Turner Prize finalists challenge ideas about art - Action News
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Turner Prize finalists challenge ideas about art

The Turner Prize show, unveiled Tuesday at the Tate London, features the first artist working primarily in sound to be nominated.

The four artists contending for Britain's Turner Prize are presenting a very different take on the question ofwhat is art.

The show, unveiled Tuesday at the Tate London, features the first artist working primarily in sound to be nominated.

Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, 44, is presenting an almost-empty room filled only with the sound of her own voice, singing a Scottish lament.

The sound features different versions of Lowlands Away from three speakers, sounding by turns harmonious and discordant.

Where it is heard changes the experience Philipsz has set up her work under bridges and in alleyways. Another work, Surround Me, is currently sending largely forgotten madrigals throughout London's financial district.

The Otolith Group, which is artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, has brought video and film pieces that draw on historic footage.

Another contender, Angela de la Cruz, 45, brings mangled canvases and sculpture that features everyday objects such as filing cabinets and stools.

Only Dexter Dalwood, 50, of London is a more traditional painter, but his paintings portray contemporary subjectswho are largely absent.

William Burroughs in exile in Tangiers is shown as a pair of slippers and a hookah before a forbidding wall.

His canvas about the mysterious death of weapons inspector David Kelly in the Oxfordshire countryside is a moon hanging over a lonely hill.

Dalwood alsodeals with political issues such as the Greenham Common protest and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

De la Cruz has canvases, but they're three-dimensional swashes of colour, mounted on broken frames.

A Spanish-born artist who has some disability from a brain hemorrhage in 2005, her sculptures also reflect brokenness, including a chair atop a rickety stool.

The Otolith Group presents viewers with a choice of a 49-minute film Otolith III which they say is a tribute to Indian director Satyajit Ray's unmade The Alien or a "monument to dead television" which plays on 13 monitors at once. Both works incorporate old film clips and TV series.

The Turner Prize is often controversial, especially among critics, but always draws thousands to the public show.

The winner of the 25,000($40,500 Cdn) award will be named Dec. 6.