The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced tomorrow evening, live on Channel 4, chosen from the four short-listed artists currently exhibiting at Tate Britain.
This year's short-list was trumpeted as marking the demise of the Young British Artist phenomenon. Everyone thought YBAs Martin Creed and Sarah Lucas would be included. They weren't. It was, jury chairman Sir Nicholas Serota said, a move towards pluralism after a decade's dominance of the British art scene by Damien Hirst and company.
The inclusion of three non British artists on the list was seen as evidence of this. But there is also a Trojan horse in the pluralist camp, in the form of YBA Glenn Brown. And, ironically, from being regarded as an also-ran he has emerged as a surprising popular favourite. So, although it is unlikely, it's not inconceivable the award ceremony may include the spectacle of the jury-chair eating his words.
It is true, though, that Brown is only tenuously a YBA. His strange, obsessive paintings, labour-intensive and finished to an exacting level of technical perfection, are a long way from the stereotype of the conceptual one-liner. But he was in Sensation, the Royal Academy show that put the official stamp of approval on the YBAs, and he didn't look particularly out of place.
For much of the time his work has looked like a form of laboured, slow-motion irony. He made flattened, meticulous copies of photographic reproductions of Frank Auerbach's textural brushwork and equated sci-fi illustrations with overblown 19th-century paintings of apocalypse and the sublime. The standard critical line on such forms of ironic appropriation is that they question notions of authorship, originality and authenticity. But in fact, beyond the brief glare of lazy rhetoric burning itself out, they rarely ignite any real debate. More often they seem symptomatic of a deracinated culture capable only of diminished varieties of self-parody. And Brown has wisely down-played this aspect of what he might be about.
I have to own up here and say that the first time I saw a painting by Brown, I hated it on sight. And for much of his work it's still more a case of liking the thinking rather than the object. But, to his considerable credit, he has extended his forms and concerns in several inventive and unpredictable ways. His interest in Auerbach has led him circuitously, even tortuously, to a bizarre hybrid, The Marquess of Breadalbane, which conflates several art historical categories in a horribly fascinating image that is, somehow, more than the sum of its parts. Then there are his sculptures, compelling objects in which passages of thick painterly impasto escape the confines of the two-dimensional picture surface and become monstrous, autonomous objects in their own right. Like a lot of his work, they are off-putting at first sight but genuinely engaging and resonant.
There's a succinct adage that encapsulates the pragmatic brutality of military logic: Never reinforce failure. It came to mind as I negotiated the increasingly convoluted pathways of Japanese-born Tomoko Takahashi's crowded, monumental installation of found, discarded and, surely, carefully selected objects that make up her huge, clogged installation. These myriad objects are accumulated into dense, baroque concentrations, always more than random but never pointed or persuasive enough to be convincing as anything else, either.
The tenuous rationale is contained in Tomoko's title, Learn- ing How to Drive. Much of the stuff she has filled the gallery with relates to rules and regulations and some specifically to cars and driving, from Scalextric track to traffic cones, to the carefully mapped out road markings she made as a template for laying out the tons of flotsam she'd acquired. But as the room filled up it must have occurred to someone, if not to the artist herself, that things weren't getting any better. It's as if her parable of excess itself fell prey to the perils of excess.
Dutch-born Michael Raedecker uses an unusual battery of means and materials, including acrylic washes, glued thread, fake fur, embroidered thread and wool, various bits and pieces of textiles and extruded paint. With these he makes odd, sparse, cartoonish images of deserted places. He likes quirky little three-dimensional effects, making a - fairly laboured - play on the actuality as opposed to the illusion of depth. He also spends a serious amount of effort simulating such things as the effect of electric light.
Raedecker studied and actually worked at fashion before turning full-time to art. There is a theatricality to his images in that they are often drawn from interiors magazines and they evoke generic film or television drama settings minus the actors. The theory here is that they make semi-familiar, vaguely disturbing spaces into which we can inject our own narratives. There is an odd, dispirited virtuosity to his evocations of a glum, grey, empty world, but en masse his work looks a bit thin to bear the weight of the profundity that some commentators project onto it. Some aspects of his work recall the Irish artist Paul Mosse, whose constructed paintings are easily as interesting, and in visual terms more so.
Trendiest exhibitor is certainly photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who made his reputation by developing an exaggeratedly casual pictorial aesthetic in his work for style magazines. He shows a miscellany of images, from tiny to huge, taped to the walls, some low, some so high as to be almost invisible, as though on a lay-out grid for a giant magazine spread, though minus the text and any thematic coherence. While there are little mini-thematic episodes within the overall sequence, the emphasis is on variety, something emphasised by the fact that he uses 57 separate pieces.
Tillmans favours the fragmentary and everyday. He places his work in traditional pictorial categories, the portrait, landscape and still life, and says that he always tries to make beautiful images. But there is a hard blandness to his style that doesn't always translate into beauty and, for someone who is so avowedly personal and oblique in his approach, a curious lack of involvement.
In sifting through his own work and tracing connections, promiscuously mixing subjects, sizes and photographs old and new, he is, to his credit, clearly trying to forge a relatively novel, non-linear narrative form. Something discursive and fortuitous, perhaps, and presumably reflecting the wayward habits of consciousness and contemporary experience. As with Tomoko, though, he doesn't entirely convince that he has succeeded in coming up with any cumulative, transcendent meaning in assembling his bits and pieces. It's fast, slick and ambitious and, apparently, the favourite according to an influential body of opinion to take the Prize.
From this short-list, Brown deserves to win, not on partisan grounds in the old painting-versus-photography-and-installation debate - Raedecker is also a painter, after all - but because, of all four artists, what he shows reflects a genuine if perplexing level of development and achievement.
Tillmans may be the trendiest choice, Raedecker the most conventionally obvious, but Brown is the most interesting.
The Turner Prize exhibition is at Tate Britain until January 14th
