Spreading the word

This year's Turner Prize exhibition is faintly disconcerting but not, perhaps, in the way that those responsible for it might have wished. Conventional notions about the nature of art are not subverted; preconceptions about society and morality are not deconstructed; human perception itself is not radically redefined and re-evaluated - or at least no more than usual on occasions such as these. The exhibited work of the four shortlisted artists - Douglas Gordon, Craigie Horsfeld, Gary Hume and Simon Patterson - turns out to be highly academic; that is to stay, almost all of it conforms to the various models of nonconformism that hold sway in the theory and practice of late 20th-century art. As if to demonstrate this, the exhibition actually culminates in an academy (or at least what passes for one, in the context of the Turner Prize, in the year 1996): a room full of chairs where the audience, having got through the necessary hard work of contemplating the art, can settle down to enjoy a continuous-loop video, made by Turner Prize sponsors Channel 4, devoted to its exegesis.

This is what disconcerts - the sheer rapidity with which experience is short-circuited by explanation. One minute, you are contemplating Gary Hume's reworking, in enamel paint on aluminium, of the face of a rabbit drawn from the medieval French tapestry La Dame a la Licorne; the next, you are watching Gary Hume on tape, sitting in his studio, proclaiming his reluctance to proclaim on the subject of his own work while simultaneously announcing his desire to "empower and democratise the viewer". One minute, you are watching Douglas Gordon's A Divided Self, a work for video in which the artist's two hands battle for supremacy with one another, a solipsist's arm-wrestling contest; the next, you are listening to Gordon as he explains his belief in the sacrosanct duty of the artist to corrupt and corrode received ideas. Interpretation, Susan Sontag once remarked, is the revenge of the intellect upon art. But it is hard to maintain the truth of that aphorism in an age when artists themselves seem so ready to collude.

The Tate Gallery remains the only British art institution to have gone so far as actually to appoint a Head of Interpretation. In recent years the museum has become increasingly keen to tell its audience what to think about what they see; and it is doubtless thanks to the Department of Interpretation that visitors to the permanent collection can now rent little grey talking telephones on which they may dial up the low-down on artists ranging from Sir Peter Lely to Salvador Dali. In the Tate's defence, many people seem to like having their experience of art cluttered up by words in this way; and surveys have been done which suggest that the average visitor to any museum spends at least as much time reading labels as looking at pictures. But the Turner Prize display takes the verbalisation of the visual to a new extreme.

The intentions behind it are doubtless good. The purpose of the prize, according to Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and chairman of the prize jury, is "to honour an outstanding British artist and to bring new developments in the visual arts to the attention of people who are interested in the culture of our own time, but who do not regularly visit commercial galleries, smaller public galleries in London and the regions, or exhibitions of British art abroad". In other words, its aim is to evangelise, to spread the word about contemporary art to the open-minded but unconverted. The abundance of explanatory material - the presence, indeed, of an entire gallery consecrated to explanation, is presumably meant to sugar the difficult pill of contemporary art.

The trouble is that this fosters the notion that works of art are like the clues in crossword puzzles - and that, if you should find yourself bamboozled, you can simply look the answers up in the back. This is reflected in the way that the audience for the exhibition has chosen to treat it, acting as if the post-mortem were the main event. The galleries containing art are sparsely populated, while the room containing the video is packed. Clearly no one wants to leave before they have found out just what it is, exactly, that these curious, exotic creatures - these Modern Artists - are really on about. The paradox of all this is that it has the effect of making the work of the shortlisted artists seem a lot more arcane than it actually is.

Of the four, Gary Hume is the most glamorously obscure in his concerns. The only painter to have been nominated - the Turner Prize has not been awarded to a painter since 1985, when Howard Hodgkin won it - Hume practises a form of disenchanted, ironically detached Pop Art. Like Andy Warhol, he is interested in the iconic properties of certain imagery, and, like Warhol, he is attracted to banality - partly, perhaps, for strategic reasons, since his limited repertoire as a painter means that he is incapable of rising very far above the banal.

Hume's After Petrus Christus, a deliberately botched copy of one of the most haunting Northern Renaissance portraits in Berlin's Gemaldegalerie, is reminiscent of Warhol's late pastiches of Leonardo's Last Supper. Old Master status, it may be inferred, is not one of the painter's goals. But he does not seem especially in love with the modern world either. The face of Hume's acidic portrait of Kate Moss, Kate, has been left blank, which looks like a painter's way of sabotaging an image that has been thrown at him so many times, on television and in magazines, that he is thoroughly sick of it. There is an acerbic, bitter quality about Hume's sensibility which gives his art an undeniable force. But the cynicism underlying his sticky paintings of stupid stuff may already have led him into something of a cul-de-sac. The German artist Sigmar Polke (who, on visual evidence alone, must have been a great influence on Hume) has been practising an extremely similar form of disaffected, deliberately tasteless, anti-Pop Art for nearly three decades now. But as Polke's own increasingly impoverished uvre demonstrates, this is not a type of pictorial language that contains much possibility for growth. The inability to believe in or to love anything is not easily deepened.

Craigie Horsfield's black-and-white pictures of people in Barcelona look like competent but hardly outstanding instances of social documentary photography. They are implicitly democratic pictures, being images, in many cases, of those living at the margins of society. But their humane qualities are slightly undercut by the photographer's rather too evident ambition to be regarded as a High Artist. The photographs are blown up to a large scale, which is effective in one or two cases (particularly a splendid photograph of a crowded ballroom) but in others merely looks self-important. Horsfeld's pictures are described as "unique photographs", which is a contradiction in terms, or at least a contrivance, because the uniqueness of a photograph is something that can only be engineered by limiting the number of pictures printed from a negative and then destroying it. This is generally done to make the picture rarer (more like fine art) and to make money, which sits a little uneasily with the generally Marxist tenor of Horsfield's work.

Simon Patterson works in that fairly small corner of late 20th-century aesthetic concerns known as Word Art, leavening with at least a degree of wit the po-faced solemnity of forebears like the American Conceptualist Lawrence Weiner or Jenny Holzer. Patterson tinkers with lists, tables, maps and diagrams, changing configurations or altering words. His reordering of the London tube map, changing the names of the stations to those of philosophers or film stars, is fairly well known and is included in the exhibition. But The Last Supper Arranged According to the Flat Back Four Formation, in which Patterson composed the names of Jesus Christ and the 12 disciples as if they were a football team sheet, was perhaps his finest hour. Conceived around the time of the 1990 World Cup, when Bobby Robson chose the cautious flat back four formation for the England team, this was Patterson's way of tracing an old English Protestant fear of Catholic flamboyance into modern English football management. He is clearly a clever person, but what he is about seems a terribly small thing: the fragile nature of his conceits and his briefly funny jokes makes the ambition to render them permanent, as Art, seem somewhat perverse.

Patterson is a relatively expansive artist compared to Douglas Gordon, whose main piece in the Turner Prize display, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is a variation on 24 Hour Psycho, the work that stole the show from Damien Hirst at the Hayward Gallery's "Spellbound" last year, thus winning Gordon his place on the shortlist. 24 Hour Psycho was Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho slowed down so that projection took exactly 24 hours; Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a similarly slowed-down version of the transformation sequence from an early film version of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, starring Frederic March. There is not a great deal to be said for it. Gordon has noticed and enjoyed the somewhat sinister effect that can be obtained by slowing down a film. The story disappears because of the longueurs involved, and the moving image, almost but not quite stilled, takes on properties of a mildly hallucinatory nature. People screaming look as though they might only be laughing or yawning. On this occasion, the degree to which the melodramatic Mr March overacted is made painfully apparent. But the depths which Gordon seems to hope he might be mining are not in reality terribly profound, because watching slow-motion film is an experience subject to the law of diminishing returns. Gordon has hit upon a device around which it might be fun to theme a chain of restaurants, not one upon which to build a career as an artist

The Turner Prize Exhibition is at the Tate Gallery, London SW1, to 12 January 1997 (0171-887 8000). The winner will be announced on Thursday 28 November