Turner Prize 2009, Tate Britain

Anyone who has had their sensibilities battered by Tate Modern’s Pop Life show is likely to be equally taken aback if they wander along the Thames to this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain – but for completely different reasons. If Pop Life leaves you feeling that art can only progress through ever greater acts of outrage – that if you’re not actually having sex on camera you hardly count as creative – the tone over at Tate Britain is measured, cool, even academic. Do these exhibitions even reflect the same world, let alone the same art world?

While Tate has been happy to harness shock value in the past – elephant turds, flashing light bulbs – and the antics of Britain’s most newsworthy artists, there are no potential Hirsts or Emins in this exhibition. Even after you’ve watched the videos in which they discuss their work, the four shortlistees for Britain’s biggest art prize remain rather anonymous figures. The show is literally almost devoid of colour; the abiding impression being of a restrained, even genteel monochrome. Not though that the exhibition is any the worse for that.

If last year’s show was one of the thinnest and least memorable to date, this year’s judges have gone out of their way to choose artists whose work at least gives the impression of having involved extended thought and a degree of rigour. Two of the artists evolve their work through drawing; two make use of that most neglected of media – paint. Not, though, that this work is in any sense traditional. Your first reaction on walking through this exhibition is likely to be bafflement. And this isn't so much because the work is inherently difficult, but because of the sense with all the artists of an enigmatic sub-text: the feeling that there is concrete information that might enhance your understanding of the work – if you were only let in on it.

In the case of the bookies’ favourite, Roger Hiorns, this information has been all over the press for the last week: the grim-looking industrial powder splurged onto the floor is an atomised jet engine, the amorphous plastic sculptures nailed to the walls include "brain matter" (apparently from cows). Hiorns, who achieved overnight fame by turning a south London council flat into a cave of blue copper sulphate crystals in his Seizure installation, is interested in the way objects and substances change their meaning through the process of chemical transformation. Yet if Seizure created a moment of genuine alchemical wonder – not least by being located in an edgy urban environment – the work here, presented under the collective non-title Untitled, has an inflated quality. The installation and the rhetoric used to explain and justify it, by Hiorns and in the gallery wall texts with their talk of "undermining the utility of dominant objects", don’t add up to more than their sum of their parts. It's the kind of art that seems to exist only to appear in exhibitions like this one; it has no hinterland.

Lucy Skaer is also interested in the transformation of materials and objects. In her Black Alphabet, Brancusi’s iconic Bird in Space is recast 26 times – the number of copies the sculptor made – with gleaming bronze replaced by compacted coal dust to give its soaring form a null, mass-produced look. Peering through a gap in the wall we glimpse part of the yellowing skull of a sperm whale. Part of a work called Thames and Hudson, the gigantic, threatening form with its massive beak-like jaws is jammed into what is effectively a packing case, so that it is only visible in fragments. Alongside are beautifully executed works on paper: rubbings that show the different sides of a chair, an unfathomable layering of spiralling marks that turns out to be a drawing of the whale’s skull.

The effect is pleasantly enigmatic, though these enigmas feel slightly academic. Skaer is interested in the way we see these things, with how our view of them is changed by context. Bigger challenges presented by the presence of the skull and the Brancusi sculpture aren’t explored.



Richard Wright’s Untitled (pictured above) is simply a large empty room with what looks from a distance like a gilded flock wallpaper design painted onto the far wall. Rather than providing decoration, his meticulously executed paintings on walls and floors are intended to commandeer the space, to make it part of the work. As you draw closer, the swirling marks take on a random, organic appearance that sits disconcertingly with their symmetricality, as though they mapped some obscure neurological process. Three balancing red marks sit, barely noticeable, above the doorway at the other end of the room.

If this appears at first to be just the kind of slightly glib installation we’ve come to expect to see at Turner Prize shows, the effect even after several viewings is oddly compelling.

Enrico David is the least easy of the artists to get a handle on, either on paper or in reality. His installation Absuction Cardigan contains a stage on which some kind of obtuse drama is taking place. Papier-mâché "egg man" figures on wooden rockers, bearing the artist’s features, stand at odd angles, on the stage and on the floor, while a kind of black felt doll attenuated almost beyond legibility lies sprawled through the middle of the action over two white boxes on one of which is an image of children. One child looks down through a hole at the image of a man floating in black space.

Around these figures are paintings, one of a manic drummer, another a stylised profiled head; a builder figure bearing his backside inside the mouth, while a man in protective clothing with some dark gunge pouring out of his head dominates the brain area.

The lack of stylistic coherence, the fact none of these figures bear much relation to each other, is daunting and oddly encouraging. Indeed, the whiff of Sixties-style zaniness hanging around the work is probably accidental. David's statement on the accompanying video seems deliberately obfuscatory, and neither the wall text nor the exhibition catalogue seem able to easily explain the work - which bodes well. Each of the figures in this installation represents David himself, and his work in general refers to personal traumas. There are, you gather, layers of near-hermetic homosexual allusion.

It may sound as though I'm interested by David's work simply because I don't understand it, and then largely because significant information is being withheld. That may be at least partly the case. Yet there's the fugitive sense that his work may actually be about something. Its air of gaucheness and messiness may turn out to be just a stylistic affectation, but there's the feeling of a view beyond the impasse of the elegant formal gesture - the neat idea accompanied by the pat explanation - that has become dominant in British art over the last decade or so. 

So while I can see why many critics are backing Wright, I find myself more intrigued by David. I may come to regret that, and I certainly don't want him to win the Turner Prize. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

• Turner Prize 2009 continues at Tate Britain until 3 January. Details here.