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The critics: VISUAL ART - Big thrills in the broom cupboard

Independent, The (London), Nov 11, 2001

In certain respects the Turner Prize never changes: art fleetingly makes the front pages; the dreary Stuckists protest outside the Tate and the winner gets a cheque for 20 grand. What has changed over the past 17 years is the space given to the exhibition, not just in terms of column inches, but the physical place in which the art is shown. It used to be a rag-bag affair in the Duveen galleries on display for barely four weeks with the shortlist all bunged in together.

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Now, though, it's 164 square meters of unshared, white-walled space for each artist for the best part of three months. The old public school adage about winning and taking part looms large. This year the use of space could hardly be more varied. The show opens with an elegant if straightforward two-part display from Richard Billingham. It has often been said that, after his touching but brutally honest photographs of his alcoholic dad, his fat, tattooed mum and speed-freaking brother in a council flat in the West Midlands, Billingham's work has never really evolved. I disagree. The video pieces that he made of the self-same family, one of which appears here, could so easily degenerate into docusoap but instead seem timeless and deeply personal.

Ray in Bed shows Billingham senior serenely asleep, the drunk's ultimate escape. The camera moves close up to the point of blurred abstraction and then almost caresses the ravaged skin. It's intensely affectionate but also painterly, a characteristic drawn out in Billingham's photographs in the adjacent room where both tightly cropped English landscapes and a panoramic view of the mountains of Cephalonia seem inspired by a genuine awe for the natural world in spite of the heritage industries that have grown up around Constable and Captain Corelli.

It's as if he's trying desperately to circumvent a jaded visual culture and to see with a fresh eye, a painter's eye perhaps. Next year he's going to the British School in Rome for a few weeks where he may well take up the brushes he left behind at art school.

After Billingham - the void, or rather Martin Creed's ongoing attempt to make something out of nothing. The room appears to be empty but then the lights go out, and five seconds later they flicker back on again and the space seems oddly full, as if every square centimetre was being used and then drained of life. Nothing has been added to the gallery or taken away and yet something has been created.

There are numerous ways to read Work No 227: The lights going on and off, from a rumination on mortality to a critique of minimalism but that's all in the mind of the beholder. I found it subtly disorienting, then it made me anxious, then finally irritated, just as I did when I saw it in London five years ago.

Creed is an absurdist and a showman. He plays in a band called Owada and sings songs about "Nothing". Last year he put a neon sign on the front of Tate Britain which read the whole world + the work = the whole world which was a neat summary of art's place in the broader scheme of things. In the context of his brief career, Work No 227 makes perfect sense and some think it a brave gesture in the Turner Prize. It's the still centre at the heart of this year's show but it feels like a wasted opportunity. Better, perhaps, to have brought Work No 200: Half the air in a given space fresh from the British Art Show to the Tate and filled the place with balloons, playfulness and a bit of basic physics or taken an even greater chance and made a completely new work.

Here, Isaac Julien reads as the antithesis of Creed. His two films take half an hour all told; they're lush, almost baroque in detail and effect. The Long Road to Mazatlan is a camp western-cum-road movie with nods to Hockney's Bigger Splash and Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Julien displays it as a triptych with mirrored images and slight time delays used to give a multi-perspectival account of a cowboy-meets-boy saga.

Aside from the screaming stooges and floozies who occasionally populate the screens, this collaboration with choreographer Javier de Frutos is sensual and full of the most exquisite textures - from glistening bodies in a swimming pool to a snake meandering across the desert floor. This obsession with surface and touch is brought more vividly to life in Julien's staging of Vagabondia where the red velvet dress of one of the characters who recreates aspects of the history of the Sir John Soane Museum is seemingly replicated on the floor and walls of the darkened room where the film is shown.

Two months ago, when Mike Nelson was wrestling with what to do for the Turner Prize, he said that he was worried that it seemed "symbolic of an artist's work as opposed to actually being a show", and that Nelson was curious to see if he could create a work that "had life and that wasn't institutionally killed".

He has succeeded in doing just that. The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent is overblown only in its title. At first you think you've stumbled out of the gallery and into the corridors which lead to the store room. In a sense you have, but it's filled with doors not paintings, stacked in racks and part of an earlier Nelson piece called The Coral Reef. Here the artist catalogues himself and makes numerous references to his own method of working while at the same time reminding us of the mundane side of major museums. Instead of being killed by the institution, he's taken it on headfirst and won by creating a labyrinth in which it is possible to get lost and to lose oneself. From room to room, vignettes appear - a mobile and some keys, an open cupboard, a mop and bucket, clues to a story which the spectator completes as if piecing together a series of jump-cuts in a film.

The critics: VISUAL ART - Big thrills in the broom cupboard

Independent, The (London), Nov 11, 2001

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