Exhibitions 1

Turner Prize 2001 (Tate Britain, till 20 January)

Nothing ventured

Martin Gayford

You have to be quite old to remember a time when the Turner Prize — founded in 1984 — wasn't one of the major items in the art calendar. In those days, most of this year's finalists would still have been at school, about the same age as the sixth-formers who pullulated all over the current exhibition at Tate Britain when I went round it one chilly Monday morning recently.

One may disagree with the view of the sponsor, Janice Hadlow, head of history, arts and religion at Channel 4, that the TP is one of the greatest cultural events of the year'. One may find it an annual invitation to raised blood pressure and spluttering irritation, as do a doughty rearguard of journalists and a probably shrinking segment of the population. But it is hard to dispute that the TP is a triumph of publicity, hugely successful at putting often rather recondite contemporary art on the map.

The higher blood pressure and the raised public profile are, of course, closely connected. It is largely its detractors, I suspect, who have made the Turner Prize as prominent as it is. Hearing that something is new and radical and under attack, people throng along to sec what all the fuss is about. And an important part of the recipe is that there should be at least one work that strikes the public mind as really outrageous. (They're having a laugh with us, aren't they?', as someone insisted to me recently of contemporary artists.) This year the position of most outrageous Turner Prize nominee was won bands-down by Martin Creed, with his 'Work #227: The Lights Going On and Off — which consists of just what it says, the lights in one room at the Tate going on and off every five seconds.

Now, of course, Martin Creed is having a bit of a laugh. He is clearly a humourist, as can be gauged from his deadpan titles (Work #88: A sheet of A4 poner crumpled into a ball', 1994, is another example, which also means just what it says). But that doesn't stop him from being a serious artist at the same time.

His subject is nothingness, which is of course a topic of profound metaphysical interest and some art-historical lineage. In 1958 — a decade before Martin Creed was born — the French artist Yves Klein exhibited a completely empty gallery in Paris as 'The Void'. (Some of the visitors to that thought Klein was amusing himself at their expense, but their anger was assuaged by brilliant blue cocktails designed by the artist.) Readers of the little book called The Nothing that Is by Robert Caplan will know that without nothing — or zero — we would have no modern mathematics, perhaps no modern world.

Creed is fascinated, he says, by the 'join' between something and nothing. How close to nothing can a work of art be, and still be something? It's an interesting question, and Creed is — intellectually at any rate — an interesting artist. But I must say that the piece in the TP exhibition failed for me to find that elusive point. It is a good deal closer to nothing than to something; indeed, when filled with earnest sixth-formers, hard to notice at all.

The other contestants employ the more conventional media of installation and video. Richard Billingham has made a reputation with his photographs of his family — probably typical enough of modern Britain in their way — consisting of alcoholic father, tattooed and unslim mother, and speed-addicted brother. Billingham — something of a aesthete, and influenced by the painters Walter Sickert and Frank Auerbach — is apparently surprised by the reaction to these images.

His object was to reveal the beauty in everyday life, not to produce a shocking exposé of life in the underclass. But as the Tate notes — in an understatement that verges in its way on the sublime — photographs such as the celebrated one of Billingham's father, Ray, 'passed out drunk by the toilet, contravene traditional taboos about which aspects of family life should be made public'.

In reaction, Billingham has taken to anodyne imagery of landscapes and whatnot. But this is a mistake. His subject is his parents, as indeed it has been for more artists and writers than are attracted by nothingness. The video Ray in Bed, which examines BiHingham senior pore by pore and follicle by follicle as he lingers, unwilling to rise at 10 a.m., is compulsive art viewing.

Isaac Julien's videos do not quite come into that category. He approaches video art from the other direction from most practitioners — as an arty film-maker, that is, rather than as an ex-painter or photographer who wants to make images that move. This is a dodgy area for video as an art form — how close can it come to the join with ordinary film?

Julien's split-screen work Vagabondia, set in the Soane Museum, is pleasant enough, and certainly focuses your attention on aspects — colour, form — that are marginalised in the mainstream movie. The other work, After Mazatlan, which deals with an inconclusive erotic encounter between two cowboys in a swimming-pool, was less to my taste. Both are reminiscent of those short films which used to be shown before the main feature in art cinemas. In the Tate they certainly get a more respectful audience than they used to, with nobody taking the opportunity to open their sweets or read the newspaper.

Installation used to be the most fashionable new art medium before video became so prevalent. As practised by Mike Nelson, it is an idiom with a history going back through such predecessors as the Russian Ilya Kabakov. If video is sometimes like film escaped from the cinema, this kind of installation is like a huge theatrical set with no actors except, that is, you, the visitor.

Nelson made a big impression at the Venice Biennale with a huge, labyrinthine installation in a disused brewery on the Giudecca. The Tate Gallery space doesn't give him so much scope, but his piece gives the most convincing impression that one has accidentally wandered behind the scenes into the Tate store rooms. From Martin Creed's Nothing, you go straight into a lovingly recreated realm of worn lino, plywood partitions and discarded cigarette packets — a place crammed, that is, with humble, evocative and mysterious things.

Well, I seem to have softened about the Turner Prize. Once I used to denounce it; now, like all those sixth-formers, I find it quite interesting. The only point I have never fathomed is on what basis the prize is awarded. The person I want to win never gets it, so, to avoid putting a hex on anyone, this year I am going to make no prediction. By the time you read this, in any case, the winner may well have been announced.