Head Turners of British Art

It has been best known for giving generous prizes to artists for suspending cows in formaldehyde, using elephant dung in paintings, and simply flipping off the lights. But the Turner Prize has come a long way in its 24-year journey, and has cast its attention-grabbing net far beyond elite art circles to snare headlines in newspapers and even tabloids over its controversial winners. This is mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse.

The see-saw of Turner Prize criticism goes from being overly elitist to overly popularist and back again on a regular basis. Even prize-winner Anish Kapoor once referred to the competition as “a bit of crap.” But the award—and the media surrounding it—has not only done a great deal to make the public care about contemporary art and bring them into the galleries, it has helped shape the character of British contemporary art.

Thus, if you're looking for an escape from the encroaching heat rather than into it, you have until July 13 to head into the Mori Art Museum as they host “History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize.” This show ran its course at London's Tate Gallery until January of this year, and has now made its way to Tokyo. It includes works by every winner of the prize since its inception in 1984.

The show runs in a vaguely chronological manner, opening conservatively with an introduction to the award's namesake, J.M.W. Turner. But turn the corner, and you are soon faced with the ominous Terris Novalis, two enormous and somewhat atypical sculptures by Tony Cragg, and the real nature of the Turner Prize begins to appear.

The truth is that this exhibition is more of a “best of” than a retrospective, since only the winners are on parade. There is nothing of the many short-listed artists that enlivened the debate and gave the winners a run for their prize money. However, on the plus side, the pared-down approach leaves plenty of room to view each work in a nice, wide breathing space.

One of the Prize's most infamous works is Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided—the now-infamous sculpture involving a cow and calf, each bisected and suspended in formaldehyde. For reasons unknown, the museum has forbidden visitors to walk through the center of the work—an aspect that I always understood to be integral to it. But the piece still gives rise to a symphony of squeals and gasps from unsuspecting punters.

If you have a beef with Hirst's cows, Martin Creed's Lights Going On and Off, which consists of an empty room with the lights turning on and off at five-second intervals, is one of the award's too-clever-by-half works. Creed plays with viewers expectations of space and objects in his work. And amusingly, any number of museum patrons will walk right through the installation, only to stop with surprise as the lights turn off (or on) mid-stride. Naturally that isn?t the point, but it?s definitely an amusing side-effect.

But there are plenty of more formal sculptures, paintings and video works, including Anish Kapoor's mesmerizing sculpture Void No. 3, and Gillian Wearing's film-portrait Sixty Minute Silence. Conspicuously absent from the Tokyo incarnation of the show is Simon Starling's much-discussed Shedboatshed—a boathouse he turned into a boat, sailed up a river, and then converted back again. But in its stead, we get One Ton II, a photographic work taking up less floor space, but with as much, if not more, conceptual impact.

These are the rock stars of contemporary art: some grateful, some reluctant, many controversial, and all heavily discussed. Love them or hate them, this is the once chance you get to see them all in the same place.

History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize (to Jun. 13) Mori Art Museum. Roppongi Metro Station. ¥1,200. 10 a.m.–10 p.m. (Tue. until 5 p.m.) Tel. 03-5777-8600. www.mori.art.museum