Celebration of diversity

The winner of this year's Turner Prize, for artists under 50, will be announced next week in London. MARY RUSSELLlooks at the often controversial award and at the contenders, whose work includes art using atomised aircraft-engine metal and the skeleton of a blue whale

IT’S THAT time of year when gallery-goers, art-watchers and the odd person like myself head for London’s Tate Britain. On December 7th, the winner of the Turner Prize will be announced.Loved, lauded and lambasted, this is the exhibition that gets everyone talking. It has been characterised as shocking, boring, with not enough women or too many women. We’ve had Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung work and Damien Hirst’s bisected calf, Tracey Emin’s bed and Grayson Perry as his alter ego, Claire, collecting his prize wearing a lilac party frock. (Plus, of course, his great ceramic pots.)

The prize, initiated 25 years ago, has moved through troubled waters. The first prize winner – who painted clearly recognisable horses, goats and fish – failed to turn up to collect his cash. One year, a government minister described the exhibition as “cold, mechanical bullshit”. There was no Turner Prize at all in 1990 then, phoenix-like, it rose, powered up on the £20,000 award given by Channel 4. The current sponsors are Gordon’s Gin and the prize money is now £40,000.

But why Turner? Considered controversial in his own day for those watery images of sea mist seen through a fog, he had wanted a prize awarded to a young person (which now means anyone aged up to 50) who has had “an exhibition or presentation in the 12 months preceding”. And virtually anything goes – paint, clay, dust, brickwork, fabric, wood, video, dead animals and body parts. One of this year’s entries, by Roger Hiorns, is a spray of atomised metal made from the engine of a passenger aircraft. It lies on the floor like a lunar moonscape with blue-grey craters, black volcanic peaks, the whole thing draining away silver at the edges. Difficult to picture all this as a hard, drumming engine. “It’s what happens anyway,” says curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas.

“The engine is broken up into its constituent parts, melted, sprayed, left to cool and so on. Hiorns carried the dust in in sacks, scattered it on the gallery floor and then sprinkled darker dust on top.” Surreptitiously, when the attendants aren’t around, I blow at it and yes, a tiny flurry of dust rises then subsides. Real dust.

Hiorns is the artist who, last year, sprayed the inside of a condemned council bed-sit in London with liquid copper sulphate and then left it. Within months, the room was transformed into a mesmerising cave of electric blue crystals, but who was the artist – Hiorns or time? And it’s still there to be viewed: demolition work has been delayed – by the recession, I like to think. Some clouds have unexpected linings.

Apart from Hiorns, there are three other contenders: Lucy Skaer, Richard Wright and Enrico David. Skaer offers us the huge skull of a sperm whale seen through a series of wood panels hung sideways like Venetian blinds so that your vision is interrupted and blocked, forcing you to use your imagination to fill in the missing bits. Her work, says Carey-Thomas, is all about seeing and engaging. I found it irritating. Why? Because I don’t like to be interrupted.

Next up is Enrico David, born in Italy but educated and living in England. At 43 the oldest of the contenders (the others are 34) David makes demands of the viewer for which there isn’t always time. He offers huge rag dolls with extreme legs and arms and Humpty Dumpty bodies with his own face imposed on the head. And here’s the great thing about the Turner Prize: you can look at a work and say – that’s just plain silly – knowing there’s bound to be someone who’ll agree with you.

The work that David doesn’t show but which is illustrated in the catalogue, is far from silly, hinting at a dark childhood moment that most of us would choose to keep to ourselves but which David needs to examine.

And then, saving the best till last, there’s Richard Wright.

“Space,” he tells us in a video at the gallery, “is a work already begun . . . if you walk into an empty room, you can’t see the air but you can sense the atmosphere.” Anyone who has worked in radio will know what he’s referring to – that moment of total but palpable silence just before the mic is switched off.

Wright has designed and executed a complicated mural done in gold leaf which dazzles and shimmers and will continue to do so until it is destroyed at the end of the exhibition at the artist’s wish.

Anyone who, some years back, watched a group of Buddhist monks create a sand mandala in the Douglas Hyde Gallery and then ceremoniously carry it to the Liffey, into which it was poured, will identify with Wright, who, like the monks, works in the moment and not for the future. His untitled work is both enormous and detailed, the intricate patterns – some pieces of gold leaf no bigger than a full stop – covering most of the gallery wall. He uses a Renaissance technique whereby the artist traces the pattern onto paper, pricks holes in the surface then puffs chalk through the holes – a method not unlike, I have to say, the way my mother used to do her smocking.

This work had to be executed in three weeks, so Wright used a team of helpers to get it done in time. So much energy, so much gold leaf and none of it retained. Ah, vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . .

It is to the credit of Tate Britain that it makes space for a calf cut in half, someone’s unmade bed, a man in a frock and a scintillating wall of gold leaf. It’s that – the celebration of diversity – that lies at the heart of the Turner Prize.

The Turner Prize is at Tate Britain until Jan 3