Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed: Turner Prize 2005, Tate Britain until Jan 22. Admission £5 (€7.35), 0044-207-8878888.
Apart from the fact that it features several relatively little-known artists, one of the main talking points of this year's Turner Prize shortlist is that it includes a painter, Gillian Carnegie. "Painter shortlisted for fine art award" is not, on the face of it, headline news, but in the context of, particularly, the contemporary London art world, it is enough to cause a stir. It has been several years since a painter was shortlisted for the prize named after Britain's most famous painter.
The work of another shortlisted artist, Simon Starling, seemed to harbour some potential for arousing controversy. The main physical component that Starling shows is a big, roughly made wooden shed. It might have been designed to invite the disparaging comment: but it's just a shed. Which it is. Except that it is Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2). Starling found the shed standing by the Rhine. He dismantled it, reusing the wood to make a traditional riverboat, which he then navigated downriver to Basle. There, he transformed the boat into its original shed form for a gallery installation.
As a conceptual art project, there is a certain elegance to this sequence of events. The logic breaks down, however, when the shed is transported (presumably not by the same self-sufficient method) from mainland Europe and installed in Tate Britain. In the gallery, it is just an idiosyncratic wooden structure sadly adrift, so to speak, from its initial functional context and, equally, from the transformative cycle of Starling's adventure in nomadic architecture. It would be more pertinent, and probably more impressive, if we saw not a big shed but carefully formulated documentation of what he had done. He is, though, a thoughtful artist, and his focus on time, energy and futility comes through consistently, but it could well be that his shortlisting is premature in terms of his level of artistic maturity.
As the show is laid out, you move from Starling's work to Darren Almond's installation, If I Had You, which comprises four video projections widely distributed at different angles throughout a huge darkened space. The work is about memory and loss: Almond brought his grandmother to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, the first time she had been back there since her husband died 20 years ago. One screen focuses on her face as she deals with the complex emotions of the event.
On the one hand this could be described as voyeuristic and manipulative in the way of reality television programmes. On the other, it could be argued that it is a valid articulation of an area of experience with general resonance. However, whether by accident or design, Almond's use of sound and image is hackneyed. He comes across as all too ready to settle for a facile sentimentality. His grandmother's dignified demeanour calls for more.
After Almond, Gillian Carnegie is astringent. She is recognisably affiliated to a growing number of contemporary painters who practise what might be described as variations of impoverished realism. Not that her work suggests a world as wan and exhausted as that in the paintings of Luc Tuymans, for example. But she is similarly cautious, cagey, mistrustful in addressing things in terms of paint, taking nothing for granted.
The notes accompanying the exhibition tend towards hyperbole. Making excessive claims for what we are looking at is now standard curatorial practice, and Carnegie is presented as a painter of exceptional technical accomplishment.
In fact, there's little evidence for this in the work which, while perfectly competent technically, is positively formulated to sideline technique. A series of studies of trees makes up a case in point. For what she is trying to do, the tree paintings lack the requisite verve of delivery. Exactly what they lack can be seen in the paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold, whose paintings of trees featured at the Kerlin Gallery earlier this year.
But Carnegie is all the same a capable, intelligent painter, trying to inventively deal with established genres: landscape, still life, the portrait, the human figure.
Jim Lambie has made an installation, The Kinks, that evokes retrospective psychedelia and the rave culture of the more recent past. The gallery floor is transformed into a disco-like mass of noisy, rhythmic patterning by the application of contrasting bands of black, white and silver adhesive tape. The notional starting point for the whole thing is a silhouette image of the group The Kinks, which gives the overall piece its title. Several outsize, kitsch, ornamental figurines of birds, with arbitrary attachments and embellishments, are arranged throughout the space.
What does it mean, you might ask. It probably doesn't mean anything in the sense of being about something external to the work. Yet it does generate great energy and its own distinctive atmosphere. You could even say that it is giddy with its own ecstatic energy in a way that evokes the joyful buoyancy of ecstasy-fuelled clubbers. But there is also a post-party strangeness and hollowness about it, so that it is, in all, an uningratiating, provocative piece of work. Lambie is regarded by many as the favourite.
He and Carnegie are, on the evidence of the show, the two most interesting contenders, but in truth nothing on view really merits the accolade that the Turner should represent, not because their work is bad, but because the prize comes too soon in their careers. The winner will be announced during a live broadcast on Channel 4 on December 5th.
