The original function of the Turner Prize, inaugurated in 1984, was to reward the best British artists and to create a stir about contemporary works of art – much as the Booker Prize had created a stir about contemporary works of literary fiction. Despite the relative simplicity of those aims, it took a while to settle into an established pattern. After a few years of giving out awards for lifetime achievement to the likes of Gilbert and George and Richard Long, the powers that be decided to make some changes. Mature artists – deemed for some reason to be generically more sensitive, vulnerable and prone to self-doubt than mature novelists – should not be subjected to the potential embarrassment of competition with those much younger than themselves. As a result, an age limit of 50 was imposed on all Turner Prize nominees, which at a stroke transformed the award into a prize for younger and (mostly) middle-aged artists. Henceforth, each artist was only to be judged on a body of work created during the past year. This last condition was, admittedly, a distinct improvement, for the simple reason that it levelled the playing field and established, seemingly for once and for all, what the prize was actually for.

Nevertheless, the idea of subjecting such supposedly fragile beings as artists to the rigours of competition clearly continues to trouble those administering the prize. Tate Britain’s director, Stephen Deuchar, expressed this spirit of nervousness at the opening of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. The main purpose of the event, he declared, was “to draw attention to new developments in the world of contemporary art in Britain and to encourage wide debate around them.” But if the main purpose of the Turner Prize really is to provoke debate then perhaps it should be given a new title. The Turner Seminar might do, or the Turner Forum for Discussion, although on reflection perhaps neither is quite catchy enough to attract the audience at which the event is aimed. As if to mirror a prevailing reluctance to frame it as an all-out contest, the very conditions of the event now mean that no one leaves empty handed. One artist will be awarded £25,000, while the other three will receive £5,000 each. Gore Vidal, who famously said that “it is not enough to succeed, others must fail”, would not have approved.

The work of the artists shortlisted for this year’s prize turns out to be singularly dry, verging on academic. There is little desire to beguile or enchant and almost no sense of spectacle – little interest, it might almost be said, in the visual aspect of visual art. The jury’s decision to choose such intellectually boilerplated, resolutely non-commercial work may itself represent a statement of sorts – a gesture against the knowingly rampant commercialism exemplified by an artist such as Damien Hirst, and the razzamatazz represented by events such as the Frieze art fair.

Goshka Macuga, whose work fills the opening gallery of the show, is exemplary, in that she makes art of the kind that is said to “investigate” particular themes – which already has the ring of a Ph. D. thesis about it. The themes she is said to be investigating on the present occasion are the relationships between, respectively, the designer Lilly Reich and her personal and professional partner Mies van der Rohe; and the artist Paul Nash and his lover, the English Surrealist painter and collage-maker, Eileen Agar. Macuga’s methods plainly involve much time spent in the archives. In fact, to create her various meditations on Paul Nash and Eileeen Agar she actually raided Tate’s own archive. She began by making enlarged prints from the original negatives of Paul Nash’s photographs, of subjects such as the wrecked fuselage of aircraft (studies for his haunting wartime picture, Totes Meer). On to these, she then superimposed cut-out ephemera from the store of Eileen Agar’s unused materials for collage, also owned by the Tate archive – cut-out images of brightly plumed turkeys, or anatomical models. These enigmatic little arranged marriages of form, literal illustrations of the idea of mutual influence, have been created in such a way that they can be dismantled once the show is over, their raw materials returned to the archival boxes whence they came. This could be said to represent the perfect triumph of concept over form, the work of art happily sacrificed – as an enduring object – to the memory of the idea which it serves.

Macuga’s other contribution consists of precise replica models of Lilly Reich’s little-known designs for exhibition furniture, originally fabricated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Remade on the basis of old photographs and drawings, Reich’s designs for such things as a stand for the display of textiles, made from plate glass and brushed steel, are objects of textbook modernist simplicity and fitness for purpose. The unstated implication behind Macuga’s decision to refashion them is that Reich must have played her own, largely forgotten part in the formation of Mies van der Rohe’s own modernist aesthetic. The results are briefly engaging and thought-provoking but ultimately somewhat arid – the relics of an exercise in a form of muted feminist archaeology.

Cathy Wilkes is a more likely candidate for the now traditional tabloid assault on one of the shortlisted artists (often a good guide to the eventual winner). Her work involves nudity and going to the lavatory and is made largely out of rubbish – discarded shopfloor mannequins, dirty cups and bowls, bits and pieces of unwanted rooftiling and the like. But although it looks, at first sight, as though it might be meant to shock, its actual effect is curiously dead and dull. A pair of mannequins are the actors in a scene of artfully engineered enigma. One sits slumped on a lavatory, face bedecked with such items as a nurse’s hat and coils of wire, a string of horsehoes serving as an ad hoc necklace. The other sits on a junked supermarket checkout counter, surrounded by carefully arranged detritus. I Give You All My Money, as the work is titled, looks like a parody of its own origins, in the aesthetic of Surrealism. Whereas a similar, Surrealist mise-en-scene might be intended to get the audience guessing at the hidden meaning or attempting to complete the narrative, Wilkes’s deadpan arrangement of stuff is so perfunctory that it arouses no curiosity whatsoever. The effect seems to be deliberate, which is the most puzzling thing of all about this singularly inert installation.

 
The third of the four short-listed artists, Runa Islam, is represented by three shortish films, the first of which goes by the convoluted title Be The First To See What You See As You See It. The film itself is a small but engaging mystery with a mildly Stepford Wives feel about it. A solitary woman takes tea but as she does so she gradually, piece by piece, smashes all the crockery – a process shown, satisfyingly, in super slow-motion. The second of Islam’s films shows a number of rickshaw drivers in Bangladesh relaxing for the simple reason that the artist had paid them to do so. As they uneasily enjoy their unaccustomed indolence, the camera dreamily inspects the trees above them. But in the last and most recent of her films, Islam too chooses to make a work of art about art – a film shot in a special effects studio, which is entitled CINEMATOGRAPHY, in which the camera slowly tracks across the letters that make up that word.

The most impressive work in this year’s show is that of Mark Leckey, odd man out in an otherwise all-female shortlist. At the centre of his installation he has placed the ne plus ultra of a work of art about art – namely, a long and ingeniously shot film of himself giving a lecture about the art that moves him. It might sound like the driest contribution of all, but this weird and zany tour-de-force of off-the-wall art historical extemporisation is the star turn of the whole Turner Prize. Cinema in the Round, as he calls it, is a fascinating journey through the objects that have moved and fascinated Leckey, from the late paintings of Philip Guston to the bunny sculptures of Jeff Koons, from the animations of Walt Disney to the conceptualist films of Fischli and Weiss, from Homer Simpson’s shoes to Vincent Van Gogh’s boots – narrated in the broadest and most deadpan of Birkenhead accents and illustrated with all manner of cleverly altered found images of film footage.

Leckey is a Professor of Film Studies who lectures regularly at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, and it shows. He would be an apt winner of this most self-referential and intellectually beetlebrowed of Turner Prize contests. But it has to be said his contribution also renders the notion that the prize should exist to “promote debate” peculiarly redundant. Leakey’s work actually is a form of debate – albeit one that aspires to metamorphose,  like one of the many fluid animations that so fascinate him, into a work of art.