Retrospective revisits Turner Prize controversies

Last Updated: Tuesday, October 2, 2007 | 11:42 AM ET

CBC News

With exhibits such as a pickled cow, a room with a light blinking on and off and paintings daubed with elephant dung, Britain's Turner Prize has been controversial, but difficult to ignore.

Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided won the 1995 Turner Prize.
(Fiona Hanson/Associated Press)

Its nominees have often been objects of derision in the tabloid press and the annual exhibit of entries is one of the biggest draws at London's Tate Gallery.

Now the public is being invited to take another look with a retrospective of the last 23 years of the Turner prize at the Tate Britain. The exhibit opens Tuesday.

"It's really been an amazing period in British art," said Lizzie Carey-Thomas, a curator at the Tate.

"In 1984, British art was virtually invisible and since then there's been a phenomenal change. This exhibit really charts the history."

The Turner Prize, awarded annually to a contemporary artist, has played a huge role in refocusing public attention on art.

Entrants such as Mark Wallinger's State Britain, a reproduction of the posters of an antiwar protester who has camped outside Britain's Parliament for six years and Gilbert and George's huge brightly coloured photo collage Drunk With God have given the prize both notoriety and media attention.

In 1999, more than 140,000 came to see the Turner Prize exhibit that included a piece called My Bed by Tracey Emin, a dishevelled bed with soiled clothing and empty vodka bottles.

"Art is talked about in a more informed way in the press now," Carey-Thomas said. "People aren't afraid or embarrassed anymore to go in and say what they think."

Alan Bowness, director of the Tate Gallery in 1984 when the prize was created, hoped it would bring the public to art in the same way as the Booker Prize boosted the novel.

'All publicity is good publicity'

It has been so successful it spawned similar competitions in France, Germany and other countries.

Traditionalists call the prize pretentious nonsense.

But some argue the derision that greeted Damien Hirst's pickled cow in 1995 or transvestite potter Grayson Perry accepting his award in a tutu in 2003 has actually elevated the status of British art.

"All publicity is good publicity. I give it 10 out of 10 for opening up public debate and 10 out of 10 for exporting the event around the world. Britart is in sparkling health," said art writer Meredith Etherington-Smith.

The retrospective includes work from all 22 past winners, as well as photographs of the works of shortlisted artists.

This year's Turner Prize 2007 exhibition will open at Tate Liverpool on Oct. 19. The winner of the $50,000 award will be announced Dec. 3.