner nominees dropped from 46 in 1985 to 30 at the time of its relaunch in 1991. At the same time, Tate attendance figures rose from 980,105 in 1985 to 1,816,421 in 1991. In the seven years since Tate Modern and Tate Britain opened the figures have trebled.
Nor is it just a British phenomenon. The Turner has become the world’s most famous art prize. Writing in The New Yorker in March this year, the sociologist and art-market expert Sarah Thornton explained: “Unlike other art prizes, such as the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Whitney’s Bucksbaum Award, which are just a line on an artist’s cv, the Turner Prize is a cross between the Academy Awards and American Idol; people take sides, argue about the contest at dinner parties, and even place bets on who’s going to win.” No question, the Turner has been a huge success – which is, of course, not the same thing as saying that it has rewarded artistic talent. In fact, in our jaded age those two things mostly preclude one another.
The saying that “Every country gets the government it deserves” can be smoothly adapted to art: we get the art – and the art prizes – we deserve. Like any overeducated critic with a degree in art history, I’ve got issues with the Turner, but I find the arguments of the anti-Turnerites – among them the self-publicising claque of “stuckists” – even less appetising. Over the years there have been a handful of Turner refuseniks – artists who have refused a position on the shortlist. The painter of pictograms Julian Opie, who made his reputation in the 1980s art boom, is one confirmed case, and Lucy McKenzie, a young Scottish painter of architecture-as-scenography, is another. Rumour has it that Cerith Wyn Evans and Sarah Lucas also said no.
There may be many more: a Tate spokesperson will only say, “There have been a very small number of examples in the prize’s history where someone has felt that they could not commit to being on the Turner Prize shortlist. We can’t discuss who these artists are.”
The refuseniks and their gallerists mutter preciously about how the “competitive environment” of the Turner is not how their artists think their work can be properly appreciated but the real reasons are cruder. Some of these artists are making so much money that the prize money – £25,000 to the winner, £5,000 to each of the three runners-up – is small change. Others are rightly afraid that the paucity of ideas on which they’ve managed to hang a career will be cruelly exposed in the brilliant glare of competition.
What the Turner is great at, however, is presenting an overview of directions in contemporary art. Year after year, the Turner judges – this year, Fiona Bradley, director of the Fruitmarket Gallery; the writer Michael Bracewell; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; the freelance braodcaster and writer Miranda Sawyer; and Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool – cunningly pick four contrasting artists, each of whom stands for a different theory and trend in contemporary art. The rules of the game are simple: every artist has to be based in Britain, aged under 50 and have had a show in the past year.
Consequently, the prize show presents an annual snapshot of contemporary art, a little like the series of chart albums Now! That’s What I Call Music Vol XX. This year, to prove my point, the Turner hits of yesteryear are being recycled as nostalgia, just like pop music, in a show of Turner Prize Prizewinners. While the 2007 shortlist exhibition is being staged at the Tate Liverpool, instead of the usual London venue, Tate Britain is doing a “Greatest Hits”. There you can relive your youth and hum along – or whatever the visual equivalent might be – to Damien’s sliced cows, Antony Gormley’s blobby casts, Martin Creed’s “The lights going on and off”, and suchlike.
This year’s Turner crop – Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger – are a fine example of panoramic potential of the ritual. There’s always one old – increasingly old – Young British Artist on the shortlist. This time it’s Mark Wallinger. Like others from this school, he has adapted American pop and European conceptual art into a domesticated British idiom.
His work is witty and eclectic and ranges from the impenetrable to the proletarian. Wallinger’s entry this year features his appropriation of the display of the five-year-old antiwar protest that was held on the green outside the Houses of Parliament until it was dismantled by police in May 2006. It’s been on show at Tate Britain since January. This looks like another dumb readymade, a back-of-the-napkin idea from another spoilt contemporary artist – but there’s far more to it than that. Love it or loathe it, the work is a nodal point for a handful of intersecting trendy theories of contemporary art. Once again Wallinger has found a neat way of anglicising conceptualism – this time the political text-and-installation art of the 1980s. The work follows the fashionable contemporary-art strategy in which the artist “uses” his position to attract attention to political subjects by plonking them in an art gallery.
It’s similar to what Jeremy Deller did a few years ago for his Turner show, when he invited the Quakers to set up a stall at the Tate. Thus the status we ascribe to art becomes a tool of political rhetoric. Perhaps I have almost persuaded you to admire the work – if so, that’s not what I intended. It’s glib – the art world’s version of a Sky news report – though that is also an important feature of most contemporary art. Wallinger is favourite to win the Turner but I think the judges will eschew the obvious winner because last year the prize also went to the obvious winner, the brilliant abstract painter Tomma Abts.
Zarina Bhimji illustrates a completely different art trend: documentary. Bhimji is a photographer and video artist of an older generation who produces what are essentially documentaries, in the form of evocative photographs and videos about her Ugandan heritage. Galleries try hard to dress up this simple work with grand analytical prose. Thus Bhimji’s works are “records of absence alluding to loss and the passage of time; motifs which operate on a universal level. We see empty landscapes and deserted buildings that are witness to interrupted and abandoned human activity ...” But it’s basically documentary photography and film without people.
There’s a reason why there is a lot of this documentary work around at the moment. A generation ago someone like Bhimji might have been making documentaries for TV. But as the BBC and Channel 4 have become ever more banal and unambitious, the art gallery has become a refuge for factual filmmakers fleeing the straitjacket of the relentless three-act narrative saturated in voice-over. Art-gallery documentary, though, is often very boring. At its worst it is a room full of monitors showing interminable unedited interviews in a foreign language, like Kutlug Ataman’s 2004 Turner entry “Twelve”, in which 12 Turks recount their experiences with reincarnation. At its best, though, the art lover gets visual poems that cannot be enjoyed in any other cultural forum.
The other two nominees draw our attention to yet more directions in art. Nathan Coley, a 40-year-old Glaswegian artist, has been nominated for a neon sign he erected on the Isle of Bute that read “There will be no miracles” and for a large blue-and-white striped model of a church. It’s a dramatic but dismally unoriginal work. Neon texts and drawings, originated by the American conceptualist Bruce Naumann, have become the egg sandwich in the conceptual art chiller cabinet. Everyone’s churning them out, from Tracey Emin’s scrawls to Mona Hatoum’s globe. They are the ultimate symbol of the commodification of conceptual art formulas, the repackaging of what were once arcane and intellectual ideas for art into simple gift ideas – wall jewellery – for millionaires. Coley’s stripes are no better than his neons; they quote the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, who has been “striping” gallery walls and other interior and exterior spaces for decades, as a way of “signifying” the presence of art without obviously making it.
The fourth nominee Mike Nelson has, like Mark Wallinger, been nominated twice – last time was in 2001. If we had an -ism for his artit would be cinematism. He is one of a number of artists who have turned installation art into set design – building intricate and creepy interiors that suggest their own dark narratives. Other artists working in this way include Christopher Buechel, who last autumn turned Hauser and Wirth’s fabric warehouse in the East End into a macabre al-Qaeda safe-house, and Gregor Schneider who, over much of the 1990s, converted his father’s Rhineland home into a series of lead-lined chambers, secret bedsits and false partitions.
Nelson has been nominated for an installation he made for last year’s Frieze Art Fair. One entered the unsignposted work through an anonymous door set alongside the booths: inside was a spooky darkroom full of photographs of the construction of the fair. It was brilliant and Nelson – representing the perfect intersection of Tate and Frieze – should win this year’s prize, so place your bets now!
Past shortlists have supplied similar art-history lessons. The transvestite potter Grayson Perry’s prize in 2003 highlighted both the revival of figurative painting and a wave of painters whose subject was an esoteric fantasy world. Jeremy Deller, 2004 winner, is an exponent of “relational aesthetics”, in which the artist collaborated with groups of people, including the audience, to create the work. Martin Creed, winner in 2001, represented a new generation of playful yet ultra-austere minimalists.
Yet providing a handy survey of contemporary art trends is only half of the importance of the Turner Prize. Together with Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi, Jay Jopling, Frieze magazine and Art Fair and the auction houses, the Turner has played a dynamic role in the contemporary art boom, the first big cultural landmark of the 21st century.
The Turner Prize paved the way for the reinvention of art as a participation sport. As Lizzie Carey-Thomas, curator of the Turner retrospective, says, “The whole mission of the Turner Prize was to get more people interested in contemporary art, and to make art less elitist, and in that respect the prize has exceeded all expectations.
“What happened in the 1990s was that the ambitions of a new generation of artists to reach out to a wider audience through the media matched the ambitions of the Turner Prize.”
At the same time it does feel as though there was a suspiciously large amount of synchronicity going on in Britain. The Turners were being awarded to artists that Saatchi was buying, that the auction houses were selling. This was an alliance in which traditional values of critical journalism, the separation of auction houses from art dealing and of public galleries from private collectors were set aside – and it was phenomenally successful. They created a new art boom that made the 1980s art boom look like a school fête.
Hirst’s skull – at £50m the world’s most expensive work of contemporary art, and the same price as a high-quality Titian portrait – probably represents the high-water mark of the current boom. Of course, that’s an absurd price-tag, and the skull also emblematises the dark side of the Turner. No one wants to go back to the late 1980s, when the only dealer in London who could get a decent price for a work of contemporary art was Anthony D’Offay – but the Turner Prize, along with all the other agents of the contemporary art boom, may have bred a Frankenstein, a monster that is now out of control, a speculative bubble in which prices and reputations are hyped up beyond reason.
Hirst’s skull, the White Cube gallery recently announced, had been sold to “a consortium of businessmen”. They placed less emphasis on who these businessmen were – but one of them, we know, was the artist himself.
No one with any sense of morality can look at today’s art market – where Warhols and Rothkos go for $70m, and a Klimt for $135m – without an overwhelming sense of foreboding and revulsion, without the sense that society has entered a new phase of decadence.
The conundrum is this: yes, we could be living through a new Renaissance, where a new generation of the super-rich bankrolls a flowering of artistic talent ... but no, we could also be witnessing a cynically manipulated market, an art version of the dotcom bubble. Though the Turner judges announce their verdict on December 3 – the jury will still be out on the big question.
If the bubble doesn’t burst, and we really have entered a new phase of our culture in which art is our religion, then it will soon be time to take the Turner on to the next level. It’s been a primary motor in the expansion of the art market, yet it hasn’t expanded similarly. It’s been a success but it hasn’t yet fully realised its potential.
It’s time to internationalise and diversify the Turner. It’s an anachronism in the international globalised art market to have a national prize – you get idiosyncrasies such as the award going to Germans living in the UK (Tomma Abts and Wolfgang Tilmanns).
It’s inappropriate to give only one award a year given the vast increase in the number of artists and shows. There should be a raft of awards – “Best Newcomer”, “Best Foreign Artist”, “Best Contemporary Art Exhibition, “Best Group Show”, “Best Blockbuster Exhibition”, “Best Sculptor/Installation Artist/Performance Artist/Painter”, “Best Commercial Gallery”, “Best Artist-Run Space” “Best Curator” and, of course, “Best Art Critic”.
Ben Lewis is a documentary filmmaker and art critic
The Turner Prize 2007, October 19-January 13 2008 at Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool L3. Tel: +44 (0)151-702 7400.
‘Turner Prize: A Retrospective’, October 2-January 6 2008 at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1. Tel: +44 (0)20-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk
It should have been them – Ben Lewis nominates his favourites
MICHAEL LANDY
In 2001 Landy exhibited “Breakdown”, in which he used an array of machines and assistants to destroy everything he owned in a shop in London’s Oxford Street. This was simply the finest work of art made by a British artist in the past 10 years – and one of the best works of art ever made about consumerism and materialism. Born 1963. Never nominated.
VICTOR BURGIN
Born in 1941, Burgin is a seminal “poststructuralist” photographer who combined staged photographs with texts in the 1980s and who inspired a generation. Should have won a Turner in the 1980s but was, unfortunately, beaten by Gilbert and George in 1986.
TINO SEGHAL
The three hilarious “performance” exhibitions at the ICA by 31-year-old Seghal were wonderful satires on the pretensions of the contemporary art bubble (though with some nauseatingly clichéd anti-capitalist politics attached). In one a group of actors stood around the gallery visitors and announced that the work of art, which was them, had no meaning. At the Venice Biennale 2005, actors dressed as museum guards danced round singing, “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary.” You can buy one of his works of art in a legal contract although they don’t actually exist as objects or as videos. Never nominated.
SUSAN HILLER
Video and installation conceptual artist who studied anthropology and whose work has a strong psychoanalytic content. The archival style of presentation of her work – in museological displays and series of notebooks – her involvement of the spectator as participant, and subjects of female identity and death influenced the art of the 1990s. Born 1940. Never nominated. Should have won a Turner in the 1980s.
DAVID SHRIGLEY Zany 39-year-old Scottish artist known for his cartoon-y graphic style. Shrigley produces books as well as drawings and sculptures such as “Five Years of Toenail Clippings” (2002). His time will surely come. Never nominated.
