Art review: Turner Prize 2010

Published on Monday 6 December 2010 10:26

TURNER PRIZE 2010 TATE BRITAIN, LONDON **

• Susan Philipsz's Lowlands is a musical installation that feels quite out of place

The Turner Prize claims to present the latest and best of contemporary art, but really it is to making serious art as Crufts is to walking your dog; the Crufts of art, it's a weird irrelevance. Last week in this column, I suggested that contemporary art as it is epitomised in the Turner Prize is merely art mimicking the stratagems of latter-day market capitalism.

Like capitalism, it is dependent on the illusion of constant newness. It follows that only art that provides that illusion can be considered to qualify as truly contemporary. Ordinary painting or sculpture can never appear novel in that way and so cannot win the prize and the shortlist nearly always consists of work in new media. These new media are, no doubt, as capable of being profound as any other, but it is a false assumption that they hold the monopoly on serious art. The Turner Prize is supposed to be an open competition, but the selection is highly tendentious and assiduously promotes that false assumption.

In this year's competition the Otolith Group is on the shortlist. The name sounds like a multinational corporation. In fact, injuring language as well as art, the "group" comprises just two artists, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. The other three included this year are Dexter Dalwood, Angela de la Cruz and Susan Philipsz. They are, I am afraid, the usual bunch of nonentities making unmemorable art - and how many former winners can you name? - but catapulted into a kind of celebrity by the Turner Prize publicity machine and consequent media visibility.

If these artists have anything in common apart from their mediocrity, it is that they seem baffled about what they are supposed to be doing. Perhaps that's not surprising. If art does mimic the markets and the global financial system is like Wile E Coyote suspended in the air before he realises that he has run off the edge of a cliff, then artists too might feel they are in mid-air and not quite sure what is holding them up.

The first you encounter in the exhibition is Dexter Dalwood. He is a painter. "Hurrah!" you may expect me to say, "things are looking up at last." Not so, I fear, for he is not a very good painter. Indeed he doesn't seem to understand painting at all, neither how it works, nor what it can achieve. He gives his works portentous titles that relate to real people or events, but, we are told, "his paintings go beyond merely illustrating an often well-known event or celebrity to offer an arresting and thought provoking visual testament to seminal personalities and moments in history." That is simply not true.

His paintings don't even go as far as illustration. He achieves the distance from the traditions of painting that is necessary for his claim to be novel and thus contemporary by treating them simply as a handy scrapbook. He then takes from it a mish-mash of badly understood art history and gives it an arbitrary label. Burroughs in Tangier, for instance, is a collage of Matisse and Rauschenberg. The bits of Matisse suggest Tangiers, but otherwise it appears to have little to do with William Burroughs or the time he spent there writing Naked Lunch. In Herman Melville there is a big chunk of Cubism arbitrarily pasted into what seems to be the cabin of a ship. And what would the relatives of David Kelly think of a painting of the moon and a tree called The Death of David Kelly?

The next gallery is showing the Otolith Group. "The collaborative and discursive practice of The Otolith Group questions the nature of documentary history across time by using material found within a range of disciplines, in particular the moving image" is the pompous description given in the label. What we actually see is a dark room with a cinema screen and 13 television screens.

The latter are simultaneously showing episodes of The Owl's Legacy, a 13-part series on Greek culture by French film-maker Chris Marker. Silent, but with subtitles, each episode is almost half an hour long. I confess I couldn't watch six hours of it, but the ensemble of caricature intellectuals silently gabbling at each other looked like a chaotic video conference with the sound turned off. Typically, it seemed, too, to be all talk and no art. However good the original programmes may have been, presented this way they seem to propose that our grasp of the significance of classical antiquity is fragmented and incoherent.

For a few minutes while I was there this vision of classical culture sinking into oblivion was punctuated by the plaintive sound of an old-fashioned telephone ringing out of the shadows. That's a nice touch, I thought, the voice of the past calling and finding no answer, but then somebody came to retrieve their BlackBerry, mislaid in the darkness.

On the cinema screen, the other part of the Otolith presentation was a film made using an unrealised Satyajit Ray screenplay. Ray was a great film maker. The Otolith Group are not.

Deconstruction is a word that came into vogue 30 years ago. Far more than mere analysis, it was supposed to mean that an art work was being taken apart with such rigour that all the hidden secrets coded in its parts would be revealed.

Angela de la Cruz deconstructs paintings, quite literally. She takes them apart and presents them all smashed up, or as a canvas dangling loose on the wall without a stretcher to give it form. What she claims she is doing is "freeing (the] painting from the boundaries of its support." Her deconstruction does not reveal any hidden secrets, however. A picture may be a container of ideas, as she proposes, but smash it and, like smashing a glass of water, you will not reveal its contents. You will lose them and be left with nothing but a puddle and a shapeless heap of broken shards.

Susan Philipsz sings. Her room has nothing in it, or nothing visible, only the sound of her voice. It is quite a pleasant voice and she gives a nice rendering of a plaintive Scottish ballad. This all began with her doing the same thing under a bridge over the Clyde. If you were walking under some dank Glasgow bridge and suddenly and unexpectedly heard her disembodied voice singing a beautiful Scots song, you would certainly be startled and you might be moved. It loses its piquancy in an art gallery, although it is still pleasant enough to listen to.

The problem is that it is pleasant in a way that art can never be. She has brought a shinty team to play a football match. The difference between art and music is not just an administrative convenience. It is the difference between eye and ear. Sight is the queen of the senses, but our aesthetic response to music is always more immediate and more intuitive than it is to art. Music is music, art is art, but for centuries artists have puzzled over how to create art so intuitive and so unencumbered that it could reach our aesthetic core as directly as music does. Simply to put it in an art gallery and declare that your music is actually art does not solve that conundrum.

The Turner Prize is a muddle. Neither the artists nor the judges really know what they are supposed to be doing.

• Until 3 January 2011.