The winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced next Tuesday evening. Since the names of the shortlisted artists were announced a few months ago, three of the four contenders have been regularly and confidently named in the press as "the favourite". Steve Pippin, an artist in the mould of the eccentric English inventor, is the odd one out. Noone seems to fancy his chances. But the favourite among the favourites has to be Tracey Emin, famous for appearing drunk on television - and walking out - during an after-award discussion programme two years ago. And famous, more recently, for exhibiting her recreated bed, complete with rumpled sheets, dirty underwear and empty vodka bottle, in the Tate Gallery. In fact, Emin's dirty knickers have been a godsend for the Tate, and the Turner.
The award needs something that galvanises media interest, and draws in the crowds, and this year the bed did the job, to the extent that the Gallery has used it in its advertising.
Emin's most vocal and engaging critical champion, Matthew Collings, who has been unashamedly partisan, to the extent of cursorily dismissing the other contenders, claims that while she was the people's choice, the critical establishment hates her for various disreputable reasons. Time Out's Sarah Kent is even more aggressive in her support for Emin.
After all the fuss, though, the bed installation is disappointing. There is something absurd about queues of people filing dutifully through, consulting the catalogue notes and examining the artist's very ordinary dirty linen as though they are going to experience some great insight into art, or life, or something. Besides the bed, Emin shows a wall-full of doodled monotypes, usually self-portraits noting her sadness and dismay at the unfairness of life and love. There are also two confessional pieces about her uncle's death and her own depression.
The late Willem de Kooning once said something to the effect that, if you are a painter, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not. The current manifestation of the genre of confessional art, to which Emin's work belongs and has greatly contributed, eschews such sentiments. "Heaven knows I'm miserable now," as Morrissey sang once: but, a la de Kooning, Morrissey still felt the song had to work. Emin often leaves out the song and gives us the unmediated misery.
In this, a sympathetic reading of her work would have it, she speaks to all or most of us. We can empathise with her problems, because we can relate to them, and to her telling of them, which comes without any aesthetic impediment. Nan Goldin, currently exhibiting in London, was a pioneer of the confessional mode. Her informal, deliberately artless photographs record the troubled lives - and deaths - of her and her circle of friends over more than a decade. As with Emin, for us, looking on, it's inescapably voyeuristic.
Goldin's depictions of people on the edge depend on her good faith. We have to believe that they really are desperate to appreciate our privileged glimpse into their desperation.
Similarly, that is why Emin has had to continually raise the stakes. Her bed has been described as a Duchampian gesture, but it isn't really Duchampian at all. Because Duchamp demonstrated that the artist could transform anything into an art object simply be claiming it as a work of art, the argument goes, that is what Emin is doing with her bed. But that is a relatively insignificant aspect of what she's doing.
The real point of the bed is its status as an index to her emotional life. We're supposed to read it more as we would a traditional work of art than a piece of Duchampian conceptualism. In terms of her work, it's another variant in a succession of ways she's chosen to convey her emotional states to an audience. When it's claimed that the iconography of her bed conveys the gamut of human experience, it's as well to remembers that it does so in a banal way. It could be argued that the impoverished means of her art reflects the starkness of her message, but that doesn't make her work great art, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it isn't.
The Wilson twins, also identified as favourites along the way, are Jane and Louise. They have collaborated since their time in college. Though they attended different art schools, they displayed identical, collaborative work for their graduation shows, which sounds like a bit of a gimmick, as does their way of highlighting the fact that they are twins while simultaneously frowning on any mention of it. Though the Wilsons are close to the main group of Young British Artists, the YBAs, they have cannily maintained a certain distance.
For the Turner exhibition, they are showing a very ambitious video installation, Las Vegas, Graveyard Time, which puts the viewer right into a multi-screen environment composed of imagery from two sources, empty Las Vegas gambling casinos and the corridors inside the Hoover Dam, which delivers water to the desert city. The images are intriguingly interwoven, and the camera movements continually draw you into these strange, empty, but highly charged environments. It's a fair bet that Kubrick's The Shining was instrumental in shaping their visual style, with its eerie tracking shots and air of unspecified menace.
Almost everything written about the Wilsons' work, including the catalogue notes, is off-putting. The heavy-handed iconographic symbolism of the worthy, functional civil engineering project versus the tacky consumerism of the casinos sounds clumsy but doesn't come through that way in the piece as you experience it. Their work manages to find a life for itself outside the confines of its exegesis. Exploiting the language of film, they generate an alternative to its narrative logic, a non-narrative that is richly atmospheric and involving. They have visual flair and can inventively knit images and sounds together, and their feeling for the atmospherics of built, designed environments is impressive.
The highlight of Steve McQueen's display is Deadpan, a short black-and-white film which recreates a stunt from a Buster Keaton film, Steamboat Bill Jnr, in which the gable wall of a barn collapses around the comedian without touching him. Showing considerable cool, McQueen stands stock still while a wooden gable falls, apparently on top of him - but, like Keaton, he is safely framed in an open window and emerges unscathed. We see this event again and again from numerous angles.
`THE artist has taken a moment of stillness, a cinematic cliche, and given it powerful resonance," says the catalogue. This is almost grotesquely untrue. The genius of Keaton's stunt is its throwaway nature. By isolating and monumentalising the moment, and then replaying it over and over, as if to emphasise its difficulty, McQueen effectively kills it stone dead - something, mind you, that is intriguing in itself. Like many of his peers, he sets out to question cinematic language. While the work in the Tate is not altogether successful, McQueen does come across as an interesting, intuitive artist, keen to stretch the medium of film and willing to follow his own hunches - not at all a slave to fashion.
Pippin conforms to an English stereotype: the mad boffin in a lab coat. He has made a career out of turning the most unlikely objects, notably washing machines, into cameras. Some of this work makes up his Turner exhibit. A row of washing machine cameras record moving figures in sequence, a bizarre revision of Edward Muybridge's seminal studies of animals and humans in motion. There is a tenuous link: Muybridge designed a prototype washing machine. Unlike Heath Robinson's notional contraptions, Pippin's equally implausible devices are untainted by mere functionality. The point of them is that they are pointlessly ingenious. But, after looking at your umpteenth washing-machine photo, you begin to feel you've had more than enough pointlessness.
None of the shortlisted artists is entirely convincing. It's hard to believe that they represent the best of what was on offer to the jury. There is the sense, evident in much commentary, that the Turner Prize is "owed" to Emin, in the same way that it was owed to Damian Hirst - that is, they eventually got around to giving it to him a couple of years too late. In a sense, Emin has already won it, in that she can hardly cap the level of attention she's so far attracted. And as a cultural phenomenon she may well deserve it. But in the restricted terms of the work on offer in the Tate, the Wilsons have the edge, and they deserve the prize - even if McQueen wouldn't be a bad choice.
The Turner Prize 1999 exhibition is at the Tate Gallery, London until February 6th, 2000. The announcement of the winner will be screened live on Channel 4 next Tuesday evening
