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The Turner Prize: Ordering the Avant-GardeTerry AtkinsonPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Terry Atkinson (2002) The Turner Prize: Ordering the Avant-Garde, Third Text, 16:4,411-418, DOI: 10.1080/0952882031000077648

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The Turner Prize:Ordering the Avant-Garde

Terry Atkinson

Most of the public criticism of the arts is really an attempt to asksuch questions, and, instead of just priding ourselves on creatingcontroversy by raising them, trying to answer a few might not besuch a bad idea. The sciences rose to this challenge, and thebooksales these authors enjoy indicate a surprising public appetitefor complex issues, the result of which has been a broadening socialdialogue about the power and beauty and limits of science. (FromBrian Eno’s speech at the Turner Prize 1995)

Here is a first truism. Like all prizes the Turner Prize (TP) is an act ofplacement. It places artists, not only those that are on the TP list, 1, 2, 3,4, 5, etc but, by virtue of those who are on it, the TP also places thosewho are not on it. In this way the TP subscribes to perhaps the widestand most rampant fundamental capitalist formation – competition. TheTP is a smooth ideological agenda. In terms of its embrace of the avant-garde (A-G) model of the artistic subject (in these remarks you are goingto hear quite a lot about this model), the TP, like the model of the A-Gitself, is beginning to historically appear a bit mouldy.

Here is a second truism. The TP is a celebratory rather than acritical event. The latter may seem an obvious point but I am going toargue here that it is perhaps worth dwelling on a bit more. Forexample, the Prize celebrates a particular conception of British art atthe same time as it celebrates the Tate establishment as its high templeand centre of its relations of distribution. Further on in these remarksI am going to argue more specifically that the Prize also celebrates, andthis its internationalist ideological motor, a particular version of the A-G model of the artistic subject. And outlining what I take to be theformation of two versions of the model is the central concern of theseremarks. Meanwhile, before I attempt this analysis of the A-G modelof the artistic subject, some brief general historical comments will bemade on the development of the model, followed by some anecdotalcommentary on the occasion of my being placed upon the TP shortlistin 1985.

Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 4, 2002, 411-418

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2002 Kala Press/Black Umbrellahttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0952882031000077648

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There have been occasions, throughout the running of the A-Gmodel of the artistic subject during the last 150 years or so, when tocelebrate the model would have run counter to its characteristicmanifestations on these occasions. On such occasions the model hasbeen dissenting from, resistant to and critical of the dominant modesof culture making within the societies it has found itself developing. Ithink here, for example, of the works of Rimbaud and Lautreamont atthe turn of the 1860s into the 1870s; and like Rimbaud’s work at thesame time, of the work of Courbet at the event of the Paris Commune.In the twentieth century, I think of the experiments at Vitebsk beforethey were historically underwhelmed by the requirements of observingthe emerging sacraments of the alleged future Communist society, andbefore they were finally throttled by the Stalinist reflex. I think too ofsome of the corrosive first incursions of Conceptualism into the canonsof Modernism in the last half of the 1960s, before these incursionsbuckled and were buried under the slurry of the aesthetic bombast ofpostmodernist hyperinflation of the claims about object and text asauthoring agents. All these manifestations of the A-G model of theartistic subject were largely critical in spirit. When viewed in thecontext of such events, there is something ludicrous about the idea ofagents, who allegedly embrace the critical version of the A-G model,both seeking for and gaining, or taking a chance on losing for thatmatter, a prize presented for the attainment of an alleged excellence inconforming to the paradigm of a particular version of A-G behaviour,the last thing of which is critical input. Such ideological ironies andpungent political paradoxes were not altogether lost on me when, in1985, I was a TP nominee. Not least because right at that time, SueAtkinson, who is today still keeping an eye on the conceits and thefoibles of my artistic career, was then part of a determined struggle andin the bitter throes of contributing to the protest at GreenhamCommon, for the upholding of which principled stance she, shortlyafter the TP jamboree, served a short prison sentence. At the time ofthe 1985 TP, Margaret Thatcher’s second administration still basked inthe post-Falkland mummery of its first, and the strike of the NUM hadrecently been defeated by a number of authoritarian manipulationsthat would not have been out of place in Pinochet’s 1974 version ofChile. In the midst of this seemingly vivid Thatcherite exultant politicalsphere I found myself (I am not arguing my innocence or naiveté hereby the use of the term ‘found myself’) on the TP shortlist.

Against this political foreground Sue pronounced somewhat wrylyon my placing on the list to at least have an aroma of token radicalism.She would be the first to admit that both this pronouncement and thefact that she predicted that Howard Hodgkin would win the TP by aninstitutional mile required no great feat of insight on her part.Nevertheless the label of token radical was not without its discomforts.I think perhaps for Sue it was guilt by association resting on my guilt,which was a more direct and evasive guilt by participation. As youknow, via the media, the Turner Prize is an event where silly hyperboleand amplifying mutual admiration are only some of the humanweaknesses displayed alongside the art objects. In 1985 RichardAttenborough, whose Rolls-Royce stood like some angel of the southoutside the then Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) that night, was, like

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Madonna this year, the star presenter of the prize in 2001. He waspoised between the acclaim for his already realised filmic rendering ofGhandi and the promise of Cry Freedom, his filmic version to come ofSteve Biko. He talked, I think, to all the candidates for the prize; hecertainly talked to me. However, the filmic icons of the quasi-radicalheroics of the film versions of Ghandi and Biko notwithstanding, whatflooded my mind at this moment of TP’s self-importance was an imageof Eric Idle, in what I have always thought to be one of many greatMonty Python sketches, delivering the Monty Python rendition ofRichard Attenborough. The anecdotal details of the encounter withAttenborough are not important; what I am attempting to lay out hereis the outline of the TP as a culture of celebrity that consumes themodel of the A-G by ordering it through a model of mutualcongratulation funded by a self regarding hyperinflation of the notionof the artistic subject.

In so far, then, as it is exclusively celebratory the TP is a bit like acoronation – and whoever heard of a critical coronation? The TP inthis sense is thus an event and reinforcement of a socially institutedintelligibility. In this sense too the TP celebrates itself. Since it does this,we may permit ourselves to enquire how far such an eventconventionalises and reifies the celebratory version of the A-G modelof the artistic subject as seemingly the only version of the model. Andin doing this, then asking how far, within the practices of art, it editsout the other more critical version of the model. Such an inquiry might,in turn, be pre-empted by at least two other questions: (1) What is amodel of the artistic subject?; (2) What is the particular model of theA-G artistic subject in its various versions?

Whilst, in the foregoing remarks, I may have given someperemptory hints at possible pathways into the answers to suchquestions, it must be obvious here that these questions are rhetoricallyheld out as little more than discursive agents provocateurs. And, inturn, such questions presuppose a prior one, bearing upon the largernotion of the development of culture itself. On the latter question Ioffer the following brief remarks.

In using such a term as ‘cultural development’, I am trying toseparate the notion from some such term as ‘cultural evolution’. Forwere I to use the term ‘cultural evolution’ I think I would be in dangerof misdirecting these remarks in the following sense. Using the word‘evolution’ in this context may lead us to over-liken the processesinvolved in the development of culture to those involved in Darwiniannatural evolution. When we talk of some – such as ‘the evolution ofart’ – the distinction between the two sets of processes may easily beoverlooked. Whilst it seems unarguable that one characteristic of ourspecies nature is that the species make culture, that is, that ourpropensity as a species to make culture is a natural propensity, theculture/nature distinction, certainly at this juncture in the presentremarks, is worth hanging onto and further examining. Our models ofartistic subjectivity will be primary instruments in developing both ourculture per se and our idea of culture, which may or may not match,and in developing, more specifically, both our specific culture of art perse and our notion of the culture of art, which, again, may or may notmatch.

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I would argue that there is in the A-G model of artistic subjectivitysomething of what is, by now, a diehard confusion between twonotions of cultural maintenance, and that these two notions of culturalmaintenance not only correspond in some significant ways to the twoversions of the A-G model of the artistic subject but that the confusionof the two notions of cultural maintenance is, in some strong sense, theconfusion of the two models of the A-G model of artistic subjectivity.One notion of cultural maintenance – let us focus on the matter of artpractice since this is our direct context here – is concerned withpreserving standards that the culture perceives as having been alreadyachieved. In day-to-day art discursive exchange the notion implies, andis accepted more or less quiescently by the protagonists of the notion,that our cultural ancestors have achieved standards that we may equalbut cannot surpass. The other notion of cultural maintenance suggeststhat art practice, in some sense of the historical long run, producesbetter and better art. The clear implication here is that over thegenerations we will make better art than, at least, our remote culturalancestors. In other words, that art gets better, in some obvious sense ofthe word better. Of course, in respect of the time-slices involved herethe period of the TP (1984 to present) is a very minute time-slice.Nevertheless, though it may appear a facile one, the question, is thework in 2001 better than the work in 1984? it is perhaps worththinking about in the setting of inquiring into such a notion as culturaldevelopment. Both notions of cultural maintenance rest upon thenotion of natural kind. I have remarked already that there is noquestion of whether or not making culture is a natural speciespropensity, it most incontrovertibly is. But the question that claims ourattention at this point in these remarks is that of the competitionbetween the two notions of cultural maintenance. To repeat: the firstnotion is primarily concerned with trying to ensure that what it claimsto be our cultural standards are retained; the second notion is primarilyconcerned with trying to ensure that what it takes to be our culturalstandards are surpassed. In my experience of trying to discuss thesepoints, whilst the respective devotees of either one or other of thenotions may both equally contemplate the possibility that the effects ofour cultural efforts may be of such magnitude that they feed back toaffect our nature in some abstract sense, both sets of devotees, whenpushed argumentatively to defend their positions, will both soon fallback on one concept or another of natural kind.

We have, as a species, at least since that sunny day in August 1945,when the high-flying Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima,been faced in fairly stark terms with the fact that effects of our culturalefforts will be of such magnitude that they may not only affect our ownspecies nature but nature in general. In 1945 I was six and clearlyremember something of my father publicly speculating upon andextrapolating from the report on the BBC of the event having takenplace, in the days following the report, to members of the extendedfamily. In the weeks following the dropping of the atomic bombs, Ihave a clear recollection of something of that peculiar mixture oftriumph and awesome apprehensiveness in the family discussion as theimpression began to sink in that the bomb was a nature shaker. Sincethe event of Hiroshima we can list a whole number of our cultural

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efforts that threaten to make serious inroads of alteration into ourspecies nature. Consider the work of the Roslyn Institute, where Dollythe Sheep was cloned, which may have important repercussions on ourspecies nature. And recently we hear of the initial achievement incloning a human embryo in Massachusetts. In terms of our day-to-dayhandling of this area of argument, of culture versus nature in mattersof art practice, our embrace of the A-G model of the artistic subject isnot noted for being a particularly informed one. It, at least, ischaracterised by misinformation provided by a constant misuse of theconcepts of both nature and culture. Both versions of the A-G modelvary the emphasis of this misinformation accordingly as the argumentis set out at different times and within different practices. It then goeswithout saying, frequently with little regard for consistency ofapplication. The TP, as a kind of publicly exposed spectacle of theseerrors, celebrates, albeit unwittingly, this inconsistency too.

Summing up so far what is present at the event of the TP, one of thethings most on display is what is by now the tremendous weight oftradition, which, acting as a near involuntary reflex fuelling theembrace of the celebratory version of the A-G model of the artisticsubject, ensures the action of this version of the model lording it overthe other more critical version – to the point where the critical versionof the model is more or less invisible at the TP. The TP, whilst it is farfrom the only event but since it is the most media-exposed event, tendsto make of us all well-behaved consumers of what is by now theconvention of A-G behaviour. The spectacle of the event of the TP notonly congratulates and celebrates the artists on their alleged avant-gardism, as part of this it also celebrates itself as part of this avant-gardism. The TP is a kind of double celebration: in the ceremony ofcongratulating the artists it is congratulating itself for congratulatingthe artists, a festival of mutual congratulation. Not the leastconstituent of this heady mutually self-congratulatory exchange is thespectacle of the TP mistaking the celebratory version of the A-G modelof the artistic subject (the version it is an exemplification of) for thecritical version. The Turner Prize is a spectacular symptom of thecelebratory version of the A-G model of the artistic subject. In thisrespect it mistakes a symptom for a critique of that symptom. And thechances are that there will be no cure when there is no diagnosis. On awider front than just the TP, the language used throughout the artcommunities to construct and maintain the A-G model of the artisticsubject ceased long ago to be provisional. Accordingly, the language weuse in discussing and evaluating such events as the TP is not at allexperimental – it is a well-worn vocabulary using secure and familiarmeanings and, to underline this point, it is perhaps worth noting thatone of the words we use most habitually and unexperimentally in thisvocabulary is the word experimental itself. Admitting the ratherjaundiced and recalcitrant prism through which I view art events, andparticularly the freight of their discursive currency, there are few morewearisome events for me in the entire panoply of the relations ofdistribution of art than to view and to hear the likes of a Tate curatormouthing the celebratory version of the A-G model of the artisticsubject whilst taking it to be the critical version. Such curators have, toquote Rimbaud himself, ‘absolutely reliable memories’.

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For a long time, getting on for forty years, there have been very fewexperiments with the language through which we construct the A-Gmodel of the artistic subject. The fact that the celebratory version ofthis model enjoys such hegemony over the critical version is anendorsement of the language through which we maintain and addressthe concept of the A-G, having become frozen and stagnant, statuesquerather than grotesque. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, in respect ofthe A-G model of the artistic subject we have an interregnum, wherethe old cannot move out (we are addicted to the celebratory version ofthe A-G model of the artistic subject, to the extent that even theattempts to give it up become part of the spectacle) and the new cannotbe born. To again echo Gramsci, the problem consists precisely in thefact that the old is dying and the new cannot be fashioned: in thisinterregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears. The TP is themost noticeable of these morbid symptoms. The language the wider artcommunity uses in addressing the model seems now so irreparably self-congratulatory in tone that it ensures the serenely endless reproductionof the familiar template of some such as ‘being radical’ – I believe thehapless tabloid euphemism is something like ‘cutting edge’.

Not least of the instruments contributing since the late 1960s to thecentrifugal reproduction of and domination by the celebratory versionof the A-G model of the artistic subject has been the wide art schoolembrace of, what shall we call it: French Theory? This is a very literaryrendition of the notion of theory and, as such – Derridean subtletynotwithstanding – the sector has seemed singularly untroubled, andfurther at times it has seemed explicitly careless of trying to achieve anadequately theorised concept of theory. It is a literary tradition, and thephilosophers whom the sector has lionised belong to the tradition ofwhat Bertrand Russell termed ‘literary philosophers’. What I am herecalling French Theory has been the darling diet of what we might termthe cultural studies sector of the art school and art practices industry,a sector which so burgeoned throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and asyet shows little signs of abating. Its horizon contains no otherphilosophical candidates but literary ones. This too is one of whatGramsci called the variety of morbid symptoms. It seems to me that theinput of all this quasi-theorising has incited our art school communitiesto a frenzy of conformity of theoretical method and theological trance.The art practice cultural studies sector is spookily passive in its franticdoting on French Theory, which also significantly feeds its spookyaddiction to the notion of the celebratory version of the A-G model ofthe artistic subject, not least because it shows no signs of being awareof its addiction. The grandees of French Theory are nothing if not fansof the notion of the A-G. The twenty-year gush of French textual A-Gism has mistaken the celebration of A-Gism for A-Gism itself. Withregard to examples I think of, for example, Foucault’s remarks on thenotion of the artist as herald, Foucault on Goya and Van Gogh. Whenthe A-G becomes heraldic we ought to know that aristocratic hand-me-down livery is about. A more interesting, troublesome and personallycloser example can be found in Jean-François Lyotard’s introduction toa book of one of my closest friends and intellectual allies, JosephKosuth. The book is titled Art after Philosophy and After. Lyotard’swriting here is characteristic French celebratory theory celebrating the

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celebratory version of the A-G model of the artistic subject. If there areany future archaeologists of art who are sufficiently skewed to beinterested in comparing the arcane materials of the respective Kosuthand Atkinson practices, Lyotard’s hymn to Kosuth, which is a hymn towhat Lyotard considers to be the celebratory version of the A-G modelof the artistic subject, might be a good place to start. It is not so muchthat Lyotard is a fan of Kosuth as that he is a fan of the celebratoryversion of the A-G model of the artistic subject. And in this respect,from the view of my own personal exchange with what is now arelatively long and intimate historical scanning of and exchange withKosuth’s person and work, I would contend that Lyotard does Kosuth’swork something of a disservice. Kosuth, however, is quite able to takecare of himself and will, no doubt, defend Lyotard’s intervention. Ourfriendship can stand a lot more strain than ever our differences overLyotard could put on it. What I take Lyotard to exemplify in hisfanship of the celebratory version of the A-G model of the artisticsubject is, again, one of the great variety of Gramsci’s morbidsymptoms – a cultural practice gone morbid for lack of philosophicallogic and, consequently, epistemological and ontological subtlety.

Kosuth and I once toyed, facetiously, with jointly writing an articlesporting some such title as ‘Art Prizes We Have Never Won’. I guess itis obvious that the writing of it would have been tongue in cheek,although one then ought to further warn we had better distinguishwhich particular set of cheeks we might finish up having tongues in.Another title, more academic sounding, might have been ‘Prizes andthe Many Forms of Obsequiousness’. Last year, or maybe the yearbefore, I received a book that was a kind of magazine history of not somuch the Turner Prize as the work of the candidates. It was the firsttime I knew of the existence of the book. Nobody asked me toparticipate, and I suppose nobody in the celebratory wheels of theTurner Prize administration cared much whether I was asked or not. Ididn’t care much myself. But it is fact that I was not consulted on thebook in any way, shape or form, I was simply in it. Again I don’t caremuch; the book seems to me to be uninteresting. But it struck me as akind of parable of the Turner Prize’s iconic vanitas not to so muchcelebrate the corpses of the Turner Prize but to celebrate themagnanimity of the Turner Prize’s mention of the corpses. Again,Kosuth/Atkinson future joint productions in mind, I fleetingly thoughtof a booklet entitled ‘A Short History of Sour Grapes’. But, bad jokesaside, in proxy vengeance, and alas were it only possible and I hadaccess to Captain Kirk high tech, it would be sweet to get the TurnerPrize administration on the train from Charleville to Paris, in the samecarriage with the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud, in 1871, disordering hissenses. As Graham Robb points out:

At the Gare du Nord…. Two men in railway uniform asked him forhis ticket. He was taken to one side and searched: a suspicious littlefigure with long hair and grubby, but respectable clothes. He had anaccent that might be foreign. His pockets proved to containincomprehensible notes, written in lines of different length. Thestory that he was suspected of espionage may well be true. Reportswere coming in all the time of attempted coups and politicalagitators returning from abroad. Five days after Rimbaud’s arrest,

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Victor Hugo arrived at the same station, but with a first class ticketand a cheering crowd at the exit … [assuming they had to go to war-threatened Paris and were they to have a choice, my nominal TurnerPrize administration from 2001 would surely have preferred toarrive with Hugo, it would surely be more their celebratory avant-garde style – first class travel and cheering crowds] the ticketlessboy, who came from a region that was now in enemy hands [theFranco-Prussian war was in full swing in north western France],might be part of an avant-garde.1

Perhaps we can imagine that Madonna at the 2001 TP couldpresent the winner with the contents of Rimbaud’s pockets(photocopies of course), and in honour of the Avant-Garde The TurnerPrize from 2002 would be renamed the Rimbaud Ticket (photocopy ofcourse).

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1. Graham Robb, Rimbaud,Picador, 2000, p 46

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