The Art World's Grand National

Whatever his reactions on taking over the Tate Gallery, Nicholas Serota must have viewed at least one of his legacies with alarm. From the first, the Turner Prize had proved unpopular with laymen and experts alike. In contrast, the Booker Prize had succeeded in persuading the British public to read novels again. What was the Booker doing that its art equivalent was not? One answer is that the Booker was successful in only one sense. It reminded readers that fiction existed at a time when triviality, conservatism and caution were back with a vengeance, Anita Brookner was in her heaven and all was right with the world. That might have been fine for the fiction readers of Britain but did not suit Serota. Despite the occasional lapse (like an exhibition of Howard Hodgkin, the painterly equivalent of Anita Brookner) it was not what his spell at the Whitechapel had been about. Admittedly, the Tate was a different kind of place; it was a museum, after all. But it had to become more popular. How could he make sure of this without compromising his own position?

As he sat and planned his next move, his most outspoken antagonist was probably doing the same. With the instinct of a born populariser, Peter Fuller had spent years turning himself into a version of his idol, F.R. Leavis. The same passion for debate was there. So was a refusal to indulge in close analysis. Far from being seen as failings, these tendencies were encouraged by his admirers, so confirmed in their cultural prejudices that they were often moved to participate. If hating current art was what art criticism was all about, then they could join in and demonstrated as much by keeping Modern Painters provided with reams of articulate philistinism. Seeing his chance, Fuller seized on the new conservatism and turned it to his own uses. Roger Scruton wrote for Modern Painters. So did nuns, royalty and Brian Sewell. And so did people he barely liked. The weak succumbed to Fuller because they envied his success. In return he abused them roundly. Those who did not or could not answer back came in for the worst treatment. And a main target for attack was the Tate Gallery in general and Serota's direction in particular. His next aim, Fuller boasted, would be to have Serota ousted from the Tate altogether. No one ever dared ask who would take over. Roy Strong? Maggie Hambling? Sister Wendy Beckett? Perhaps Fuller wasn't thinking that far ahead. Or perhaps he assumed that he would do the job himself.

With Fuller's premature death, the Turner Prize lost its most formidable enemy. Nevertheless some of his jibes might have hit home; Serota acknowledged that something should be done to alter the whole affair. But what? Unable to scrap it altogether, he decided to make running repairs. In an interview in Flash Art magazine he described his general priorities - renovation, fund-raising, better display, more interplay between the historic and modern collections, international surveys, 'engagement and dialogue with artists', guest curators for contemporary shows 'to encourage younger critics and curators to develop expertise' and a new approach to the Turner prize. 'I have insisted, against some opposition, on changing the format... It was a mistake to follow the literary Booker Prize format because art and artists work differently from writers... It is too wide a range - the public get confused..." Some of these aims have been fulfilled, others not. Two revisions to the Turner specifications made it clear that the event would centre on an exhibition. In future, galleries and critics would be ineligible for nomination. But would the judges ever have considered giving a prize to a gallery-owner or critic? If the awards are for art, neither should be preferred to artists, particularly now that conditions have deteriorated so rapidly.

Over the last few years British art education has been writhing in agony. Earlier this year a student in the sculpture department of the Royal College of Art was refused a degree because the staff said they didn't understand his work. Meanwhile in Brighton, students at the Polytechnic were occupying the Grand Parade site; because of the apparent bankruptcy of the Visual Arts department, all visiting staff had been informed that their contracts would not be renewed. At the same time visitors to the Central School of Art, now Central St. Martin's, were confronted with posters of a virulence which would have been unusual at the Sorbonne in 1968. The director, students explained, had voted himself a 17.5% pay rise and had celebrated by firing a high-ranking member of staff and replacing her with his mistress, who was not simply incompetent but terrified at the response her arrival had elicited. She worked behind locked doors, emerging only to use college toilets, where students daubed her name in excrement across the walls and in support the janitors had refused to clean it off. While the pottery department had no clay and the film department lacked any materials for film-making, the Director had given himself a present: a car with a uniformed chauffeur.

Meanwhile, in South London what might turn out to be the most successful British art education course of all time was destroyed. Kay Fido's dream was a Foundation course for unemployed people. The problem was money. When a young art student called Lina Garnade died, money left by her mother was used to set up a fund to help artists. This was put at Fido's disposal. She used it wisely. The first year or so were the most difficult; the course was run on a shoestring from whatever spaces the local council made available. The students made up for all the problems, banding together, lending each other money, sleeping on each others' floors when they were homeless. How they were interviewed was a mystery; some had so little work it would barely fit into a coat pocket. Others had no work at all. It scarcely mattered; Fido was looking for attitude, not ability. After two or three years, it was evident that her methods were paying off. The national average percentage of students transferring to B.A. courses from Foundation studies was below 50%. In its final years, the Lina Garnade course average was 100%. Not only that, but at the end of year exhibitions Fido proudly typed labels showing not only students' names but also the colleges which had accepted them: Chelsea, the Slade, Goldsmiths... only the best. Obviously, anyone as gifted as Kay Fido had to be stopped; she was making the others look bad. Finally, her course was taken away from her.

Stories like this are ten a penny. Gradually, as the recession set in, marketing became more important than product, quality was surrendered to a slick veneer and the functionaries took over. This was the Jocelyn Stevens era, the Estève-Coll period. And inevitably, art - the very look and feel of art - was affected. For these were also the Goldsmiths' College years, celebrated by this year's Turner Prize committee by two out of four nominations. 'Goldsmiths' is over. This year's B.A. exhibition, Liam Gillick and Andrew Renton's feeble book Technique Anglaise, the anticlimactic Broken English exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, and the desperate marketing of weak work by former graduates made sure of that. As a mythology and a support system it served a large number of London artists for a few years, bridging a gap between college and the outside world in an effective way: many were shown in galleries, sold work and survived. Of the two Goldsmiths artists chosen by the Turner committee, one represents a 'Goldsmiths' look and the other does not. (Ian Davenport is the the former, Fiona Rae the latter.) When people use 'Goldsmiths' as a descriptive term, they mean Lisa Milroy, not Claire Joy, Grenville Davey but not Mark Wallinger, Julian Opie but never David Leapman. Nicholas Logsdail picked up on it first, that mixture of impudence and awe with which Julian Opie approached Minimalist conventions. Opie's direct route from college to gallery inspired his Goldsmiths contemporaries. Later, Simon Linke and Grenville Davey would show at Lisson too - Davey with his subtle, faultless, nearly erotic approach to painted metal surfaces, Linke with the cheek (spelt C-H-I-C) of his painted Artforum ads. Linke's self-confessed Mastermind subject was and remains the artworld itself, as a business as well as a social phenomenon. His streetwise approach resurfaced in the operations of Damien Hirst, role model for a new phase of Goldsmiths wheeler-dealing. In 1989 he re-staged a B.A. degree exhibition, this time as public spectacle for gallery-owners, new fashion-conscious collectors who emulated the Saatchis and, incidentally, the general public. Hirst had worked at the d'Offay Gallery and not a moment of this apprenticeship had been wasted. With Freeze an entire graduating year acquired social cachet and critical drawing-power, their rough edges smoothed, but not too carefully. And though they might have reminded British viewers of things they had seen before, the air of déjà vu never became stifling. (How many British collectors had seen a Lynda Benglis or a Richard Serra splash piece?) Hirst's follow-up, Modern Medicine, took a clearer, more logical (and, cynics might add, more marketable) approach, while Gambler at Building One harped on neo-Op pattern recognition.

By this time the main outlines of the Goldsmiths approach had been sketched in. Clarity of expression was greatly prized and touch was either eradicated or emphasised. (In Ian Davenport's work, it was stressed and removed at the same time.) The issue highlighted was one of aesthetic distance, tested strenuously in the work of Mat Collishaw, whose chosen images have included an open wound and bound women from S&M magazines, but more frequently in bids for an increasingly ironic context. Goldsmiths was the new Cool School, where understatement served as plea for depth. Working in series, ambitious young graduates with a star-system mentality issued endless warnings about the evils of commodification. Goldsmiths art not only looked like art, it looked like art we had seen before, but made more precisely, as if straining to please. Intent on Minimalist afterthoughts and endgame thinking, this was not art about breaking rules; it was art that took its inspiration from previous art, made to be greeted with a knowing smile, like an gatecrasher who slips into a club unnoticed by the doorman. Conscious of its reputation for one type of work, the heads of Goldsmiths tried to break the mould. Jon Thompson hit out at the typecasting of the college in a degree catalogue, while recent staff changes on both the B.A. and M.A. courses are certain to alter the slant of the teaching. That the college seems to have willingly put itself into this state of transition suggests how much damage mistaken critical emphasis can do. In retrospect it is worth asking how much of the stability of the Goldsmiths 'look' depended on the continuing stability of the college itself, which, because of its permanent link with the University of London, remained untroubled at a time when other London colleges were fighting the idea of a Collegiate, and the potential loss of individuality.

Reputation is also what the Turner Prize is all about. Fuller used to see it as a pointless exercise, the hob-nobbing of a social clique based on misguided values, money made from 'internationalism' and the creation and protection of an overpriced, overweening mainstream avant-garde. But, to quote Mandy Rice-Davis, he would have said that, wouldn't he. After all, Fuller was dedicated to Britishness, Ruskinesque drawing, John Piper flower paintings and Stanley Spencer. The weakness of the Turner Prize does not lie in the kind of art it chooses to support. It is woven into the very fabric of the award itself. Aspects of it are fair. Anyone can nominate artists, as long as the artist in question is British and under 50. Those with most votes then go forward to be judged by a panel. This is where unfairness creeps in. The Turner Prize itself is £20,000, donated for the first time this year by Channel 4, who have agreed to sponsor the event for four years. The prize goes to the candidate who has made 'the largest contribution to British art' in the form of an 'exhibition or other presentation of work' during the twelve months up to June 30th. Anish Kapoor, for instance, would have been nominated on the strength of his 'Void Field', shown first at the Lisson Gallery, then again at the Venice Biennale, where he was a prizewinner. But while Kapoor could also have been nominated for his drawings exhibition at the Tate itself, none of the younger artists competing with him has his international reputation. Although each has shown abroad, the fact remains that while three of the four artists are to be considered on the basis of a solo exhibition London, a fourth is world famous. Nevertheless, no shortage of support for each candidate will be found for each candidate. Of the judges this year, Andrew Graham-Dixon praised Fiona Rae in The Independent, Maria Corral is rumoured to have bought 'Void Field' for the Reina Sofia Centre in Madrid. Norman Rosenthal wrote an essay for the catalogue of the Ian Davenport exhibition at the Waddington Gallery earlier this year, and so on... But how much of a proper competition is the Turner Prize? No member of 'the public' I have spoken to in the course of writing this essay has thought that Anish Kapoor wouldn't win. Let's hope the panel have no such foregone conclusions and consider the artists one by one.

In his System and Dialectics of Art, John Graham told the story of the ancient Japanese artist who made a landscape painting before the throne of the Emperor himself. As the entire court looked on, he unrolled a length of paper on the ground, dipped a live chicken in a pot of black paint and let the bird run from one end of the scroll to the other. In the twentieth century Max Ernst and David Siqueiros were only two of the painters to harness chance effects by means of dripped paint. Jackson Pollock, one of Siqueiros's assistants for a time, finally improved on it by using basters to ensure a continuous augmented paint flow. An entire generation profited from his experiments. Using a technique derived from Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis soaked canvas with paint by letting it run down sticks. More recently, young British painters have adopted similar techniques.

Ian Davenport's approach to this tradition is methodical and reductive. He releases paint at regular intervals along the edges of stretched canvases, which are then tilted so that signs of the hand are removed completely and the painting seems to have made itself, like a natural phenomenon. Yet 'natural' is hardly the word; they strike the viewer as impeccable artefacts, conscious of their own naïvete, their sophisticated take on an archetypal Modernist stratagem. The result varies from one set of works to another. Davenport began by taking paint from bottom to top, left to right. The habit of tilting canvas was developed later, after he had abandoned the idea of blowing paint across it by using fans. In February 1990 he began tilting canvases in two directions; down and across. The result was a complex mesh, with every part of the painting interrupting every other part, a fast, springy affair in comparison with his other one-directional pourings, statuesque presences which dwarf the viewer. Recently too Davenport has experimented with pouring gloss paint, matte paint and varnish onto canvas. A glance at the edges reveals the exact order of events.

Davenport remembers his first encounter with a Jasper Johns drawing of numerals. Its cunning simplicity and internal logic would be echoed in his own work. Johns had done nothing to conceal the decisions which produced the drawing. His young admirer would set a problem and reveal the solution at the same time. (Viewers baffled by the course of events that led to a Davenport painting can glance at the edges and use them as a key. 'Things work better for me when they're obvious,' he admits. As the eye moves away from those edges, however, layering becomes intricate and deceptive and predictable patterns vary or are lost. Sometimes counter-rhythms occur, as in works where paint has flowed from side to side as well as from top to bottom. Davenport can make simpler structures than this and generate the same degree of bafflement. Recent paintings have included two broad runs of paint, with the statuesque presence of standing-stones.

The significance of the 'drip' lay in its power to disguise intention by embracing accident while banishing the very idea of the accidental. What had been regarded as an Expressionist gesture could be learned, harnessed and even repeated. Reducing his moves to a minimum and banishing traditional indications of human touch, Davenport is experimenting within a tight historical framework. While Modernism is presented as inevitable, opulent, museum-bound and repeatable, it remains as mysterious and ungovernable as a force of nature, while remaining a cultural icon. Is Davenport a satirist? Or a deeply conservative figure? Or is he simply intent on demonstrating how painting - almost of its own volition - breaks free of any limitations placed on it?

'I don't want to make sculptures about form,' Anish Kapoor has said, 'but about belief, or about passion, about experience that is outside of material concern.' Though in the West, the prospect of sculpture that leaps beyond 'material concern' may seem vainglorious or delusory, traditional Indian aesthetics squares 'belief' with 'passion', even religious belief with sexual passion. Kapoor's early clusters of patently hollow, vividly coloured, floor-based forms showered with bright pigment seemed dazzling, evanescent and indefinite in outline. As they seduced the senses, they confused them, offering a bridge between states of reality. Throughout Kapoor's career this loss of bearings has been fundamental; the groups of powdered shapes; the complex, single forms whirling around an invisible centre like solidified choreography; a set of rocks hollowed out, allowing viewers to peer into a space which defied limits, all drew attention to places where vision and logic parted company.

Kapoor's sculpture celebrates the void, considered not as absence but as an invitation to presence. The vessel is regarded both as an unattainable interior space and a state of potentiality. And since the opportunity for art to arise becomes the centre of attention, the most obvious Western parallel is with Romanticism, where the subject of art is so frequently the state of inspiration (literally, a 'breathing into'). And as vision and the visionary are united in an act of heightened awareness, a further parallel is suggested: the monochrome tradition in Modernist painting, in which an impression of boundlessness and transcendence is achieved by severe restriction of means. Examine Kapoor's art from any direction and it will lead to the same set of connections, repeated differently each time, but all concentrated on suggestions of the possible coming into being of matter around a hollow centre and the change of awareness this may engender. Something may come of nothing after all, it seems. And, as if to emphasise that emergence, another thread of Kapoor's thinking connects the artist as producer to a mother; his 'Mother as a Mountain' and earlier, hollow, unashamedly sexual work, is recalled in a new sculpture, 'Mother as a Void'.

Approached head-on, there is nothing to see but a black circle with the slight suggestion of an edge; the area of darkness is large, far taller and wider than a person. Walking towards it, gazing into its centre, looking for a centre or indeed any sign of differentiation in the deep blackness, the viewer is overwhelmed. Suddenly it is too late to try to look from one side to another; the blackness stretches from edge to edge of one field of vision. Panic and fascination vie for dominance; no centre, no end to the blackness, is visible. Look at the edges and it is clear that this is no painting; the space really recedes - exactly how far it is impossible to tell - and the work resembles a vessel, lying on its side. To confront lack of image, lack of matter, is to be forced to re-evaluate one's own vision as a measure of truth, to be threatened by oblivion. Or, perhaps, it is to be encouraged to accustom oneself to that creative force, which is the twin of destruction.

In 1988 Rachel Whiteread chose an old wardrobe and filled it with plaster. Later, she broke the wardrobe off and covered the plaster with black felt. The resulting work, Closet, introduced a technique which, with variations, the artist continues to employ. Though Whiteread regards her work as a memory of enclosure and darkness, her method does not depend on autobiography or realism but rather on the differences between choosing, remembering and making - synonymous, in her mind, with acts of filling, emptying and reversal. Later, she cast a hot water-bottle and a space below a bed, calling it 'Shallow Breath'. Both were spaces with limited access, the former another common childhood hiding-place, the latter a myth of being born such as children themselves devise, but birth seen working to child's advantage as the mother's body is peeled off, then discarded like a useless husk. Melancholy, even a touch macabre, Whiteread's activities seem less contemporary than Victorian. After all, the Victorians lived in an age of sentimentality and violence, worship of childhood coupled with a lifelong death cult.

If Whiteread had chosen to apply her method more rigorously, the entire process might have taken a conceptual turn. But the decision to abide by serendipity represented an acknowledgement of the role played in her work by what Proust, borrowing from Bergson, called 'involuntary memory'. Interviewed in 1913, he explained that 'voluntary memory, which belongs above all to the intelligence and to the eyes, offers us only untruthful aspects of the past; but if an odour or taste, re-encountered in totally different circumstances, unexpectedly reawakens the past in us then we can sense how different this past was from what we thought we could remember, from what voluntary memory offered us...' Letting her mind play over the old and disregarded, the artist memorialises the humble and forgotten. Casts of tables produced something akin to prison structures, sometimes covered and completely sealed off by actual table parts. Then, using a technique for piecemeal casting, Whiteread turned her attention to bathtubs and parts of rooms. By now the process had changed; instead of producing negative spaces, the shapes chosen were such that they themselves would produce positives. Cast the underside of a cast-iron bath and the result is another bath. Working section by section, then assembling separate units produces something akin to a museum exhibit. A door turns out to look much like a door, but with extrusions reversed. Perhaps Whiteread's entire roofless room of 1990 was titled 'Ghost' not because the assembled moulds were lacking in substantiality but because the space exhibited really existed elsewhere, an elsewhere less imaginary than half-remembered. Whiteread triggers involuntary memory in herself and her viewers by bringing visual intricacy, physical reversal and psychological tergiversation into near alignment. Gently, patiently, the humble is exalted, confinement is relaxed, repression is uncloseted and the dead are allowed fitting burial. Their absence has been considered with such accuracy and humility that for a moment we realise we were wrong about the past, without knowing exactly why.

Each of the paintings Fiona Rae showed in Damien Hirst's Freeze exhibition contained rows of separate, smaller pictures, in hieroglyphic style with hints of skewed realism. Beyond a certain careless tidiness, no organisational principle prevailed; only a sense of wrongness connected the parts. Imagine a halo, then below it a rail draped with towels and you might be thinking of a single unit from one of these anthologies, except that the rail could be a waterfall, the marks could be made in styles that varied from hesitant sketching to apeshit abstraction and the colours ranged from Velasquez black to Mothercare pink. The entire business was so nervy, so liable to topple into inconsequentiality, that it seemed to parade its own misgivings. Who could have imagined that this maddening hotch-potch could lead anywhere? Fiona Rae could. And this was only the start. From now on the brakes were off.

Her studio is littered with books and reproductions: Crivelli, Schnabel, medieval heraldry, Polke, Uki-oe prints, Guston, Uccello, Disney, Ruscha, Picasso, Hundertwasser, Bosch, Marden... Marks, motifs, even entire passages from these crop up in Rae's paintings. She may begin by covering a large canvas with one or two matte colours of what she has called a '70s airport departure lounge' variety. Over this an entire gamut of marketing is paraded, from itchy charcoal strokes to multicoloured bands so thick and glutinous that six or seven brushes had to be nailed together to make them. Each carries its own tone and context which becomes part of the rickety totality. The result is more staged than natural; even a drip in one of Rae's paintings overacts like a precocious child while Rae, the Hollywood mother, shouts instructions from offstage. Its adventures make a picturesque journey of its own, not only from top to bottom, but sideways and upwards, back the way it came. Like every other mark, it is different from the others, with a separate case history and a recognisable context. The problem is that they are all so very different, like an orchestra of soloists or a class of naughty school-children. And the result is a gallimaufry, a goulash. Julian Schnabel's description of painting as 'a bouquet of mistakes' has never seemed so apt, except, of course, that in this case the mistakes cancel each other out.

Disjunction fascinates Rae; a clash of colours, strokes, speeds, directions and levels of seriousness. The result is like a party where nobody gets on. Some people deal with television by changing channels constantly. Like them, Rae shows that you can watch it all, despite a short attention span. The sense that this is still painting should provide some consolation. It does not. Instead, she begins as an identification game - 'Look! That's a Richter!' or 'This curve's from Baselitz!' and turns it inside out. Instead of recognising the edges, a way of locating whatever is at the centre, the viewer realises that the centre will not hold and only edges exist, that Rae's painting is all icing but no cake, and that any form it may be expected to take marks some uneasy visual compromise of the viewer's own. As in all Mannerist art, Rae's sophisticated procedures succeed so well that the sense of glut and procrastination they engender forces the viewer to confront quite different problems: of belief in general and our own willingness to avoid it.

Over the last ten years art has become a solidly middle-class activity. And, since privilege and poverty exist in inverse ration - the more serious the latter, the more obscene the former - 1991, a year of deep recession, sees the return of that annual obscenity, The Turner Prize, in which successful artists who do not need the money are awarded cash prizes. Last year the break in continuity provided Nicholas Serota with a chance to forget his role as the art world's answer to Leslie Crowther. No chance. Once more an institution with a reputation for doing almost nothing to help young artists in Britain gives them one more kick in the groin, continuing its policy of being completely out of touch with public feeling. (Wouldn't it be a better idea if the £20,000 prize were donated to a charity of the winner's choice?) To make matters worse, this year's race has only one horse. Three colts are pitted against a favourite who has recently shown at the Tate, and now, almost immediately afterwards, will be featured in another exhibition there. Perhaps he could use the prize money to hire part of the Tate for yet another exhibition. Tautologous, I'd say. And sad. It is to be hoped that the chorus of derision that greeted the last Turner Prize will be doubled and tripled this year. Art is not a competition. Artists are not in competition with each other, but with themselves and the past.