Exhibitions 1

Turner Prize (Tate Gallery, till 6 February)

What a fuss

Martin Gayford

It has been the best of Turner Prizes, and the worst of Turner Prizes. The best, obvi- ously, because after a few slim years the 1999 edition has been rewarded with a return of high-profile publicity. In fact, it is hard to think of a Turner Prize exhibit which has elicited quite so much journalis- tic response as has Tracey Emin's unmade bed — columns in the centre pages of seri- ous newspapers, discussions on the radio on the subject of 'What is art?'.

Disapproval of the Turner Prize even made it on to a Daily Telegraph editorial list of opinions that make one a conservative, surely not the least tribute to the attention- grabbing powers of Ms Emin's underwear. And why was it the worst of Turner Prizes? — see the same reasons, as itemised above.

And what of the the other work in the lit- tle show which accompanies the Prize? Well, after all the fuss, that comes as a bit of a let-down. In addition to Tracey's domestic vignette, this year we had two consignments of worthy but dullish video, plus the works of an artist who takes photographs from unusual apertures, in this case the window of a washing-machine in a launderette.

So let's start, since she has so ably las- soed everybody's attention, with Tracey Emin. She is an odd case of an artist who has risen to national fame without really producing any trademark, easy to identify art. Damien Hirst pulled off the same trick a while back, but he had a pickled shark to help him. Until she came up with the bed, Emin was best known for a tent on which she had embroidered the names of all the people with whom she had slept (not nec- essarily in the News of the World sense).

This is mildly scandalous as an idea, but pretty nondescript to look at. It did not serve to give her more than art-world fame. She rocketed to overnight notoriety as the result of falling down drunk on a television discussion — along the lines of 'What is art?' — after a previous Turner Prize award ceremony. This, of course, was exactly the right degree of respect to show to television debates of that kind, and the nation immediately took her to its heart (as it once did the late Gilbert Harding, and probably would, say, William Hague if he had the nerve to do it).

Her image thenceforward was rather like that of those alarming women to be seen in a campaign for vodka a few years ago, slosh- ing triple measures around and guffawing in a menacing sort of way (Emin has lately been on posters advertising gin). Her biog- raphy so far, as narrated in the video including teenage promiscuity, abortions, being booed off stage at a disco-dancing competition in Margate in 1978, the attempt by a Turkish lover to throw her off a cliff is certainly gripping.

She clearly has an artistic temperament in the grand old tradition. But where's the work? Well, there's lots of it, in so many different forms that it's hard to focus on. As well as the bed, on show at the Tate there are scratchy little figurative drawings of naked Traceys, and a banner embroi- dered and macramed — I think the word is — with various obscene complaints about school and what not (Emin is fast approaching 40, by the way). This put me in mind of a neat encapsulation I once heard of a third party as 'The sort of woman who wears macrame badges read- ing "Women are Powerful".' She is also fond of taking pictures of herself doing this and that, often in the nude.

There are complaints that all this activity is rather egotistical — me me me — but egomania is a thoroughly traditional quali- ty for artists to have (see Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso). Traditional is perhaps the word for Emin. The bed is only an up- dated bit of la vie de boheme, rather Sick- ert, in fact. At the Royal College of Art she had the reputation of being a good painter.

She strikes me as being an artist of rather old-fashioned gifts who has made a successful bid to represent herself as some- thing more publicity worthy. Perhaps, for being old-fashioned and bohemian, she deserved to win. The others certainly aren't that. This year, for the first time, fully 50 per cent of the short-list is made up of video artists, with the other short-listee Tracey Emin's 'My Bed, 1998

being a photographer (though he has apparently moved on to other things).

Brazil, General de Gaulle once remarked, has great potential, and always will have. Video, it seems to me, is just like that — forever promising, always about to take over as the medium of the future, never actually delivering. On the other hand, video and photo-based art is current- ly very popular with the art nomenklatura, witness this short-list.

Personally, with very few exceptions, mainly by Bill Viola, I have seldom seen a piece of video art that stayed in the mind the way great art does. It is almost always competent, worthy, quite interesting. Cer- tainly, that applies to the works of Jane and Louise Wilson and Steve McQueen. The former, who are twins, produce what might be termed topographical video. In one of the specimens on show, for example, one is taken through the gaming-rooms of Las Vegas, and the bowels of the Hoover Dam — all displayed in a complex, multi- 'Prey, 1999, by Steve McQueen, winner of the Tamer Prize screened way. It is very well done, and, as the blurb says, atmospheric — a bit atmo- spheric, a bit interesting, not enough for me.

The same applies to Steve McQueen, whose most substantial piece consists of a re-enactment of that famous shot in a Buster Keaton film in which the whole front of building falls towards the hero, a window miraculously coinciding precisely with his position. McQueen's video goes through this instant again, and again, from different angles, trying, as he explains, to keep that instant going.

There is always one Turner Prize short- listee of whom no one has heard (no doubt because of complex secret regulations). This year it was Steven Pippin, who turned out to be a most engaging figure, who once spent months locked inside a train lavatory trying to take a photographic image using the lavatory bowl as a camera (results a shade disappointing). He also advances the heretical view that the art world was largely a waste of time.

On these grounds — although his wash- ing-machine photographs are less than stunning — Pippin would have been my second choice, with Emin — for effrontery and drunkenness — first. In that waste of time the art world, it has always been held that the Wilson twins were a shoe-in. As we now know Steve McQueen won. I some- times think I will never understand the Turner Prize.