JUST 60 years ago, in 1948, Eric Shilsky, newly appointed head of sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, organised an exercise in abstract design for his first year students. The very idea was so controversial it earned a picture in this newspaper.
Abstract art was shocking and even an innocent student exercise in abstraction was news. The British public was slow to accept modern art, but attitudes have changed profoundly. Instead of the suspicion and hostility that prevailed then, now it generates real interest and people approach it with an enormous amount of patience and goodwill. Too rarely, however, does what they are offered repay that effort. Take the Turner Prize, for instance. People want to understand and take possession of what is presented as the art of our time. They bring it their goodwill. They give it their attention, but they get precious little reward.
This year is no exception. Goshka Macuga has the first room. She makes collages by imposing photographs of the English Surrealist Eileen Agar, and fragments of images from Agar's own work, on to photographs by Paul Nash. The couple were lovers and they collaborated as artists and so Goshka Macuga combines them in her art as they were partners in life. She revisits tame surrealism with tamer surrealism.
She also presents, alongside these collages, several steel and glass constructions. They are unexplained, but are evidently a homage to Lily Reich. Design partner and lover of Mies van der Rohe, she has recently been recognised as playing a leading role in designs attributed to him, such as the famous Barcelona chair. Macuga's point in both cases seems to be to restore the gender balance in a historic partnership. If so, it is so specific that her work is more illustration than art.
Cathy Wilkes's work derives from Italian Arte Povere, but where that movement was by definition economical, she throws in everything, including the kitchen sink. Her installation here is a literal image of domestic disorder. Two female tailor's dummies sit among dirty plates and children's toys, all set out around two supermarket checkout counters. One dummy has a birdcage on her head. The other is sitting on a lavatory wearing a nurse's cap and draped with horseshoes. A white painted stepladder with ashes at its foot hints at the death of aspiration among the burdens of domesticity. It is a sound feminist point, but the visual muddle is such that she entirely fails to create a metaphor of imprisoned domesticity and instead of being compelling, she just seems a bit querulous.
Runa Islam "works with film". That cant phrase suggests she is superior to any mere rude mechanical who simply makes films; that as an artist, film is only a tool for her. Of the two films available the day I was there, Cinematography records the scene in a workshop as the movement of a swinging camera spells out the 14 letters of that word. Watching the film, you couldn't guess that is what is happening, but when you do know it you are little wiser. In the other film, The First Day of Spring, Islam returns to her native Bangladesh to record a group of rickshaw drivers. First they are at rest and then, with no more signal than a puff of breeze stirring the leaves, they all get up at once and go. It is a touching little scrap of film, but pretty unremarkable all the same. The fact that it was made by an artist certainly does not raise it to a different plane of experience from film by any mere documentary film-maker or, dare I say it, even by an amateur.
The most interesting art here is a work by Mark Leckey, not for itself, certainly, for it is perfectly null, but for the example it gives us of what is wrong with this kind of art, with the teaching that produces it and generally with the Turner Prize itself. Mark Leckey also "works with film", but the centrepiece of his show is actually a film of himself giving a lecture about film. As he stands there lecturing, it is not simply his self-importance that is astonishing, it is the delusion that his ideas are interesting to us and that this will remain true no matter in what form he chooses to present them.
So often I read in a label explaining some stumbling work of would-be art that the artist is interested in this or that as though this piece of perfectly trivial information was going to illuminate everything. It doesn't matter in the slightest what an artist thinks he or she is interested in. The greatest artists have always been among the greatest minds of their time, but they do not deal with ideas in the linear sequence of literary forms, or even worse, of a lecture.
It is the art that speaks to us, not the artist. It is metaphor; it translates thoughts and feelings into images; it makes things coherent that are otherwise incoherent by bringing to bear on them the huge resources and astonishing powers of comprehension with which our sense of sight, our dominant faculty, is endowed. No matter how profound and riveting the lecture may be, and Leckey's is not, to stand there lecturing and call it art is to admit failure; it is to own up to the artist's inability to deploy the resources of sight to create metaphors.
Perhaps worse still, it is a tacit admission of failure even to understand that challenge. Cathy Wilkes, however fumblingly, does at least try to create metaphors, though I suspect that the muddle reflects the fact that she too is trying to give visual form to a verbal idea. That is certainly the problem with Goshka Macuga's attempt to use art to correct history, just as it is with Runa Islam's Cinematography. If art starts in the two dimensions to which linear thought is confined, it will stay there and never transcend its origins.
These are all pretty mediocre artists. It is a pity. The selectors have let us down yet again and, doing so, they betray all the goodwill towards contemporary art that is so tangible, especially among the young. The Turner Prize show at Tate Britain was empty when I was there; compare that with Tate Modern, which, while it is a hideous place, is always crowded – and the crowds seem predominantly to be under 30.
Currently it has a real antidote to the Turner Prize in its Mark Rothko exhibition. It is dedicated to his late work and these wonderful paintings transcend the grim architecture. Rothko prescribed low light for some of his paintings, but this is simply dingy. It is about as sympathetic as a railway waiting room at night in winter.
The presentation makes Rothko's painting difficult to see, but it is worth persevering. His work looks simple. It is not burdened with literary ideas, but is an essay in the richness of vision. Roughly brushed rectangles float like flames against a background in a kindred colour, distinguished from the ground by subtle shifts in tone and texture. The effect has a grandeur like the shadowy space of a Gothic cathedral or the Pantheon in Rome. Rothko understood this. His rectangular motifs suggest architecture and mostly he conceived these late pictures in series with architectural settings in mind.
However, in the latest pictures here he abandons the architectural reference implicit in his familiar rectangular motif and seems instead to move outside. The colour is reduced to black and grey divided by a simple horizon. The sky above and the earth beneath, this is landscape reduced to its purest existential essence.
&149 Turner Prize 08 runs until 18 January; Rothko until 1 February. The winner of this year's Turner Prize is announced on 1 December.
