Turner Prize fails to capture imagination

This year's Turner Prize has little to excite the viewer, expect perhaps to see the work of the Belfast-born Cathy Wilkes in the final four

THIS YEAR'S Turner Prize exhibition, featuring work by the four shortlisted artists, is a relatively muted event. There isn't much for the tabloids to get excited about (though there was a half-hearted fuss made of the naked-mannequin-on-toilet installation), but the problem is more that there isn't much for anyone to get excited about.

On the whole it provides a heavily theorised, dry-as-dust experience, and though there are interesting ideas along the way, there's little in the way of real visual interest. Even the most visual of the four artists, Runa Islam, shows scant flair in that regard.

The show is designed so that you encounter the work sequentially, and first-in-line is Polish-born Goldsmiths graduate Goshka Macuga, who has been raiding the Tate archives for her display. She focuses on two Modernist couples, the Surrealist artist Eileen Agar and her lover of nine years or so, the painter Paul Nash, and designer Lilly Reich and architect Mies van der Rohe, who were personal and professional partners from 1925 until 1938, when he emigrated to the United States.

Macuga combines Nash's photographs with collage cut-outs from Agar's scrapbooks, preserving something of the spirit of both in images of pastoral surrealism. Nash reportedly introduced Agar to the "found object", an idea that she embraced enthusiastically, and in a way Macuga's inserts found objects into otherwise straightforward images of Agar herself and other subjects.

There is perhaps more of an edge to Macuga's Haus der Frau, which features the glass and chrome exhibition fittings Reich designed for the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929.

Macuga's architectonic arrangements of these archetypal modernist forms could be interpreted as implying that Reich was instrumental in shaping van der Rohe's vision in more ways than is generally acknowledged. If so, she is echoing Albert Pfeiffer, who has argued just that on the basis of documentary historical evidence. Macuga's interventions are tentative and ambiguous. The official line on her work is that she is questioning "the conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display." If so, she is doing so in ways so subtle as to be imperceptible, but she can't be blamed for the claim.

Belfast-born, Scottish-based Cathy Wilkes' installation, I Give You All My Moneyis perplexing. It's a big, sprawling affair, featuring two supermarket checkouts, a step-ladder and myriad smaller bits and pieces, but it's cast adrift in a huge space, so that it seems immediately diminished.

It's also a mess but then, as she might say, it's supposed to be a mess. Its two mannequins represent idealised women, here subjected to the mundane realities of biology (one is sitting on a lavatory), motherhood and domesticity. The daily grind is evoked in an image conflating the supermarket shop, the blitzed kitchen after breakfast and other everyday moments. In case we miss the point, one mannequin wears a nurse's cap, the other a birdcage, together with other symbols of multi-tasking bondage. The ladder might offer a means of escape. But hold on a minute. Has Wilkes just noticed all this? What has she been doing for the previous 41 years of her life so far?

There is a strangely retrospective cast to the piece, which makes heavy work of its own obviousness. The official rationale is that she shows that "the naming of objects is disconnected from our experience of them." Each piece she makes, it is suggested, tears up the rule book and reconfigures those relationships. Except that it all looks familiar.

Bangladeshi-born Runa Islam is showing three short films. In First Day of SpringDhaka rickshaw drivers bask in utter stillness until a gust of wind wakes up the world around them. Be The First To See What You See As You See It features an overly poised, controlled woman who sips tea and carefully shatters a display of fine china with great relish - an appealing scenario. The third piece, Cinematography, is the weakest. A camera manoeuvres restlessly through a special effects workshop in New Zealand. We can't know it from merely looking at the sequence, but the movement spells out the word cinematography, which is surely a piece of pointless cleverness, a conceit.

While the other two films are promising, they are also prone to a self-conscious trickiness that is ultimately self-defeating. Artist- filmmakers, as opposed to filmmakers, often edit against narrative expectations, which is fine, except when it is done mainly to disguise their lack of confidence or competence in the medium.

The curatorial cliché, of "questioning" or "challenging" the conventions of a form or a discipline, is too often an alibi for predictability. Despite the real merits of her work Islam, alas, messes around with her material in this way, without significantly enhancing it.

The final shortlisted artist, Mark Leckey from Birkenhead, lectures in film and he employs it together with sculpture, appropriation and other means in a hugely varied body of work. He has apparently emerged as the favourite to win the prize, perhaps because there is an enthusiastic, celebratory quality to what he does, and it can't hurt that he leans heavily on pop cultural references, including Felix the Cat and The Simpsons, all of which is in contrast to the rarefied air of dry academicism you've had to get through to reach his room.

Enthusiasm isn't enough in itself though, and the sheer prodigality of his work, which encompasses a three-dimensional model of his studio, seems almost designed to prevent you focusing on any one piece or aspect and seeing how limited it is. The heart of his show is a recording of an illustrated lecture, Cinema in the roundin which he informally discusses his personal cultural highlights. It has attracted lots of favourable comment but to this visitor at least it came across as banal - if enthusiastically banal.

Who should win the prize, which will be announced in December?

On the basis of the exhibition, it should be between Macuga and Islam, with Macuga having a slight though definite edge.

Having said that, the general tenor of what's on offer makes one wonder how contemporary art has backed itself into such a tight corner. It's as if fine art is still preoccupied with rhetorical games, paper tigers, pyrrhic victories, while visual culture happens elsewhere.

Turner Prize 2008 is at Tate Britain, London until Jan 18. www.tate.org.uk/britain