Assemble’s Turner Prize entry is positive, genuine and ego-free. They’ll never win

Here are some fur coats reclaiming the design canon for the sisterhood. They are draped over the back of tubular steel chairs. In this daring arrangement, they subvert the established patriarchy by partially obscuring the ‘autograph design object’ of the chair, something that represents the historic subsuming of all female creativity under male dominance.

While this will be obvious enough, it must be appreciated in the greater context of the work which ‘extrudes novelty from recognisability via subtle acts of transformation’ and in doing so ‘displaces the certainty with which we appoint function and value to objects’. I read this in the catalogue, an essential companion to Nicole Wermers’ ‘Untitled Chairs’. Here, curator Paul Pieroni shows himself to be a master of his under-appreciated medium. It is tempting to quote at length. If the Turner was awarded for nonsense prose, and sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking it might as well be, Pieroni would be a shoo-in.