Prepare to be angry and confounded

By IAN BURRELL

British culture minister Tim Howell's description of last year's exhibition as "cold, mechanical, conceptional bullshit" will not stick this time around.

Grayson Perry, a transvestite multimedia artist, whose work includes a depiction of an emasculated pit bull terrier, and the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, who have exhibited sexually mutated child mannequins, are on the shortlist announced by the Turner Prize jury at Tate Britain in London.

Other finalists named are Willie Doherty, a Derry-based photography and video artist whose work centres on the tensions of the Northern Irish conflict and the sectarian divide, and Anya Gallaccio, a Scottish-born sculptor specialising in ephemeral materials including flowers and fruit.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a member of the Turner jury, said the shortlist was one of the most interesting in the prize's history.

"They are four artists working in four very different ways," he says. "All are in their mid-thirties or early forties. This is not a Turner Prize devoted to the newest of the new, the youngest of the young. They are all artists working for a number of years and making effective contributions."

In anticipation of the annual controversy surrounding the Turner, Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, pleaded with the prize's critics to exercise caution for writing off the offerings of this year's shortlist. "When you attack the shortlist this year, look before you leap to conclusions."

He says the Turner Prize has brought 70 artists to wider public attention over 20 years, and some have gone on to become household names. Previous winners include Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Chris Osili and Rachel Whiteread.

"Love it or hate it, it's pilloried but also imitated," Deuchar says. "I do think the Turner Prize does matter."

The prize will again give the public the opportunity to express its views on the exhibited works, either on the Tate's website or on notice boards at the gallery. It was on such a board that Howells made his brutal observations last year.

Of this year's shortlisted artists, the best known are Jake and Dinos Chapman, who Tate assistant curator Katherine Stout says are "well known for their consistent ability to confound and shock their audience".

The Chapmans came to prominence in the early 90s with three-dimensional recreations of Goya's series of etchings, the Disasters of War. They again used the human body to explore an aesthetic of horror with their 1996 work, Tragic Anatomies, when they showed a group of sexually mutated child mannequins, naked except for the Nike trainers and sprouting genitalia from unlikely places.

The Chapmans' most ambitious work was an enormous tableau in the shape of a swastika, made up of more than 5000 Nazi figurines acting out a scene of death and destruction.

Last year the brothers produced Works from the Chapman Family Collection, which showed rare ethnic carvings embossed with the brandings of the fast food giant McDonald's.

This year they returned to Goya, committing what the jurors describe as "the ultimate artistic taboo" by desecrating the work of the Spanish master and doctoring his original prints with hand-painted cartoon heads. The exhibition will open at Tate Britain on October 29 and the winner will be announced on December 7.

- INDEPENDENT