The Turner Prize 2004
Until December 23; Tate Britain, London

You might have noticed that documentary has clawed its way back from po-faced, kipper-tied, grave-yard slots on late-night TV. You’ve probably also noticed that it’s enjoying a cinema renaissance, spearheaded by films like Touching the Void and Fahrenheit 9/11. But who would have guessed that documentary would rule the roost at this year’s Turner Prize exhibition?

It’s an odd show. Each artist’s space leads to the next through a narrow grey corridor. The first three are colourless and grave, each concerned in their own way with our precarious world order. Having navigated your way through them you emerge in the fourth space, where a blast of loud, flamboyant colour hits you like a sudden bolt of lightning on a dreich day.

It’s like a punchline to a joke you don’t understand. It’s like a clown popping out of the coffin during a funeral. It leaves you wondering how art can look so out of place in an art gallery.

Let’s go back to those documentaries. Jeremy Deller’s is the first room of the show. Although he’s London-based, Deller is represented by the Modern Institute in Glasgow, a healthy sign of the city’s growing artworld profile.

Deller is probably best-known for his reconstruction of the Battle of Orgreave, a pitched battle involving armed police during the miners’ strike. That work typifies his approach of working with different sections of the community, orchestrating events with social significance, without controlling them.

While not wanting to detract from the importance of this kind of approach, it doesn’t work well in the gallery. The street parade which the artist organised in Spain was probably a very valuable contribution to the area, but all we get is a relatively dull video by a local youth group.

Equally, Deller has commissioned a series of understated memorials to forgotten individuals and groups which were put up in sites around England. Again, what we get has only a fraction of the impact: some photographic documentation and directions to get there.

The work for which Deller was nominated is Memory Bucket, an elegant documentary about people in Texas. A Waco survivor talks frankly to camera, and so does a Quaker who is demonstrating against George Bush. The owner of Bush’s local diner tells us what his favourite meal is. It’s charming, it’s sincere, but at the end of the day, I wonder if it’s much more than a reasonable bit of television production.

While Deller’s room is a crowded mix of thoughts, events and histories, the next artist has restricted himself to just one work. Kutlug Ataman, born in Istanbul, is primarily a feature-film director, but he also makes video art. Unlike Deller’s self-contained documentaries, Ataman’s installations are heavily dependent on their gallery context. His themes are the time-honoured favourites of film-makers and artists alike: identity, memory and truth.

Walking into his room, you immediately notice that the floor has gone soft – it’s carpeted. Six video screens hang casually from the ceiling, at angles to each other so it’s possible to watch a few at once. You’re encouraged, by the furniture and soft flooring, to sit at the feet of one of the six storytellers. These people are filmed, handheld, from below, to complete that sense that you are in a traditional storytelling environment. It works: I felt rude when I walked past a character on a screen which had no audience clustered around it.

The subject of the work is reincarnation. Each of the six storytellers, from an Arabic part of Turkey which borders with Syria, can vividly remember their past life. They relate their experiences as nephew, as father, in a matter of fact way. They describe how their old families have accepted them with their new bodies. They describe their own violent deaths, and how they have visited their own graves. They tell you that their memories are like a film. You end up hopelessly confused about which of their two selves they are talking about, and with that, Ataman has done his job.

The next room is my favourite (and the bookies’ rank outsider). Artist couple, Langlands and Bell, were commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 2002 to explore post-war Afghanistan. After two weeks in the country they made work which might seem restrained, but it leaves a clear imprint on your mind.

The first thing that struck the artists was the number of agencies which had set up shop in Kabul – a whole 280 of them. A slide show churns through photographs of the many wooden signs erected by the organisations, a huge number of them written in English. The artists have gathered all the acronyms and abbreviations and reduced them to a single corporate font, bringing them together in banners and photographs. The result is sinister. We all know about the modern War Machine, but have we thought about the agenda of the Post-War Machine?

A video by the artists of a trial in Kabul has been removed from the exhibition because of legal advice. That’s how topical it is. The defendant in the video – a “human dog” – has long since been executed, but it’s his warlord boss who’s now under scrutiny.

The main work in the room, for which Langlands and Bell were nominated, is the House of Osama bin Laden. Having taken photos of bin Laden’s last official residence, the artists worked with a games developer to turn it into an interactive environment for us to explore. With a joystick you can navigate through the dry dust of empty bunkers and rooms, trying the trigger button occasionally in the hope that something exciting will happen. Of course it doesn’t, because this is not a shoot-em-up.

I was alarmed, a few hours later, to see a tube poster advertising the latest computer game. The sandy, dusty remains of bunkers were identical to bin Laden’s, the landscape the same. What differed was the presence of soldiers and helicopters, and the heroic challenge of ensuring “global security”. The empty, ambiguous, abandoned version in Tate Britain had seemed much more real.

Having worked through this maze of undiluted seriousness, from Deller’s Bush to Langlands & Bell’s Bin Laden, you’ll see now why the exuberance of the last room comes as such a shock. The outrageous colour, pattern and energy of the work are like a party thrown at the most inappropriate time.

With his painting, sculpture and choreographed video, Yinka Shonibare is actually closer to conventional artforms than any other artist in the show. Indeed his sculpture, The Swing, specifically pays homage to a Fragonard’s 18th century rococo painting of the same name.

But after three sobering rooms of home truths, and away truths, it’s difficult to embrace such sensuous extravagance. Art, in its conventional role as something visually rich and luxurious, becomes hard to stomach. Dazzling gestures seem wrong for our times.

The irony is that while Shonibare revels in visual sensation, he is deconstructing it at the same time. His painting pulls apart the supposed visual and social purity of minimalism and abstract expressionism – both white male domains. The colourful batiks around the room are far more than decoration – they are Shonibare’s shorthand for the complexities of colonial history.

Batik, worn as a badge of African pride, was in fact made first by Dutch people, and sold to Africa by English colonisers. It has an even more ambiguous role than tartan, for some a cultural identifier, for others a romantic fiction. It is in part a cheeky response to the art teacher who once told Shonibare he should incorporate African motifs into his art because of his African roots.

Most of the artists have produced brand new work for this exhibition, and Shonibare has made his first ever film, an elaborate silent ballet reworked from a Verdi opera. The story is of a king who starts a war for domestic political reasons, and is much hated by his people. This is no coincidence: Shonibare shares the same apocalyptic concerns as every other artist in the show. It just so happens that his come with frills on.

The winner will be announced on December 6

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.10.04