Now everyone's a critic

By TJ McNAMARA


Two questions: Who will win? What's it all about?

The rich Walters Prize is unusual in the way the exhibition comes first and judgment, by the New York art celebrity Robert Storr, comes not quite at the end.

In the interim, on the model of the Turner Prize in Britain, we are supposed to discuss furiously the work of the four artists the jury selected and decide for ourselves who deserves the prize. Everybody is an art critic.

The artists have been given lavish space in the New Gallery until the end of November.

The exhibition is given piquancy by the inclusion of Restricted Access by the collaborative et al, who will be New Zealand's representative at the Venice Biennale. The choice is still under attack, even by MPs.

The guiding spirit of et al is Merilyn Tweedie, even though she chooses to operate under pseudonyms to avoid the sort of writing about art that is more about artists than the work.

Her early work was sheets from old newspapers which had advertisements emphasising the domestic role of women. To expound her feminist point of view these advertisements were covered with yellow varnish to make them look old, rejected and rubbish.

Restricted Access has wider implications. The modern world is a world of discarded things and she has changed the yellow varnish for grey paint. The effect is the same.

In a corner of the gallery, hung with black plastic and provided with spectator seats that cannot be sat on, she has created an artistic rubbish tip.

Portaloos, with their obvious reference to excrement, dominate it. On the walls are blackboards which instruct us about the nature of nothingness.

There is a wordy, ready-made art criticism where one of the artist's pseudonyms is roughly filled in for the original subject. There is a little screen with Paul Holmes endlessly talking. The rest is discarded trolleys, music cases, record players and books with their content suppressed.

Everywhere there are loudspeakers. Most of these speakers are dead but one squawks and another delivers an endless, irrelevant lecture on the nature of art.

The work has a strong point of view and is undeniably powerful, but it is equally undeniably totally negative.

The exhibition fills the galleries with noise. Screams and yells come from the work of Ronnie van Hout. His installation, No Exit Parts 1 and 2, is about the position of the artist in contemporary life.

In one stance the artist is leaning forward, hugely bewigged and staring at a dead-white fireplace with dead-white logs. No heat here.

On a screen nearby is a clip of two headstones with strange figures flitting between them. The standing figure holds two birds - robin redbreasts, dead and stuffed. "A robin redbreast in a cage/ Puts all heaven in a rage," wrote William Blake. The artist offers his birds but they cause no stir.

In the next room he, the artist, is dead on the floor, wearing a tracksuit. Birds perch nearby to peck out his eyes.

Round the corner in a third room the artist is pilloried again. His head is stuck between big lumps of tree trunk five times over and behind it all is a large NO. The whole feeling of the work is that the artist is someone who is desperately in danger but in an odd, funny peril.

The nay-saying is continued in Invisible, the work of Jacqueline Fraser, though the idea is conveyed with baroque opulence. The twisted and astringent line of her early work is here abandoned in favour of elaborate draping and cut-out figures.

The drapes over the entrance are a fabric with a design that shows a clash of cultures - the Old World, Britain or Spain, confronting the innocence of the New World.

Inside, the drapes are all black. Figures round the walls are made from thick coat material with additions in patterned tulle. They all wear Cossack hats and smart shoes, often decorated with roses. Their attitudes are self-confident despite almost all having their eyes covered and being fixed to the wall by pins through their pointed bosoms.

Surely a critique of high fashion is intended because these smart figures have no individuality and are all given the names of potent tranquillising drugs. The total effect is richly satirical.

It is much more easy to determine what Daniel von Sturmer is about with his The Truth Effect.

He is cultivating little sensations in the most abstract way but using common objects and movement. The work is presented on a huge white surface in a white gallery. On the white surface are five pure white screens.

On one screen a hand places circles of different colours on a turntable. They are not centred and weave eccentrically. Some press forward from the colour behind, others make a hole in it. That's it and that's all.

In the next piece, household objects take on a simple life by sliding upwards, hanging poised and sliding to the next corner. In another, rolls of tape of different sizes make abstract compositions.

Another screen shows a book of coloured paper. The valley in the spine of the book becomes a horizon and can be read as a simple landscape.

These are sweet, neat abstractions; no story, no emotions but clever visual effects.