Visions that turn modern life in to debatable art

By MICHAEL GLOVER

Five artists were yesterday shortlisted for Britain's Turner Prize for modern art, which this year has a distinctly political feel.

Two of the artists - a duo who will compete against three individual artists on a shortlist of four - have created a digital model of the "last official address" of Osama bin Laden. Another work is a filmed reconstruction of a battle between pickets and police during the miners' strike.

The shortlisted artists - Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, Jeremy Deller, Kutlug Ataman and Yinka Shonibare - are vying for a prize doubled by the new sponsors, the gin-maker Gordon's, to £40,000 ($118,000). Their work will probably reignite the row over the quality of the Turner entries.

The prize has always lent itself to headlines decrying the wackiness of modern art. In 1995, the Sun raged against that year's winner, Damien Hirst, for making art out of dead animals. In 1999, Tracey Emin's unmade bed got the red tops in a twist. The year before, it was Chris Ofili and the elephant dung he used on his canvases. And last year, Grayson Perry hammed it up in his pretty blue frock, becoming the darling of the Daily Mail in the process.

But for all its lapses of taste and judgement, the Turner has made many good decisions. Its winners have not, generally speaking, been outrageously undeserving - rather the opposite. And it has also helped to ensure that contemporary art is a regular subject for heated debate among cab drivers, publicans and their clients, which would have been almost unthinkable 20 years ago.

The general public used to think art was something the so-called educated middle classes indulged in. The Turner has helped to prove that so much hogwash.

And the fact that the Turner has actively encouraged participation in an ongoing national debate about what art does, what it is for, what it should be made from (if not dead animals, why not?) means more people have felt empowered to express their opinions. They have lost their fear of the idea of the exclusiveness of high culture and its attendant snobberies and cliquishness.

This year, for example, the public were invited to make their own nominations for the Turner shortlist. They made 350 suggestions which the judges took into account and three of the names made it on to the final shortlist of four.

So who has it deservedly brought to the public's attention? Sculptor Richard Deacon, for example, won the prize in 1987, and has continued to craft often brilliant work from materials that would once have been thought inappropriate for sculpture. Deacon was one of a group of important young British sculptors who all went on either to win the prize or be shortlisted for it - including Tony Cragg (winner 1988), Antony Gormley (winner 1994), Anish Kapoor (winner 1991), Richard Wentworth, Alison Wilding and Bill Woodrow - and who have between them reforged the identity of British sculpture. One of the most important sculptures in the new Chicago Millennium Park, due to open in late July, was made by Kapoor.

And then there are the painters - Howard Hodgkin (winner 1985), Lucian Freud (shortlisted 1988 and 1989), Peter Doig (shortlisted 1994).

So the Turner is not perversely anti-traditionalist. This year there will be the usual outcry that the prize has ignored the traditional crafts of painting and sculpture. But what this year's shortlist makes evident is that artists now tend to be multi-disciplinary, readily shifting from video to sculpture to drawing to painting and back again, and often creating hybrid works from several different disciplines.

That's the way art is now. Artists are living, love it or hate it, in a restless, multimedia world. And the Turner has helped to make that clear.

- INDEPENDENT