Other / Jack Houghton / 24 November 2009 /

Jack Houghton wades into the Turner Prize odds ahead of his own tilt at the crown in 2010

There is a truth professional gamblers hold to be self-evident: to be profitable, you must specialise. Losers gorge themselves of all that the great buffet of betting has to offer; winners only ever eat the cheese and pineapple sticks. Who knows what might be lurking in that couscous salad? Therein lies uncertainty, and winners have no truck with uncertainty.

Jack Houghton was a long-time follower of the specialisation theory. Many learned academics credit him with its invention. But now he's turned his back. August 2009. Armed with a £1,000 bank and oodles of likely misplaced confidence, he sets out to prove that, in a year, betting on everything Betfair has to offer, he can turn a profit.

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I call it "Man Punting His Balls Off". Or at least I will. When I finally get round to making it. The plan is a bit of sculpture-cum-live art. And a bit of painting thrown in for good measure.

It will consist of a man - a real live man - sat in a chair, naked, tapping away furiously at a laptop, placing numerous online bets upon obscure events of which he has no knowledge. A wire will run from the back of the computer to electrodes placed on naked-man's testes; delivering a shock for every losing bet. In front of naked-man will be a statue of a three-foot-tall woman, also naked, playing keep-me-ups with a giant testicle. Balanced next to the statue will be a life-size carbon-copy-cut-out of Jimmy White, upon which will be painted the words: "NO ONE'S KING OF THE JUNGLE".

The perceptive among you will have already unravelled the complex connotations: the emasculation of modern man juxtaposed against the torrid dominance of the Arsenal Ladies' team; the dehumanising nature of the online world juxtaposed against the refulgent vigour of sporting conquest; the grotesque form of naked-man juxtaposed against the artistry and shapeliness of Jimmy White.

And of course there's the ambiguity of meaning in that apostrophe: is No One a person; or is there no king of the jungle; or does Jimmy simply refuse to be called king of the jungle?

Crowds will stand aghast at the beautiful simplicity-complexity of it all; the fandango layered upon the hubbub underpinning the hullabaloo. It'll be a shoo-in for the Turner Prize, reaching its super-ironic and self-referential climax as naked-man navigates to Betfair, lays me for five grand in the Turner Prize market, and, as a final and fatal shock is delivered groinward, is jolted skyward, the very second I am announced the winner.

It'll have to wait for next year though. The shortlist has been announced already this time round. And anyway, the guy I had lined up to do the punting is getting all testy about the testes thing. It doesn't mean I can't raise some funding for the project by finding this year's winner though.

For a run-down on what the Turner Prize is all about, check out Richard Douglas' article on the subject. Or for a rock-solid winning bet, stay right here. Bearing in mind I'm due to win the thing next year, there should be no better judge of who will precede me.

Lucy Skaer stands no chance. She's basically painted a big black canvas in which you can kind of make out the skeleton of a whale. In all honesty, it's not much more than a colouring-in job. Oh yeah, and she's placed a giant whale's skull next door. Whale's skull? Numskull. Not nearly enough juxtapositioning going. Lucy's a sure-fired loser.

Enrico David could cause a shock. His oversized papier-mâché heads-on-skis pee on Lucy's skeleton (not literally - artists aren't allowed to deface other artists' work), and his work is an homage to Surrealism, with a dusting of Art Nouveau. A bit of homage-ing always impresses the judges.

Richard Wright's stuff is little more than expensive wallpaper and, whilst there's a bit of figuration and abstraction going on, there's not nearly enough irony, banality or schadenfreude encapsulated within the core form of the installation to give it anything but an outside chance.

Roger Hiorns will win. And the bulging Betting Challenge Bank is having £20 on at [2.14]. His "Seizure" saw him take a council flat and turn it (or should that be "Turner it"?) into a copper-sulphate crystal cave. What more need I say?

This week's bets:
£20 BACK Roger Hiorns at [2.14] to win Turner Prize.

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