Every loser wins

Keith Tyson

5 April 2012

Keith Tyson was always the bookies' favourite to win the Turner Prize. After all, his art looks like the real thing: there's sculpture, painting, a bit of movement and some mysterious rumblings from his computerised Thinker that give his work a sense of the profound. It's art about ideas, yet objects that you can walk around and contemplate with a meaningful gaze. If I were a bookie, I'd have gone for him, too.

But for me, the Turner this year has been a four-horse race. I'd have been happy with any of the finalists winning, and the result announced on Sunday was less significant than the short list. Every year the art world's winter season begins in earnest at the tail end of October with the opening of the Turner Prize show. It's the punch bag for everybody's grievances about all that's bad in modern art. But the Turner is maturing nicely. It was repackaged in 1991, after six years as a worthy lifetime achievement gong, and reborn as a prize for young artists before they hit midlife crisis. I can't think of another award that has quite the same impact on the public consciousness.

Significantly, it's often not the winner who stirs up most interest, but the also-rans. In the past we've suffered the furore around Tracey Emin's bed, which has become a byword for the Turner circus but even the insiders agree, it didn't come close to winning in 1999.

The following year Glenn Brown was accused of plagiarising a sci-fi painter. Then there was Damien Hirst not winning in 1992, followed by Damien Hirst winning in 1995. But victory might not guarantee fame and acclaim anyway: Grenville Davey won the year that Damien was pipped to the post and he has hardly exhibited since then.

This year we had the racy language in the Fiona Banner installation and some reports of air sickness by a handful of people watching one of Catherine Yass's films. Culture minister Kim Howells revealed that he knew a few rude words, too, applying them sweepingly to the show and, finally, Charles Saatchi chipped in a couple of slights against the foursome in favour of his own recent acquisitions.

He wanted to see the Chapman brothers included, but they were not exhibiting in the 12 months before the summer cut-off date, so the rules were against him. I would like to have seen Tim Noble and Sue Webster on the short list for their Milton Keynes show. But the omissions should alert us not to take the result too seriously. The Turner shouldn't be seen as a "best of show" medal, but rather as a testing of the turf.

This year's short list tells you all you need to know about the important trends. For some reason those who knock it are always talking about a type of conceptual work that keeps winning, but I don't see it. The short-listed four are artists working in very different ways, and who point to a sophistication and complexity in today's art scene rather than a monolithic agenda.

They're working in long traditions of practice. Certainly there are a lot of ideas floating around, but it's absurd to oversimplify the breadth of vision to "neo-conceptual". Perhaps Liam Gillick's work is closest to the legacy of minimalism and conceptualism, with its graphic neatness and prefabricated Perspex and aluminium sculptures. But he adds value; he moves the argument forward.

His work has a reputation for austerity and difficulty, but it's very simple really. Most recently he has been working on an investigation of how galleries present displays and make art available to their public.

If Fiona Banner, by virtue of using language as her primary material, is associated with conceptual art, that's only the start of things. She has understood the physicality and visuality of words in the gallery over the cerebral. It has taken art 30 years, since conceptualists first put words on a wall, to work this one out. And in a similar way, Catherine Yass is testing what film and photography can do. You can see the points of influence in the work - whether it is Jeff Wall's lightboxes or austere German photography - but she has loosened up the received ideas, allowing the pleasure of the aesthetic back into the frame.

Perhaps the mistake lies in our looking for the new New, and hoping that we'll find it at the Turner, in splendid isolation from the rest of art history. But the best works will never enjoy that separation, and must build upon traditions, if only to dismantle them.

The Turner Prize is the place where the public has a chance to see this happening, which is why the judges gave Keith Tyson the prize this year - he connects the dots.

His work draws in strands of every art practice: from drawing to painting to sculpting to hightech machinery. One work might not resemble another in form, but every work expands a larger idea. He has not been working through just one strand of art; he tackles the lot, simultaneously.

What is reassuring about Tyson's practice is that the work itself generates more ideas the more it tries to solves its own conundrums.

His paintings might be seen as the fruits of that one enlightened teacher we all had at school, who wasn't so much concerned that you got the right answer, as long as you showed your working out. The process is visible and invisible everywhere in this artist's work. There's that computer, too, constantly calculating the meaning of life, if only it could articulate it.

Perhaps, like the Turner race, Tyson's work is a game of chance. Before the announcement of the winner, Liam Gillick told me he had been deep in conversation with Tyson. Keith's a bit of a gambler apparently and Liam was in awe of his ability to back more than one horse at a time, calculating the odds and playing them off each other.