The shock-horror of the Turner Prize winners

The Turner Prize has gone north this year, to Tate Liverpool in the run-up to that city's year as European Capital of Culture. Leaving a gaping hole in the calendar of Tate Britain on London's Millbank, which has staged the world's most famous art award every year since it began in 1984.

Hence, with a public growing increasingly hungry for the latest names and goings on of the world of contemporary art, Tate Britain seized this one-off opportunity to hold a retrospective of the 23 years of the controversial award.

Running until January 6, The Turner Prize: A Retrospective features key work from all the winning artists including Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Chris Ofili, Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and last year's Tomma Abts, one of only four painters ever to win. It also revisits the shortlists and juries for each year, and reminds us of the headlines and hullabaloo that annually greeted the nominations. Overall, it amounts to something of a snapshot of nearly a quarter century of the latest British art.

The visual arts scene in this country has changed beyond recognition since 1984. Then, there was far less opportunity to see contemporary art in either public or commercial galleries, the Tate Gallery itself showing only a fraction of what it shows today. Deciding that new art needed a boost, the Tate created the Turner Prize, naming it after the controversial in his day British painter, J.M.W.Turner, in response to his unfulfilled wish to set up an award for younger artists. The Tate's hope was that like the Booker had helped the novel, the Turner would encourage greater public discussion of art.

And so it did, right from the word go, if not precisely as hoped. While two million people watched the 1984 award ceremony on BBC's Omnibus programme, a storm of outrage followed over the British' credentials of the winner, painter Malcolm Morley who had lived in New York for the previous 25 years.

The early years saw rules chopping and changing and arguments over how to announce results, whether to show the shortlisted artists and so on. In 1990 the prize was suspended, returning the following year with a revised format and backing from Channel 4. The rules are simple enough: the prize is now "awarded to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the preceding year".

Teething troubles over, the Turner went from strength to strength if Tate visitor numbers are anything to go by. 1999 saw an extraordinary rise in attendance to a record 140,000, an average of 2,000 visitors a day. This was partly due to Tracey Emin's unmade My Bed, nominated though not a winner (Steve McQueen won with his film, Deadpan), which provoked intense criticism yet pleased the public, say Tate curators.

Today, walking round the tanks containing Damien Hirst's iconic Mother and Child, Divided (since donated by the artist to the gallery), it's strange to recall the impassioned responses to it back in 1995. The pickled' bisected cow and calf that drew derision and respect in equal measure then, now look beguilingly harmless.

But I jump ahead. Shock-horror has been a constituent part of the Turner Prize all along, so let's move on and talk about a few of the winners. The exhibition runs chronologically apart from three exhibits in the Duveen Gallery: Richard Long's 1990 White Water Line, recreated for the show in a continuous line of pigment poured on to the gallery floor; Tony Cragg's Minster, 1987; and conceptual artist Simon Starling's Shedboatshed, 2005, that started life as a boatshed on the Rhine riverbank, was chopped up and rowed downriver to Basel: the idea being a physical journey' through which the process is emphasised rather than the final object. Among the 1980s' prize-winners you see Malcolm Morley's canvases, two typically energetic oil paintings by Howard Hodgkin, winner the second year, Gilbert & George's huge multicoloured Drunk with God, and almost trip over Richard Deacon's curling wooden sculpture For Those Who Have Ears #3, and its steel sibling For Those Who Have Eyes.

On into the 1990s and an era when "the Turner really found its stride", according to the curators, when younger artists "undeniably energised the prize," and to two of my favourites: Anish Kapoor's Untitled, and Gillian Wearing's 60 Minute Silence that won in 1997 out of an all-female shortlist.

Kapoor's sculpture, three large voids' coloured in the deepest of lapis blue pigment, seems to exert astonishing power. People entering the room talked in whispers, perhaps because as Kapoor insists: "The Void is really a state within. It has to do with fear and inner darkness."

Wearing tends to explore deep emotions and the complexities of everyday life in her work. Her video 60 Minute Silence shows a group of uniformed policemen and women, ranked on benches as if for a school-photograph, instructed to sit still for an hour. Though something of an endurance test if you sit it out, this rather gauzy-looking video is oddly fascinating; it has you imagining things about the gently swaying people who wriggle and scratch their noses, as minute by minute the tension rises.

In the 2000s, winners included Wolfgang Tillmans, the first artist working solely with photography, Grayson Perry with his seductively beautiful pots that unexpectedly disclose personal and political issues, and in an otherwise empty room Martin Creed's extreme conceptual work Lights going on and off, which, needless to say, infuriated many critics.

Modern Art Oxford played a part in 2004. It was the venue for Jeremy Deller's politically charged Memory Bucket and The History of the World, the works that got Deller nominated and winning. And Modern Art Oxford will play a part again in 2008 when the Turner Prize returns to Tate Britain: Suzanne Cotter, its senior curator, will be one of the four judges.

The Turner Prize: A Retrospective is on at Tate Britain until January 6.

Mark Wallinger was awarded the Turner Prize 2007 for State Britain, his re-creation of Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square. The work was praised by the judges for its "immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance", combining "a bold political statement with art's ability to articulate fundamental human truths".