TATE BRITAIN, LONDON
ON MONDAY night, Mark Wallinger and his bear suit joined the ranks of Turner Prize alumni, alongside Damien Hirst's pickled animals, Martin Creed's light bulb and Simon Starling's ShedBoatShed. The 2007 show has decamped to T
ate Liverpool, but the others can all be seen at Tate Britain, which is housing a retrospective of the past 23 years.
The first thing that strikes the viewer about this hotch-potch of a show - other than the £11 ticket price - is the number of famous works that aren't here: Damien Hirst's dead shark; Tracey Emin's bed; Vong Phaophanit's Neon Rice Field; Jake & Dinos Chapman's rude blow-up dolls. That is because, although these works are part of the mythology of the Turner Prize, crucially, they didn't win.
By keeping its selection to winners only, and sometimes having to settle for less than iconic work, this show is thinner and duller than it should be. It was never going to tell the story of contemporary art in Britain in the past 23 years, but a wider choice from the shortlisted artists (thereby including Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Paula Rego, Tracey Emin and so on) would have made a richer picture.
Douglas Gordon's 24-hour Psycho isn't here either (it was considered when Gordon won in 1996, but wasn't in the Turner show). And Wallinger faces the same fate: it is widely accepted that he won this year's prize for State Britain, his meticulous reconstruction of Brian Haw's one-man anti-war protest, but it isn't in this year's Turner show in Liverpool, making that exhibition slightly irrelevant.
As retrospectives go, this is one of the oddest I've ever seen; a collection of works with absolutely nothing to say to one another. Nor have they been dignified by time - it's like being in a room full of toddlers fighting for attention. But then, fighting for attention is one of things that winning the Turner Prize is all about.
In this squabble of a show, the works that shout loudest fare best. Gilbert & George's enormous psychedelic photocollage Drunk With God is always going to command more attention than the two small Howard Hodgkin works, though that has more to do with volume than quality.
Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley benefit from having rooms of their own, as do the films by Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, though Jeremy Deller's thought-provoking film Memory Bucket, about George Bush's home town, is relegated to an alcove.
Damien Hirst's bisected cow and calf, Mother and Child Divided, is still a seminal work, grisly and compelling, and demanding a reaction - though it says something about its fragile longevity that this is a new version recently made by the Hirst studio after the original developed a leak. Rachel Whiteread's resin cast of a wooden floor has the rare combination of presence and subtlety. Creed's lightbulb is surely one of the most annoying works of recent times, particularly when you're trying to read the explanatory text and the light goes off every five seconds.
There is no doubt of the prize's impact. It has helped to drive conceptual art to the top of a strange new hierarchy of genres in this country. Trends which emerge here are picked up in the art schools: Douglas Gordon, the first artist to win for video work in 1996, spawned hundreds of sub-par film works, and the echoes of Wolfgang Tillmans, who won with photographs in 2000, are still cropping up in degree shows.
To this canon we now add Wallinger's bear, somewhere to the left of Gillian Wearing when it comes to long films with nothing much happening. It has a degree of persuasiveness, but I doubt we'll be talking about it in 20 years' time. That's the case for most of the works here, save Hirst's. It's strange, but lots of works all trying to be new and different from one another start to all look the same after a while.
The main story this exhibition tells is the history of the prize itself: the difficult early years; the media love affair; the glitz brought by Saatchi and Madonna; the rumours (did Chris Ofili really paint with elephant dung?); the controversies (the Chapman brothers deface Goya!); the characters (Grayson Perry in his pink frock). It's a story about how contemporary art in Britain has transformed in a generation. The prize, devised by Nicholas Serota and his Patrons of New Art, was created to boost its profile. This it has done beyond measure, whatever we think of the direction it has taken. From this point of the view, the real winner of the past 23 years is the prize itself.
• Until 6 January
