Date: 22-11-1994
Owning Institution: Turner Prize
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

Tonight, after weeks of speculation, the name of the winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced. Will it be Shirazeh Houshiary, Willie Doherty, Antony Gormley or Peter Doig? Or could it be, as Andrew Graham-Dixon believes, the year of the dark horse? The year the prize goes to the real star of the show: the Turner Prize itself?

The declared purpose of the Turner Prize has changed, shiftily, every year since the award was invented. Originally conceived in 1983 to reward ''an outstanding contribution to British art'', following numerous puzzling metamorphoses it now merely exists - according to Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery and chairman of its panel of judges - ''to bring new developments in the visual arts to the attention of that wide public which is interested in the culture of our own time''.
 
This inoffensive, well-meaning update, this revision of a revision of a revision of the Tate's view of the function of the Turner Prize is not, however, shared by everyone - not even everyone associated with the Prize itself. For instance, Waldemar Janusczak, commissioning editor for Arts at Channel 4, which both sponsors the prize and broadcasts the awarding of it, regards its function as more purely symbolical. He believes - to judge by his essay in the short and glossy pamphlet published to mark the announcement of the 1994 shortlist - that it signals ''the awakening in Britain of a new climate of optimism, a renewed faith in change''. The Turner Prize, Janusczak says, is part of a millennial trend running through the entire culture. For those who may be unaware of such a trend, he is referring to that new spirit of fervent radicalism and open-mindedness at work in Britain today, the other great modern symbol of which (as he points out) is Channel 4's ''new, ambitious headquarters designed for it by Richard Rogers''. This is a building which, being ''made largely of glass, determinedly open-plan in shape, gives concrete shape to our belief, already evidenced daily in the range of programmes we put out, that only in conditions of openness and change is real progress possible''.
 
The Turner Prize, in other words, is primarily significant as a beacon or harbinger - a portent of a brave new world in which everyone will work in the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the open- plan office and all British citizens will agree on the range and vitality of Channel 4's arts programming. This seems likely to remain a minority view of the Prize's function, but what a wonderfully ingenious account of its raison d'etre it is (Mr Janusczak deserves a prize for it).
 
In fact, both Nicholas Serota and Waldemar Janusczak are being a little disingenuous - although they are each acting in what has become the spirit of the Turner Prize itself.
 
After 11 years it has become abundantly clear that the true and proper role of the Turner Prize is to provide a forum for free and open debate of the true and proper role of the Turner Prize. Perhaps this still requires some clarification. The Turner Prize exists to promote and foster discussion of those several interrelated and vital cultural questions raised by the Turner Prize, namely:
 
What is the Turner Prize for?
 Whose values should (and does) the Turner Prize reflect?
 Where does the future of the Turner Prize lie?
 Why on earth do people spend so much time talking and writing about the Turner Prize?
 
Perhaps the greatest of the many mysteries surrounding the Turner Prize is the fact that it has not (at least not yet) been awarded to the Turner Prize. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before the judges recognise the Turner Prize's unique and incontrovertibly huge contribution to the level of public debate concerning the Turner Prize. Until they do, it will continue to be awarded annually to an artist (this year's nominees, in order of bookmaker's favouritism, are Antony Gormley, Willie Doherty, Peter Doig and Shirazeh Houshiary) - clearly a shamefaced, compromise solution, but apparently the best we can expect for the time being.
 
There is (but seriously) a serious moral to be drawn from the absurd and chequered history of the Turner Prize. Never can any award of any kind have been so systematically debated, so frequently and apologetically altered, so constantly redefined and tinkered with as this one. The Turner Prize's strange singularity, in this respect, is generally overlooked. Perhaps because everyone is so busy talking about how to change it, how to make it more balanced or fair or progressive or conservative (or whatever), hardly anyone notices that it is precisely the busy and often near-hysterical nature of all the talk that it prompts which makes it unique.
 
This does not happen in the case of any other equivalent prize or award. The giving of the Oscars, or the Booker Prize, or MBEs and OBEs for this or for that is not accompanied by an annual debate concerning the raison d'etre of giving out any of those things. People accept that some of those to be honoured deserve their honours more or less than others, shrug their shoulders and think no more about it. But the British, in the case of the visual arts, clearly find this all but impossible. It is not that the British are indifferent to art (far from it), it is that they are so mistrustfully obsessed by it, so simultaneously fascinated by and suspicious of it, that the notion of giving an award for excellence in the creation of it fills them with qualms and perturbation. The roots of this distrust lie deep in British culture, and although much of the debate about the Turner Prize revolves around the question of whether too much modern art is too obscure, history suggests that it is art in general, not modern art in particular, which so disturbs the British people: art's inutility, its frequent mere pleasurefulness, its luxuriousness trouble the British, who may no longer be the fiercely Protestant people they once were, but who still hold deeply Protestant attitudes to art, and to all sorts of other things.
 
This, surely, is what lies behind the endlessly, nervously shifting definitions of the Turner Prize annually dreamed up by those who administer it. It is very revealing that those responsible for awarding this prize for art should every year feel the need to disguise it (as if the act of rewarding art on its own merits, without other justification, were somehow shameful) under the camouflage of socially utilitarian rhetoric. Serota justifies it in the proselytising language of social improvement; Janusczak justifies it (rather more self-interestedly) as just one instance of a Channel 4-led cultural socio- intellectual-architectural revolution sweeping the nation. It's as if no one dares, somehow, to give a prize for British art as other prizes are given - unfairly, of course (all prizegivings are unfair), but at least honestly, with the sole and simple intention of honouring someone for good work in their chosen field of endeavour.
 
The Turner Prize, being an almost-award given not-quite-wholeheartedly to an artist under-50 for work found by the jury to be really rather interesting, is a wonderfully potent symbol of the ambivalent attitudes of the British to art. This time last year, it may be remembered, Rachel Whiteread discovered that she had won the Turner Prize on the same evening that Bow County Council officially announced its intention (duly executed) to smash her masterpiece, House, to pieces. What a typically British coincidence of events that seems.
 
- In case the art itself had escaped your notice, the Turner shortlist: Antony Gormley's Witness, Willie Doherty's Incident, Shirazeh Houshiary's The Enclosure of Sanctity and Peter Doig's Concrete Cabin (West Side).