Powerful display of trouble and strife

By T J McNAMARA


Much of the comment on this year's Turner Prize has focused on the transvestite persona adopted by Grayson Perry, the winner.

There has been more discussion of the embroidery of his dresses than the work itself and raised the question: Did he get the prize for his pots or his frocks? The reality is that the tall vases which are the vehicle for his ideas are considerable works of art and make him a worthy winner.

The show of work by the four Turner finalists at the Tate Modern makes a powerful group, though sparsely attended compared with the exhibition Turner and Venice on the floor below, where the queues are substantial.

By early this month, the installation in the first room by Anya Gallaccio had reached its planned decline. It is dominated by a large bronze tree cast in a mould made from an actual plant.

This permanent monumental object is hung with a symbol of transience: bunches of apples. As intended, these have become brown and rotten. They have begun to drip fluid which has puddled on the floor.

Another of her works is a mass of gerberas squashed behind glass. Their colour has faded and they, too, have the brown of decay.

The solidity of made things and the changing, decaying qualities of natural things are graphically conveyed.

The only thing unchanged in the installation is a work consisting of twigs with glass berries that stands almost unnoticed in the corner.

In the next room is all human activity. Video clips by Willy Doherty show a man running, panic-stricken across a steel bridge. It is significant that the bridge is in Northern Ireland. The videos are projected on two huge screens. On one the man is running towards you. On the other he is running away.

The sense of trouble, panic and contrasting but matching points of view all suggest a political interpretation but offers no resolution.

This is disturbing, but the work in the third space actually produces nausea. Most of the work in the installation by the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman is based on images by the great Spanish artist Goya, more specifically on his horrifying series of etchings, The Disasters of War.

Goya, who lived through the invasion of Spain by the Napoleonic forces of France, recorded the atrocities inflicted by both sides, though the catalogue of the show insists that the violence was only on the French side.

The engravings by Goya are unremittingly savage in the depiction of atrocity. The Chapman brothers have reworked one of them as a sculpture that dominates the room. Once again it is a tree. One of Goya's prints shows a dead tree with the torso and severed limbs of a man recently killed stuck on its pointed branches.

The brothers' work depicts a later stage of the same scene. The flesh has rotted away from the bones and the skeletal remains are covered with worms and flies, beetles and rats.

In a cavity of the tree hangs a bat. A mouse cowers in a hole in its roots. Menacingly, at the top of the tree sits a flesh-eating raven with its bright eyes cocked at the feast. Gratuitously, a severed head is given a clown's nose and elf's ears.

A complete set of The Disasters is ranged around the wall. Every one has been altered by the addition of a clownish face.

Goya's great work has a documentary power. The additions are a kind of atrocity in themselves, a post-modern gesture whose cleverness does not hide a cynical cultivation of shock tactics.

The fourth room has the winner's work. The ceramics themselves are large vases, traditional but varied in shape. Glazed and richly coloured, they make an immediate impression of a fine, conventional exhibition of ceramics, though not of modern craft pottery.

Close attention to each one reveals how modern they are. Recorded on their surface in collage, glazing, gilding and some very incisive drawing are treatments of modern psychological dilemmas and stressful situations from art politics to child abuse.

The truly remarkable thing is how individual each piece is and how treatment and colour are related to the subject matter.

The range is between the happy, homely and quaint Triumph of Innocence, to the wintry bleakness of We Have Found the Body of your Child, which employs a snowy landscape taken from Breughel to emphasise the chilling atmosphere.

There is an autobiographical Vase Using My Own Family, which is decorated with family photographs, and a memorable vase with energetically curved figures on it that recall antique Greek vase painting and yet comment on the modern art scene.

It is pale blue and brown and covered with rabbits and peacocks. It is called Lovely Consensus.

Like everything else in the show it is strenuously unsentimental.

A speech balloon attached to a child on one vase says it all: "Yes, I am a rounded, sensitive plant. Now hand over your money."

And, yes, the show is completed by a silk embroidered dress hung on the wall.

The embroidery is intricate and witty but the dress is a minor matter compared with the thought-provoking, disturbing impact of the vases.