Art-prize shortlist shows system just ticking over

There's nothing to get excited about in the shortlist for Britain's Turner Prize, writes TOM LUBBOCK.

The four artists on the shortlist for this year's Turner Prize are Glenn Brown, Tomoko Tak-ahashi, Wolfgang Tillmans and Michael Raedecker, and an exhibition of some of their work can now be seen in four galleries of Tate Britain.

This year the prize might reasonably not be awarded. Of the four artists shortlisted, all in their 30s, some are better than others.

Those who look to the Turner Prize for portents of the future could be interested. There is no film or video work. There are photos which are pretty much straight down the line, as opposed to art that uses photography, indicating that now any photographer might be eligible for the prize.

And there are two painters, one of whom is very nearly the sort of painter people have in mind when they say, "Why are there no painters on the Turner Prize shortlist?"

The painter, Glenn Brown, has, to a high degree, some traditional-style skills but there's a twist. He paints copies. He started off painting copies of reproductions of Frank Auerbach so Auerbach's broad, loaded, textural brushstrokes were rendered with deceiving accuracy but were flat.

It was a boggling illusion and careful, flat painting that minutely imitates a freer, more fluid kind that is still an element in Brown's work.

But it has become cleverer, too, mixing together bags of references to high art, low art, slightly dodgy art, setting up clashes and strange likenesses.

There are meetings of highly detailed apocalypses with highly detailed sci-fi illustration. Imitation expressionistic brushwork is introduced into a Fragonard portrait like a rash of vermicelli.

A subject will be borrowed from one source, a style from another, a colour scheme from somewhere else and a fusion achieved with consummate slickness, leaving you with bewildered responses, not sure what to feel or why such bewilderment (the almost universal rhetoric of contemporary art) is supposed to be so interesting.

Tomoko Tak-ahashi makes extravagant junk-rooms, gallery-filling installations of what is often called rubbish - though many of her ingredients are clearly shop-bought. At the Tate, visitors file through her mounting and dangling melee of pot-plants, road-signs, office furniture, car tyres, gadgets and spilled board-games.

The general idea is to create a cheerful sense of mess, within which hints of schemes, themes and connections may also be perceived.

So it's about order and chaos, which is not so great. I like it when she gets real compost-heap effects, disparate things meshed together. But really, Tak-ahashi's messes are superficial art-director's messes, a tidy person's idea of untidiness. They're assembled with no sculptural sense.

Wolfgang Tillmans takes studiedly casual photos of faces, body-parts, household objects, naked young people, bits of clothing, bits of pavement and bits of sky. Prints are shown in all sizes, unframed, high and low, dotted and grouped with studied casualness around the walls.

Put together, they become a statement of "the way we live now," studiedly casual glimpses of a studiedly casual lifestyle, a tedious hymn of self-regarding boho authenticity.

I like Michael Raedecker's pictures but I'm not sure I understand why. He paints pale, dim and desolate landscapes, sometimes views, sometimes the ground from above, with very few elements, almost monochrome, and the perspective is often funny.

Then there's his distinctive device, outbreaks of texture and embroidery thread sewn on to the canvas in neat lines, or glued-on furry blobs of wool, or straying tangled webs, or fields of tufts.

People talk of art/craft crossover, but it's nothing so boring. These fabric additions, though they have a representational role - making a clump of foliage, say, or an area of shady crosshatching, as blank spots in the painting, covering over what they depict. But this effect is rescued from being a bald paradox by the delicacy of the fabric work. It's a world of careful mystery - I think that's the trick.

Yet, how often do you see some art which makes you think, "I'm lucky to be here and, if I'd missed this, it would have been tragic?"

Most art has no special necessity. It's just doing its job. It exists because there's a career called "artist" and an art world that needs a steady supply of art and a public who, from habit, fashion or hope, go along to see it and know how to say: "I quite liked this," or "I didn't much like that" - and the system is just ticking over.

- INDEPENDENT

* The winner of the 2000 Turner Prize, Britain's prestigious art award, will be announced on November 28.