IS THERE LIFE AFT; ER THE DEAD COW?

The Turner Prize attracts attention like no other award. Last year, Damien Hirst's contributions made front-page news. But who will win in 1996? In an exclusive set of interviews, this year's contenders speak for themselves

Laast November, when Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize, Norman Tebbit felt compelled to comment in his column in the Sun. "Have they gone stark raving mad?" he opened. "The works of the `artist' are lumps of dead animals. There are thousands of young artists who didn't get a look in, presumably because their work was too attractive to sane people. Modern art experts never learn."

Around the same time, an apprentice expert called Fiona Darling-Glinski, who was studying History of Art at Leeds University, decided to interview the visitors to the Turner Prize exhibition for her thesis. For a week, she criss-crossed the tall Tate Gallery rooms containing Hirst's "offal" and the art of the other three nominees, proffering her questionnaires. It was not hard to find a pattern in the results: two-thirds of her subjects had never seen work by the four artists before; two-thirds had never attended a prior Turner exhibition; two-thirds were under 35. The Tate Gallery information office had copies printed.

Somewhere between this swell of metropolitan interest and Tebbit's nationally syndicated scorn sits the reputation of the Turner Prize - and, by fairly direct association, that of our modern art. The Turner Prize was set up "to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art"; faced with that debate, however, the Turner oscillates still between confidence and insecurity. This year, the exhibition of nominees' work will be larger, and run for three times longer than before; there will be an accompanying lecture course for Art A-level students; possibly even a pop star to jolly up the final judging on live television. Yet when one of the nominees suggested that he and the other three form a panel to discuss their art and ideas before a public audience, the Tate Gallery said no: the artists would be further "traumatised" by the attention.

Then again, when the Turner began in 1984 - another era for contemporary art altogether - such dilemmas about publicity were the stuff of dreams for the Prize's founders. Modern art was neither glamorous nor popular when an anonymous "Patron of New Art" offered the Tate pounds 10,000 in annual prize money to choose the best living British artist. Judges were appointed, nominations collected from critics and curators, a shortlist published, a winner announced - and immediately the limits of the opportunity became clear. The artists chosen were uniformly senior (the winner Malcolm Morley was 53) and, more damagingly, predictable (like Gilbert & George, nominated twice in the first three years). For the Turner's intended public - potential rather than actual gallery-goers - there seemed little to wake up to.

For the rest of the decade the competition edged along as a kind of long- service award. Hodgkin's turn to win came in 1985; Gilbert & George's the year after. In 1988, while Hirst and his fellow Goldsmiths' College prodigies were filling a Docklands warehouse with three shows called "Freeze" - precisely the new British art the Turner had failed to find - the judges decided not to publish a shortlist. In 1989 there was a competition, but no exhibition for the nominees; the next year, no competition at all. Just as it was about to boom, British contemporary art did not officially exist.

Finally, in 1991, the Turner Prize found its sustaining fuel: youth. A relaunch doubled the money awarded, cut the shortlist to four to avoid no-hopers, and brought in Channel 4 as sponsors; but, most importantly, it set a maximum age of 50 for entrants. A signal was sent, and acknowledged: suddenly, the nominees were children of the Sixties, not the Forties. They filled up houses with concrete, sent cameras up their own orifices, and tickled the tabloid news-desks. Taxi drivers learnt to talk a good Turner.

These days, the Tate Gallery does too. "The Turner Prize has settled down," says Dr Virginia Button, curator of its exhibition since 1993, with the well-modulated calm of a Head Girl who has pacified her unruly juniors. One moment, she delicately dismisses "tabloid reaction" and the overheated claims for British art ("We do try to keep a little distant from what might be just fashionable"); the next, she discreetly welcomes them: "A competitive edge does encourage people to become more actively engaged. They think, `Do I like this one more than the other? Why do I?' "

Button needs her calm. As well as rude newspapers, the Turner Prize has its internal frictions to deal with. Nominees chosen for their bracing irreverence do not always behave as a grand body like the Tate Gallery might hope. During the filming of the official documentary for 1996, Gary Hume refused to say anything on camera about his glossily opaque paintings. Douglas Gordon sent the Gallery a proposal to show The Exorcist, a horror film about satanic possession, and to scatter his darkened exhibition room with beanbags for the audience. The Tate said no to both: the film for its 18 certificate, the beanbags for their potential to "trip up" visitors. As one of the nominees puts it, "The Tate is almost like a coagulation of the restrictions you get in a gallery."

And for all its deft publicity, critics often regard the Turner Prize as provocative of little more than debate about the Turner Prize. This year, with four male artists chosen, none of them producing art translatable into cartoons or soundbites, the broadsheets have discussed their gender profile and not much else. Without an obvious controversy, the tabloids have given the competition no coverage at all.

But if the Turner Prize remains adolescent - always seeking attention and not always getting it, less fresh and iconoclastic than it imagines - it is not something to dismiss. Its contradictions come from the efforts of a national institution like the Tate to engage with and popularise the clever cultural experiments going on in the ramshackle laboratory of modern Britain. Inclusive enough to choose, this year, both a 29-year- old conceptualist with a fondness for rewriting the Periodic Table (Simon Patterson) and a 46-year-old social-realist photographer of the most melancholy precision (Craigie Horsfield), the Turner introduces many people to often resonant art. At times in recent years, Button casually mentions, the exhibition has got so full that the Tate Gallery has had to shut its doors.

! The Turner Prize exhibition: Tate, SW1 (0171 887 8000), Tues to 12 January. The Prize is announced on 28 November. Latest odds according to William Hill: Hume 6-4; Patterson 7-4; Horsfield 7-2; Gordon 4-1.

SIMON PATTERSON

Simon Patterson is the most nervous nominee. He is slight and pale and 29, with the squared-off hair of someone much younger, and he tries never to look at me. Through the afternoon, he fiddles with the heaters in his studio, jumps up when the phone rings in the cold corridor outside, and makes jittery cups of coffee, wobbling a plastic filter from a lost coffee machine. He just manages not to spill any.

Some young artists talk like car salesmen, plugging their under-funded schemes with speedy street chatter. Patterson, though a conceptual artist - usually the loudest kind - does not bother to play the geezer: he comes from Leatherhead, his father manages pensions, and his voice shows it. He is also winningly capable of self-mockery. "I'll spend hours on something," he says, "And then realise, `I've just stepped on that...' Complete Frank Spencer."

But Patterson is more worldly than this. He uses first names for other artists; he knows Gary Hume, and has collaborated with Douglas Gordon. And while he looks at the floor, his half-mutterings have all the clever tics of a Goldsmiths' man. He frequently mentions "slightly sending up" other works, and ideas about works, and shows famous only among artists; at one point, quite casually, this professional filler of galleries says, "The idea of bringing more objects into the world is a strange thing."

Patterson's first objects were minimal to the point of arrogance: pairs of words in generic type, printed and mounted. Richard Burton Elizabeth Taylor (1987) was typical, nothing more than the title and its resonances in the mind of the viewer - conceptualism so pure, or so coldly hermetic, that it made no visual effort beyond presenting an idea as text. "It was very precocious," Patterson admits. "It looks like work an artist has finally arrived at - so distilled."

At Goldsmiths', such young certainty was the point. "I remember going to see `New York Art Now' at Saatchi's and thinking, `This lot aren't that much older than us and they're doing pretty well.` " Patterson had his first solo exhibition at 22. Like Hume, he showed his work with Hirst at "Freeze", and extended his initial idea like a brand name. Some of his name pieces were riskily suggestive, like Andreas Baader Ulrike Meinhof (1989); others lengthened into vertical lists of politicians and pop stars, authors and artists; all said a little about modern fame and memory, and a lot about Patterson's confidence that others would find intrigue in the contents of his head.

They have. Patterson's success is there in the size of his studio, a barn among other artists' hutches in a Bethnal Green warehouse. He has new window frames to block out the east-London winter; theirs rattle when the wind turns. "A coachload of collectors came round," he says, then sterilises the story with modesty: "I don't know why I agreed. I had to fumigate the room afterwards."

His lists of names, however, have not sustained attention on their own. Patterson had to expand his range, reluctantly - "I try to avoid the handmade as much as possible. It's very boring for me" - into more tangible objects. His work abruptly became more interesting. Redrawing the Periodic Table and the London Underground map, with his usual galaxy of celebrities replacing elements and stations, he made elegant fun of our reliance on artificial systems to order the world (and of his struggles to understand those systems). More recently, he began stringing his words around well-made installations: ...words fly up... (1996) hung bold-coloured box kites from a ceiling, with the names of kite-flying scientists arranged beneath. Friskily, it suggested that science was about fun, not grinding in the lab.

Patterson reads about current affairs and science on Tube journeys from Kilburn to the studio. There is something of the boffin about him, pondering whether to leave Britain off a piece about the UN to reflect our "decline on the Security Council". But there is a daring too: "You want to do something where people almost say, `Is that all there is?' Your work is on the edge of not being art." As his caffeine levels build, Patterson hazards the occasional eye contact. For all his nerves, he has not expressed much doubt about his work. Who does he think will win the Turner Prize? He answers straight out: "Obviously I think I'm the best of the lot. Everybody secretly thinks that."

DOUGLAS GORDON

London looms over the Turner Prize. Three of the nominees work there and even Douglas Gordon, who prefers Glasgow (fewer "arseholes"), studied at the Slade between 1988 and 1990. It was not, however, a happy time. Marooned in Crouch End in north London, barely able to buy a Travelcard - other students were "being dropped off in chauffeur-driven cars" - Gordon missed the rising tide of new art. "I was pickling innards of cows in jars," he says. "Just playing around. My tutor Tim Head said, `Do you know this guy Damien?' I said: `No.' He said, `You should meet him.' We were going to go for a drink, but it never happened..."

Gordon went back to Glasgow instead and made his name there, half a decade later. The work that probably did it was called 24-Hour Psycho (1993). This slowed down Hitchcock's film and showed it, in darkened galleries, as a day-long labyrinth of even greater depth and viciousness. Gordon wanted "to reveal the unconscious of the film"; to this end, he made each of the murders last half an hour.

When I arrive at his flat, he is in the shower. He steps out in a towel, thickset and tattooed, points me to the living-room, and steps back in for another 10 minutes. Serge Gainsbourg is duetting with Brigitte Bardot on the stereo; all around, as the echoing strum of "Bonnie and Clyde" fills the living-room, is the raw material of Gordon's conceptual repertoire: piles of videos, books by Bataille and Debord, an electric guitar, a poster for Antonioni's Blow-Up, hung upside-down.

Gordon, who is just 30, thinks his art "has a place in the academy, but is coming from the bedroom culture of teenage boys". When he reappears, he is wearing white jeans and a pair of the fattest green trainers. It is raining grey Glasgow sheets outside; he pulls on a hooded hip-hop top, and we bounce down the hill towards the city centre, past Mackintosh's astonishing fortress of an art school, where Gordon was taught and now teaches, and into the clatter and hiss of a basement Italian restaurant.

The Glasgow School of Art has been much more of an influence on Gordon than the Slade. In the environmental-art department he learnt that art could be "50 per cent context - the art could be based on the environment it's shown in". Accepting this notion, any form of expression could, at times, be "appropriate". Thus Gordon has made art out of freeze-framed pornography, prank calls to customers in a bar in Rome, anonymous letters to other artists stating, "I am aware of who you are and what you do", even footage of himself lying down with headphones on, singing along to Lou Reed.

At first, this strategy sounds little different from that of Simon Patterson and the legions of other Goldsmiths'-influenced conceptualists shy of a pencil or brush. And Gordon is interested in similar ideas. Black and White (Babylon), a new work he is currently showing at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, is simply a jerkily slowed playback, on two screens with one upside-down, of footage shot of a stripper at a Sixties stag party. Its suggestions about voyeurism and ritual in the sex industry are strongly made, but hardly new.

Yet Gordon's approach is less self-conscious than that of his London counterparts. His version of Psycho, for example, came from childhood: "When I couldn't sleep, I used to get into bed with my parents and watch TV with them. So I'd see all these adult things." Later, he chose to use the film for its "status" and "currency" - unashamedly old-fashioned and populist criteria in contemporary art, where arcane reference is sometimes all. "Film has been the common denominator for our generation," he says. "People will watch a film."

Gordon's work is stealthy. His ideas often sound banal, but what they give rise to can be intriguing. Over several weeks, his bar pranks in Rome created a subtle, living work of art: some customers knew what was going on, and some did not; of the former, some gave the game away and some kept quiet; quite quickly, a hierarchy based on temperament and attitudes began to crystallise. His letter-writing had the same quality: "By the time you've read it and you've realised it's art, it's already in there," he says, with a little smile.

His background may have something to do with this. At school in Glasgow, "If you said you were an artist you'd probably have the shit beaten out of you," he says. He doesn't seem to be making it up. When Gordon found his flat, none of his family knew how he could go about buying property.

Yet despite his rough credentials, and his straight talk, and his laddish admissions about "red-wine nights" at private views, the substance of much of Gordon's art can be questioned. Has he added enough to Psycho to call it his own? "I'm not claiming authorship," he says quickly. "I'm just making a re-presentation of it." A better reply might be in the making, however. Gordon plans to slow down The Searchers as well, but this time so that it lasts five years, exactly as long as the plot in the western. His version will change so glacially that each still frame will last a day. He wants to show the film, moreover, exactly where it was shot: vast beside some highway in the American desert.

GARY HUME

GARY HUME is the sceptic's idea of a Turner Prize artist. He is also favourite. "People say my drawing is terrible," he says, eyes blearily elsewhere, quite early in our interview, "but it's the best I can do." His bottom lip puffs out: "And I think that's quite right."

Hume, who is 34, lives and paints in an old council workshop on Hoxton Square, a once-industrial huddle of plate glass and plane trees used now by fashion magazines to sell modern London. Half the workshop is a cavern of hip kitsch: jewel-studded fruit on the table, a home-made chandelier above, show tunes flouncing from a stereo beyond the long pink curl of the sofa. In the other half, Hume has made his name doing paintings of doors. They started in 1987, not as some DIY installation, but as sheeny life-size representations, built up with layer upon clotting layer of emulsion. He had seen an advert for Bupa, a drab picture of an NHS waiting- room, and, in the background, a pair of "elegant, modernist" swing doors. He went to Bart's, found the doors, measured them down to the diameter of their kick plates, painted several copies, and soon Charles Saatchi came round with his cheque book.

Further explanation does not easily emerge. "They're just paintings," says Hume, who is stubbly and red-faced and keen to get this over with. "It's wet stuff on the end of a stick with my hand attached." His voice is flat and slow, almost baby- talking. "I try to make a beautiful redemptive thing."

The idea of the doors was partly melancholy. On their way to the operating theatre, these were the last ones some people would ever see. More affecting, though, was the sheer weight of paint, of crude domestic colours and shapes precisely slicked on and sanded - for a time, Hume worked under mosquito nets to prevent curious insects spoiling the surface - until they suggested some kind of B&Q Mondrian.

By 1993 Hume was bored of doors. A single sharp notion, finely produced and marketed, had borne him upwards from Kent to Goldsmiths' to the Docklands with Hirst and, soon after, Karsten Schubert Contemporary Art, a voguish London gallery. But he wanted to do more than straight lines. So he made an odd short film called Me As King Cnut, mocking his reputation and his followers from an old bathtub. Then he tried new shapes in his pictures: bulging silhouettes of athletes copied from a Fascist stadium in Rome, wrapping-paper flowers, a squidgy teddy bear with one eye huge and malign.

"No one liked my paintings," says Hume, sounding more genuine. Karsten Schubert dropped him: "Everything was grinding to a halt." His past life reasserted itself: "I had to go back from galleries and restaurants, back to my mates and caffs." Another good idea turned the blokishness back to cockiness. Searching for an omen, Hume looked for four-leaf clovers in the lawns of a council estate just off the Square. There weren't any, so he painted a three-leaf. As he was rounding it out, he noticed that its edge exactly matched Tony Blackburn's hairline. Hume's magazine browsing has yielded celebrities ever since: Patsy Kensit (1994), pink and cutely disposable as a Warhol, and Kate (1996), Moss the supermodel burnished back to stylised anonymity.

Like a lot of Goldsmiths' artists, Hume draws on the world, man-made and natural, with a knowing naivete. Recently, he has been painting sickly rabbits. Asked why, he says: "I'm not quite sure what the symbolism of the rabbit is, and that's why I'm happy to use it." Then he stares back across the table.

But under the glibness - "All you get from me is surface" is a favourite line - the odd darker outline shows through. "I have melancholy in my paintings because I have it in myself," says Hume. He mutters about a doomy medical documentary he's seen; his huge sad rabbits line the studio walls around him. Then he remembers his next appointment.

CRAIGIE HORSFIELD

THE OUTSIDER in all this is satisfyingly contrary. Craigie Horsfield is 46, has silvery swept-back hair, and opens the interview with a story about someone he knew in Poland who went to South Africa, fell in with white supremacists, and murdered the youth leader of the African National Congress. Then Horsfield half-smiles and half-frowns, as if in awe at the complexity and chaos of the world, and launches into a 15-minute discussion of the nature of history.

Horsfield is a photographer of reality whom George Orwell might have understood. At a dark table in Patisserie Valerie in Soho, darker panelling all around him, moulding the air with his hands and talking in urgent, educated tones, Horsfield could be a central-European intellectual, afire with the issues of the day over his morning croissants and coffee in some Warsaw cafe. "The post-Enlightenment idea that human beings were perfectable," he says, hunched in his olive jacket, workshirt buttoned right to the top without a tie, "... the idea of Progress. It's very difficult to argue for right now." Goldsmiths' seems very far away.

For a substantial part of his life, Horsfield really was a kind of European intellectual. In 1968, aged 18, he visited a turbulent Germany and had a political epiphany that would mark his art: in the West, he realised, "The Left and the Establishment were inextricably tied to one another." Studying at St Martin's back in London, he was equally impatient with what he saw as the compromises of traditional creativity: "The language ... is corrupt. It cannot be the container of absolute truth." To seek this "truth", he took his cameras and went to live out his socialist convictions in Poland.

He stayed from 1972 to 1979. He taught graphics; more importantly, among the tram stops and dim, stuffy rooms of Krakow, he slowly honed a photographic style of gloomy grandeur. His subjects were people close to him, struggling on in the winter dark with a low-key sort of heroism. Horsfield's method was to photograph them and then wait - for a decade, perhaps longer - before developing the prints. The precise dates of both operations were added to the finished work: his picture of the late-night dancefloor at Klub Pod Jaszczvrami in Krakow, for example, fixed its heaving panorama of joyous couples and melancholy singles as "Feb 1976 - 1991". But far from fossilising history, Horsfield wanted to make it alive. "We have no access to the past unless we can see it in the present," he says, brow furrows deepening. "The only way we're going to conceive the world continuing is if we rethink the world."

Weighted by such concerns, Horsfield did not actually exhibit any of his photographs in Poland - and not anywhere, in fact, until 1988, when his intensity caught critical attention at a group show at the ICA in London. His first decade back in England had been tough beyond even most artists' expectations: he had lived with his Polish wife on the streets for a time, in a hostel for the destitute, and finally in a crime-cowed tower block in Hackney. All this time he worked quietly on, finding little difference between the derelict spaces and dying factories of east London and those of eastern Europe. His most potent picture took another subject, but said the same: a lone rhinoceros, printed close to actual size, stood trapped in its cage, enduring the world.

Horsfield's own stoicism is easy to call monotone - especially next to his cheeky young Turner competitors. But there is a pride and beauty in his pictures, and Horsfield in person is far from sombre. He scorns the "noise" around contemporary British art with something approaching glee: "I saw a show of mine advertised in Frieze [a fashionable art monthly] that I had never heard of, and they'd misspelled my name as Horsfeldt." He laughs: "It was in Nice. It was a show of British art. I would never be in a show of British art on principle. I've worked outside that ... It's about form, materials, not ideology."

Now that he is about to be in a show of British art, he still lives in Hackney, but in a comfortable house beside a common where autumn sun gilds his neighbours' roses; there isn't much graffiti, or any barbed wire. While his work remains stern, Horsfield offers and seeks art gossip with the giggling appetite of a West End dealer. Unprompted, he offers odds, based around calculations of international gallery politics, on all the other Turner nominees.

Then again, even in Poland he had his other side: he also worked as a DJ. What did he play? Horsfield's smile finally overcomes his frown; he rushes off into raptures about James Brown and Funkadelic and talking between the records, after midnight, to a hot hall of stoned Poles. He digresses again, about hip-hop and techno, surer of the territory than he ought to be. Lunchtime speeds by in the bright street outside. Then he stops: "...God. Imagine being an artist, if that's the whole story." !