K Foundation art award
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The 1994 K Foundation award was an award given by the K Foundation to the worst artist of the year. The award, worth £40,000 was presented to Rachel Whiteread on the evening of November 23rd outside the Tate Gallery in London. Ms Whiteread had just accepted the £20,000 1993 Turner Prize award for best British Contemporary artist inside the gallery. Prior to presenting their award, the K Foundation held a private exhibit of a collection of art works entitled Money - A Major Body of Cash. The award, the exhibition and the accompanying extravagant press junket were widely reported by the media.
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Background to the award
In June 1993 the K Foundation began taking out full page national press adverts (both in the magazine supplements of the quality broad sheets and in the tabloid press). At first they were cryptic referring to "K Time" and advising readers to "Kick out the clocks". The writing style was familiar to KLF fans who refer to this style as Drummondesque. They mentioned five year journeys which included pop success and deep space travel and that "the sands of time are running in". There was also an advert for their single K Sera Sera which was "Available nowhere ... no formats" and which was not planned for release until world peace was established.
There was a change of direction with fourth advert which appeared on August 14th, reading: "ABANDON ALL ART NOW. Major rethink in progress. Await further announcements." The next ad (28th Aug) read: "It has come to our attention that you did not abandon all art now. Further direct action is thus necessary. The K Foundation announce the 'mutha of all awards', the 1994 K Foundation award for the worst artist of the year. It then went on to detail how a shortlist of four artists had been chosen, and that they would be exhibited in the Tate Gallery.
The first newspaper piece about the K Foundation appeared the following Monday, correctly pointing out that the shortlist and exhibition were actually for the 1993 Turner Prize, the controversial annual award given by the UK art establishment to the best young contemporary artist, which came with a prize of £20000, but incorrectly assuming that the K Foundation prize was a hoax.
The next advert invited the general public to vote for the worst artist, either by going to the exhibition and using their critical faculties or by letting their inherent prejudices come to the fore. The final advert summarised the whole campaign, asked some questions back to the people that had written to them, and explained that the winner of the K Foundation award would be announced in a TV advert during the live Turner prize coverage on Channel 4.
Channel Four coverage and adverts
Rachel Whiteread was contacted by the K Foundation and informed that she had won the £40000 prize. She refused to allow her name to be used in the TV adverts. The three TV adverts apparently cost exactly £20000 pounds - since Channel 4 funded the Turner prize, the K Foundation were in effect paying for both awards. These adverts explained that the K Foundation were currently "ammending the history of art" at a secret location.
No mention of the alternative award was made in the post Turner Prize studio discussion - which K Foundation supporters refer to as cowardly and confirming all the points about the modern art establishment that the K Foundation were trying to make. However, in the Turner Prize ceremony itself, Lord Palumbo, head of the Arts Council referred to critics of the Turner Prize as a "conferacy of dunces". K Foundation supporters point out that this shows that Palumbo didn't understand the nature of the K Foundation's critique. While most critics of the Turner Prize (and contemporary art) do indeed say things like "it is not real art", the K Foundation's criticism was completely different. The K Foundation do appreciate avant garde art, it is just that they believed the Turner Prize to be corrupt and establishment.
The Amending of Art History
25 witnesses (art critics, journalists, music industry figures, artists etc., there were 15 more people present: I presume they were photographers and video crews) were invited to participate and driven in a convoy of white limos (lead by a gold limo) to a service station where they were handed a press release and £1650 in crisp new £50 notes. The accompanying press release stated that 25 x £1600 collectively made up the £40000 K Foundation prize, and that the extra £50 was for the witness to verify its authenticity by spending it. The witnesses were dressed in fluorescent orange hard hats and safety jackets, and large quantities of champagne were drunk.
Eventually the convoy reached a field patrolled by two orange-painted K Foundation Saracen armoured cars, driven by Bill Drummond and Jimi Cauty, broadcasting K Cera Cera and ABBA's "Money Money Money". Silver bearded Mr Ball, the compere with a megaphone directed the witnesses to nail their wad of money to a board inside a gilt frame, to assemble the K Foundation's prize. Some of the witnesses pocketed all or some of their wad, and the prize money was £8600 short, which the K Foundation had to make up. Mr Ball also directed the witnesses to "view the art": A Million pounds in £50 note wads, nailed to a large framed board. The K Foundation's first art work, Nailed To A Wall.
All the witnesses were visibly impressed by this sight. When an artist complained that it wasn't a work of art, as it wasn't signed, Mr Ball deadpanned "I think you'll find that every note is signed sir". The witnesses were made to hand over a 10 pound note as payment for an art catalogue. Half of each note was returned to the witness. The reserve price of the works has been set at half the face value of the cash involved. Nailed To The Wall - face value a million - is up for sale at £500,000. The catalogue states: "Over the years the face value will be eroded by inflation, while the artistic value will rise and rise. The precise point at which the artistic value will overtake the face value is unknown. Deconstruct the work now and you double your money. Hang it on a wall and watch the face value erode, the market value fluctuate, and the artistic value soar. The choice is yours." The point is simple: art as a speculative currency, and vice-versa. To put it more bluntly: Art equals Money, and Money equals Art.
The motorcade left the site of the amending of art-history and headed back to London, where on the steps of the Tate, Rachel Whiteread was due to be handed the prize money. When she refused to accept the money, the K Foundation explained that it would be burnt. With the crowd of now very drunk witnesses looking on hoping the money would be burnt, a masked K Foundation operative (Gimpo) fumbled with matches and lighter fluid. At the last moment Rachel Whiteread emerged from the Tate and accepted the money, stating that she would give it as grants to needy artists.
Media Reaction
A huge amount of press publicity ensued, with all the major newspapers and press organisations reporting that Whiteread had won both awards. The K Foundation's publicist, Mick Houghton, revealed that the voting for the K Foundation's award was supposed to produce a tie, to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Turner award committee, but that strangely the result had been a huge margin of victory for Whiteread. He speculated that the few thousand voters had just liked or rather disliked the sound of her name.
In the week that followed the K Foundation returned the million to the Bank of England, but pierced with nail-holes, the money was unusable and the Bank fined the K Foundation 9000 pounds for damaging money and charged them 500 quid to print a new million. Many of the people quoted in the huge amount of publicity that followed expressed the opinion that the K Foundation had 'wasted' the money by spending it on advertising. Or that the joke was on the K Foundation as they had lost all this money. Imagine the outrage if they had burnt the money!
In March 1997, Drummond explained thus: "Most of the people who wrote about what we did, and the TV programme that was made about it, made a mistake. I was only able to articulate it to myself afterwards with hindsight. They thought we were using our money to make a statement about art, and really what we were doing was using our art to make a statement about money. Having arrived at that formula, I'm probably manipulating everything we did to fit into the theory, but we were just getting up in the morning and getting on the phone with each other and saying, fucking hell! So at some points we thought we were attacking the art establishment then we were saying, no that's not what this is about."