This year the Turner Prize is 15 years old. To judge by the crowds thronging to see the exhibition by the four shortlisted artists at London's Tate Gallery last week, it has succeeded in at least one of its main aims: to publicise contemporary British art.
Next Tuesday, a six-person jury must decide who will receive the £20,000 20,000 prize. Fashion designer and gallery owner agnes b will announce the winner live on Channel 4. Over the years the Turner has narrowed its focus to become, unofficially, an award for YBAs - Young British Artists. The four YBAs in contention this time around are Tacita Dean, Cathy de Monchaux, Chris Ofili and Sam Taylor-Wood. They were selected by a jury comprising Tate director Nicholas Serota, British Council officer Ann Gallagher, Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo, Neil Tennant, there representing the Patrons of New Art, and the writer Marina Warner.
The Turner's lifespan has coincided with the huge success of the YBAs. Since the promotion of contemporary British art is central to its rationale, surely it can afford to feel pretty pleased with itself on that score? Yes and no. While the prize has certainly played its part in raising the profile of new art, it has to be said that the public awareness and appetite for YBAs did largely happen elsewhere, and almost took the Turner by surprise. When the Turner finally got around to giving Damien Hirst the prize, for example, in 1995, it was almost as an afterthought. There was definitely no prescience involved, no trend-spotting. It was as if the adjudicators had thought how silly the Turner would look in retrospect if it transpired they had somehow managed to miss out on the Hirst phenomenon. That may be a little unfair, but other episodes in its history suggest it may be close to the mark.
After 1996's all-male list, for example, there was a compensatory all-female list in 1997. This year's shortlist has aroused little controversy. There's nothing on it to shock a public acclimatised to the routine excesses of the YBAs. Nor is it a particularly exciting list in other respects. Most of the work is relatively low-key. Widely tipped as the favourite, Sam Taylor-Wood is the best known name. The most favourable account of her photographic and film projects casts her as the Jane Austen of the YBAs, skilfully anatomising human relationships from within the context of a narrow social milieu. In London, yousoon learn the mere mention of her name excites a certain amount of scorn and cynicism, chiefly because she is married to the art dealer Jay Jopling. But, to be fair, she has built a thriving international career pretty much under her own steam.
Last year she won a prize at the Venice Biennale, for example, for Atlantic, which now forms the best part of her show at the Tate. It is a three-screen film projection. In the centre, a couple argue tensely in the midst of a busy restaurant, but we can only catch snatches of their conversation above the general hubbub. On the right we see the woman's face in close-up, on the left the man's fidgety hands. The fact the woman is played by actress Saskia Reeves, who has a wonderfully expressive face, has a great deal to do with the success of the piece. By contrast, Taylor-Wood's panoramic photographic interiors, an on-going series of contemporary tableaux featuring cryptic, fragmentary dramas, look distinctly overblown.
Everyone says "beautifully made" of Cathy de Monchaux's sculptures, and they are. She uses materials like pink leather and suede, intricately pleated, and masses of thread, all dusted with chalk, to fashion ingeniously organic-seeming forms, incorporated in various metallic geometric frameworks. The organic forms are obsessively repeated - the sheer work involved is mind-boggling. But at heart there is one motif underlying most of what she does, the vagina dentata as filtered through the Gothic sci-fi imagination of R.H. Giger, most famously in Alien and its various imitations. De Monchaux's lush creations are sumptuous and attractive, but the frameworks in which they are presented are heavy-handed and schematic, and it's hard to avoid the impression that she really hasn't figured out how to develop her one basic idea.
Tacita Dean's work is oblique and understated. Her best piece by far is a film, Disappearance at Sea, inspired by the fate of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, who died at sea in 1969. Made at St Abb's lighthouse in Berwickshire, as daylight fades and the lamps come on, it is subtly atmospheric, with a memorable sense of isolation and a slightly uncomfortable immediacy. Another film, of women relaxing at thermal baths in Budapest, is thoroughly unremarkable, and a series of tentative blackboard drawings, based on images relating to the "Roaring Forties", are very slight indeed. Yet Disappearance at Sea suggests she possesses real imaginative potential. The final artist, Chris Ofili, garnered quite a bit of publicity for incorporating lumps of elephant dung in his paintings - one of many sharp references in his work to stereotypical black culture. Rather than hanging on the wall the paintings also rest on blobs of dung, a system that works surprisingly well. The pictures themselves are densely worked extravaganzas of pattern and colour with simplified, outline imagery. A typical list of media reads: "acrylic, oil, resin, paper collage, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas."
It's all far too much, completely over the top, but Ofili knows it's too much, the whole point of it is that it's too much, and in a curious way it works. He is the youngest of the four, and also the one who looks as if he might do something, who doesn't seem hemmed in, cautious and constrained. In this company, he deserves to win.
The Turner Prize Live will be screened on Tuesday, 8-9 p.m., on Channel 4. The Turner Prize Exhibition continues at the Tate Gallery, London until January 10th.