A study in minimalism: How the Turner prize came to Glasgow

We meet upstairs at Glasgow’s Tramway, on Sarah Munro’s last day as director of the gallery. She’s not even halfway through the exhibition for the most prestigious arts prize in the land, the Turner, but she’s landed a job at the Baltic contemporary arts centre in Gateshead and has been busy sorting through dusty filing cabinets to gather up eight years worth of work. It’s an opportunity she can’t turn down, she says, so seldom do such auspicious opportunities arise. And anyway, the exhibition is now firmly established in the converted tram depot, so she’s “surplus to requirements” anyway.

We sit down to talk about how the Tramway came to host this luminous and sometimes derided annual ceremony, which down the years has thrust into the limelight the likes of Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry and Antony Gormley. I’m curious as to how the process works, from an events perspective, owing to what seems like an increasingly competitive market for big ticket items; after all the Turner has only departed London on three occasions in 31 years, with the Tramway now the fourth. It must cost a fortune, surely, and the bidding process an endless round of form-filling, presentations and generating enough of a ‘wow’ factor to impress the eminences of the Tate.

To my surprise, perhaps because she is demob happy, Munro confesses that the prize was secured on the basis of a three-page entry, and around £200 spent on sundries including taxi fares for the judges, a “nice breakfast” and “bunch of flowers” for the downstairs desk.

So that was how the Tramway secured the Turner, beating off stiff competition in 2013 from Nottingham Contemporary, New Art Gallery in Walsall and Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester? In an age of austerity perhaps it’s a fitting antidote to the millions lavished on much larger sporting spectacles.

But cost is not the defining story. Munro thinks there were actually three significant factors which secured the exhibition for the Tramway. While ‘partnership working’ seems to be one of those overused phrases, in this case Munro believes the close cooperation between Tramway and its collaborators – Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, Glasgow Life, Event Scotland and Creative Scotland – helped to present a united front.

“It was the city working collectively and seeing something as a significant opportunity,” she explains. “It was the four partners who immediately sat round the table together and considered it a really positive thing to bring to the city.”

Strategically, a decision was also made that the Tramway would be the only Scottish venue to apply and although two other galleries later heard that the Pollokshields centre had been chosen, the approach had already been agreed. Munro says also that the city had a strong sense of a “journey”, having been chosen as the host of the Commonwealth Games and an associated cultural programme that was going to happen alongside it. And of course there was the city itself, the home of Glasgow School of Art, which has produced five winners and 30 per cent of nominees since 2006. The third factor, she explains, was the quality of the Tramway’s artistic programme.

“We work with this quality of artist all the time and we’ve got a really strong reputation of engaging with our audiences.”

In terms of what the bid had to demonstrate, it had to be able to deliver on the cost of staging the event, have a set amount of exhibition space and a proven track record in hosting major artistic programmes, all of which the Tramway had. But with just two or three pages of actual form-filling, it was, Munro says, “bureaucratically-lite”.

“It wasn’t a horrific tender document; the first phase was to submit an outline vision of what we would do and show we had the capacity to deliver it in terms of skills and knowledge and expertise.”

That was followed up with site visits by a team of three from the Tate in London, who flew up and checked in for a night at Glasgow’s exclusive Blythswood Hotel – paid for by themselves.

“From the Tate there was no sense that they were expecting people to go beyond. But I know that’s a very different model to a lot of the sporting events.

“I think a lot of what we try and do is to be really authentic; there was no sense that we were bidding to be something other than what we’re really passionate about.”