WHOEVER wins the Turner Prize tomorrow, what is clear is that the contenders are culturally worlds apart from their predecessors, writes Moira Jeffrey
TOMORROW evening, just before 8pm, Channel 4 cameras will cut from the dapper figure of newsreader Jon Snow to another set of talking heads, headlines and controversy – this year's Turner Prize announcement. One of the four shortlisted artists – Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes – will walk away with the £25,000 prize. The rest are likely to walk away with a bit of a headache.
While the Turner is a recognised staging post in an artist's career, it is also a circus with no direct equivalent on other art forms. The public and professional recognition of nomination is tempered by the practical realities. The mixture of obsessive interest and loathing that it incites is phenomenal, and that's just from the people who actively support contemporary art.
Public controversies over book prizes, say, are nothing to the annual hand-wringing at Turner time. For the tabloids, the annual exhibition of the shortlisted artists is an annual "but is it art" outing. But this year there have been notable broadsheet rumblings of discontent from key London critics. The accusations: "dull", "academic", "didactic", "opaque". The reason? Perhaps because the comfortable era of Brit Art is emphatically over. The four artists selected are of a significantly different generation from their predecessors and at an increasing distance, culturally and socially, from those who are paid to write about them.
Instead this year's Turner reflects an art form that is increasingly concerned with its own mechanics, its own history and its own limitations. It's a show about the treacherousness of the eye, about the inner life of objects and artists, and presents a view of art as a self-reflexive, considered and collaborative practice rather than an individualistic or heroic endeavour. This is a coherent shortlist, and the germ of a good exhibition, even if the delivery is rather frustrating.
The exhibition's suite of rooms (this year in the rather cramped basement) begins with the Polish-born artist Goshka Macuga, in a room decorated with long pencil marks like graphite rain. Macuga, who studied at London's Royal College, is known for installations in which she takes on the role of the curator of other people's art works. Here she explores two sets of romantic partnerships: that between the British artists Paul Nash and Eileen Agar and the modernist architects and designers Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich.
With the first pair Macuga has created a new series of photomontages spliced together from work by the artists already in the Tate's archives. With the latter she has reproduced Reich's luxurious steel and glass fabric displays created for German industrial exhibitions and international fairs. There's a clear subtext here about who gets to make history (the men) and why, but the focus is on reimagining art as a collaborative enterprise that loops in on itself in circles and affinities rather than series of solitary straight lines. It comes with an edge. The exploration of Reich and van der Rohe is not mere homage: the work's title Deutsches Volkes – Deutsches Arbeit suggests an implied complicity in fashioning the international image of Germany in the national socialist era.
Macuga's strength is her steely eye, picking over the carcass of art history to fashion something out of the bones, but much of this work was created for the Neunationalgalerie in Berlin (designed by Mies himself) and it has come loose from its historical anchors and become rather flat at the Tate.
There's a definite chill about Runa Islam's art too, in which dense film theory is condensed into a series of simple set pieces. In The First Day Of Spring a gathering of rickshaw drivers in Islam's native Bangladesh feign rest in what is a highly staged tableau rather than a piece of documentary. In Be The First To See What You See As You See It, a woman in a white dress goes about smashing pale porcelain with studied insouciance. Islam's art ticks a whole load of boxes, proclaims its theoretical seriousness, and does look very good. But it can be very tricksy.
In contrast, the flamboyant Mark Leckey, a film professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt where many prominent British artists now teach, plunders the history of film with the warmth of a fan and a consumer as well as professional expertise. His filmed lecture, Cinema In The Round, is a funny, rambling and occasionally maddening history of the moving image, splicing serious history with Homer Simpson. It is a centrepiece of an installation that features films, posters and projections. In the film Made In 'Eaven, Leckey, a former casual and inveterate dandy, explores the lure of shiny surfaces as a guise for a far more sophisticated discussion about the nature of the boundary between interior and exterior. He films Jeff Koons' famous mirrored sculpture Rabbit, but when the camera gets close up enough to capture its reflective surface we see only an empty studio. Leckey's collection of works is dense and eclectic but whether this adds up to an artistic voice, rather than brilliant art historical exposition, is left hanging in the air.
It would be hard to find a stronger visual contradiction with all this shininess than the art of Cathy Wilkes, but both these artists are interested in what animates the apparently inanimate. Wilkes' single installation I Give You All My Money, is a blunt and confrontational tableau of displaced dead objects: showroom dummies, supermarket checkouts, food-spattered bowls. As ever with Wilkes, who is based in Glasgow and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005, her art worries again and again over physicality: the frailty of the body, the messy business of caring.
There is an atmosphere of mourning: her two mannequins wear an ash-smeared face and a nurse's cap. But Wilkes' subject is not just the invisible world of women's labour, a key theme in her work. She talks about subjects that are rare territory for art: the unbridgeable gaps between people, the silences between carer and cared for, the way that the objects around us acquire a patina of personal meaning that is utterly private and often unintelligible to our closest family. The work opens up a vast new territory about the interior life that is familiar in literature, but proscribed in the sharp, steely world of contemporary art where feelings don't exist and surface is everything.
It's traditional to close a Turner review with a prediction. Leckey, the bookies' favourite from the outset, seems most likely to clinch it. He's bright and his work is clever and up-beat. He occupies the grandest room in the show. Oh, and, of course, he has the virtue of being male, a traditional Turner-winning attribute.
It's not just my knee-jerk feminism or my local loyalty to the Glasgow art scene that makes me declare my own support for Wilkes. In Wilkes' work we can see a genuine and deep-seated shift in artistic values. It's a shift that's been profound and unanticipated enough to have got up the noses of many of those weaned on the slick attributes of the Brit-Art era. Three of this year's shortlisted artists make art about art, with varying degrees of insight and complexity. Wilkes uses the means of art to talk about life. v
• Until January 18. The Turner Prize will be announced by Nick Cave, live on Channel 4 on Tuesday
www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize