The Turner Prize 2005
Until January 18; Tate Britain
Winner announced December 5

How can it be that an exhibition is at once wildly flamboyant, dripping with romance, full of grand gestures – and yet, inexplicably – modest? Welcome to this year’s Turner Prize.

The zany psychedelia of Jim Lambie is essentially junk shop detritus transformed. Darren Almond’s bittersweet video installation is out for the night, metaphorically speaking, with its slippers still on. Gillian Carnegie’s imposing paintings stubbornly undermine their own existence, and Simon Starling’s grand expeditions are, at their core, demonstrations of human inadequacy.

The modesty of this exhibition is not anything to do with meagre talent, low budgets or lack of confidence. Nor is it the kind of false modesty, of finely unhoned scribbles and scraps, which has seeped into every corner of graphic design. Instead, it’s an intelligent humility, the kind that starts from an acceptance of our limits as human beings.

You’re face to face with your limits as soon as you walk in the door. The chunky back of a wooden shed is planted squarely in your path, courtesy of Glasgow artist Simon Starling. Remnants of a long-dead creeper cling to the rotting planks, and an old birds’ nest is tucked under the corrugated eaves.

Inside, a crumpled beer-can sits on a beam, presiding over neat stacks of rope, bolts and metal plates. Like the mystery left-overs of a home-assembly furniture kit, they hint at an amateurish construction project, as do the irregular incisions in the floor. Why does this shed look like it’s been through a food processor?

The name of the work is a clue. Shedboatshed started life as a woodshed on the Rhine. Starling took it apart and turned it into a boat in the local style. Putting the remaining bits of shed in the boat, he sailed the whole lot down the Rhine to a gallery in Basel and transformed it back into a shed. The whole endeavour is pleasingly self-contained, if you ignore the fact that Shedboatshed is unlikely to have sailed itself to Tate Britain.

This is one of three works by Starling in the show, each involving an absurd journey. Tabernas Desert Run, owned by Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, is a cumbersome bicycle with a home-made, environmentally-friendly engine, exhibited back to back with a delicate watercolour painting of a cactus. The picture was painted with the bike’s only waste product, water, collected during Starling’s trip across a desert. As with Shedboatshed, Starling’s effort at efficiency is clumsy, shown up by the beauty and simplicity of the far more efficient cactus.

Starling’s journeys aren’t ridiculous just for the sake of it. They expose in miniature the absurdity of our global systems of trade and exchange. The third, and most recent work, One Ton, II, does it quite explicitly. Having discovered that it takes a whole ton of ore to create one ounce of platinum, Starling decided to make one ounce’s worth of platinum prints.

The five photographs show the scarred mine in South Africa from which Starling took his ton of ore. There is no vegetation, no horizon, no sky. Only a vast tract of scarified rubble, represented on paper by its cause, and its effect, the platinum. Knowing this, looking at the photograph creates a short circuit in your brain. Vast invisible economies are made sickeningly visible, as you struggle to comphrehend this fundamental imbalance.

Once your mind has been twisted out of shape by Starling, it’s soothed back into place by Darren Almond. The London-based artist has used his allocated room to show only one piece, If I Had You, whose gentle soundtrack permeates the entire exhibition. The polished floor of the big, dark room is empty, four screens occupying various positions on the walls.

A video of Almond’s grandmother – at the scale and height reserved for grand portraits – shows her face in slow motion, as she sees for the first time in decades the dance floor of her honeymoon. She is relatively expressionless, and our heartstrings are tugged instead by the continuous piano music.

The other three screens show the dancing feet of a glamorous couple; a creaking, twirling neon windmill; and a kitsch, gushing fountain. In this dream-like space, where it’s tempting to waltz in the dark, the metaphors are clear. Time passes as the windmill endlessly turns and the fountain endlessly spews. This memento mori – a reminder of death – derives its strength not from subtlety or finesse, but from its keen sense of romance.

Almond was chosen by the Turner Prize judges on the basis not just of this work but also of a work called Terminus, in which a bus-stop was transported from modern-day Auschwitz into the art gallery. It’s a shame Terminus is not here. His romantic video installation makes Almond look like a very different kind of artist from Starling. But just imagine Almond’s bus stop shown head to head with Starling’s shed; the dialogue would have been intriguing.

Next up is Gillian Carnegie, another London artist. If she wins, as the bookies predict, she’ll be the first woman to receive the prize since Gillian Wearing did eight years ago. Carnegie’s paintings are disconcerting, offering you visual pleasure with one hand while taking it away with the other.

Her two Black Squares make the strongest statement. The title refers explicitly to Malevich’s famous paintings of 1913, which heralded the birth of total abstraction. Here, however, Carnegie reverses the process. In amongst the rough, bituminous surface of her painting, a woodland landscape reveals itself. Hidden inside the paint’s gnarly black surface is a scene so picturesque it could almost contain frolicking wood-nymphs.

Section looks at first like an ordinary painting of an autumnal tree, painted with skill and pleasant to look at. But on closer inspection Carnegie has interrupted the space with rogue brushmarks, breaking down the structure of the work. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Mondrian’s early studies, Carnegie’s straying brushmarks re-enacting the Dutchman’s discovery of his famous grids. There are also echoes of Monet in this show, and of American artist Jasper Johns. It is as if Carnegie wants to return to every decisive moment in Modern art and replay it with alternative endings.

Heaped on top of this unspoken experiment, Carnegie oscillates between two poles. At one end she pairs stylistic virtuosity with disturbing or unattractive subject matter. At the other she treats traditionally appealing scenes – such as the woodscape of Black Square – with brutal passages of paint. Sometimes, confusingly, she offers no hint of redemption, combining clumsy painting with numb subject matter. Quite what’s going on with her horribly painted, dingy scene of Bavarian dancers is anybody’s guess.

In the midst of the murk and dinge of Carnegie’s paintings it’s difficult to the resist the eye-popping allure of Jim Lambie’s installation, half-seen through an open doorway. His psychedelic stripey floors have earned the Glasgow artist international fame, making gallery-goers woozey the world over.

It’s impressive that half of this year’s Turner Prize nominees are from Glasgow. In fact, both artists are represented by the Modern Institute, which has made a huge reputation for itself in the nine years since it came to be. The gallery’s space in Robertson Street is currently playing host to Lambie’s show The Byrds, a very close relative of the installation at the Tate, which he has called The Kinks.

Lambie’s work is the visual equivalent of pop music. Its impact is immediate, and its vivid patterns easy to recall. He makes deliberate use of pop culture items like record players and handbags and above all, everything is glittery, sparkly, optically throbbing.

The Tate’s floor is covered in black, white and silver tape in a pattern of particularly crazy crazy-paving. Dotted about are massive enlargements of kitsch ceramic bird ornaments, which Lambie has attacked with the most lurid gloss paint. Some carry mirrored handbags in outstretched wings, others look silently away.

At the Modern Institute, the birds are crammed into a small space like party animals having the time of their lives. At the Tate, the same birds have become sinister, like guard dogs warning you away. A mirrored handbag lies in maroon paint, suggestive of a violent, bloody mugging. The black jersey Rorschach pattern on the wall, a doubled silhouette of the Kinks, is a menacing black hole; the only non-shiny surface in the show, it could suck you in.

The other surfaces – all glossy and reflective – keep you out. Lambie’s work is pure disco pleasure, revelling in the skin deep. But it’s Starling’s variety of mind-bending which really does it for me. His absurd pilgrimages lift the lid on our absurd world, and leave us wanting to make it better.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 23.10.05