Turner Prize shortlist - The critic's verdict

Goshka Macuga

Macuga is the artist as orchestrator, archivist, assembler and curator. She likes to think of her art as not so much discrete objects, as things to be seen in relation to other things. And that word thing is deliberately chosen because it has a studied neutrality to it, for when Macuga shows her work, the parts don't necessarily have to be made by her. They could have been chosen, found or juxtaposed. They often have a studied, unemotional neutrality. Think of a piece of rock, for example, and what that can mean when reared up against a white wall, or marooned in the middle of a display of books. It would mean quite different things, wouldn't it? The point is how we look, she is telling us, what spaces we use, how those spaces are vivified in relation to other spaces. In short, she is the most unassuming of authors. Not since Jeremy Deller have we had an artist on a Turner shortlist who has taken quite such a back seat in their own creative life.

Mark Leckey

If you could conjure up a being who might somehow be the exact opposite of Runa Islam, someone wholly lacking in gravity and portentousness, you might end up with the likes of a character such as Leckey. But can an artist be a character in the way that an actor can fling off yesterday's role, and put on the lineaments of someone else? Well, that is what Leckey's work feels like – the product of someone who is forever hiding behind one mask or another. He is a comedian, a trickster, a poser, a funster. His work feels silly, outrageous, retro. It represents a kind of smash-and-grab raid on whatever elements of popular culture happen to be within the range of his huge appetite this time around. Take the film he made for the Tate Triennial in 2006, for example. That film juxtaposed a rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons, himself a man who loves to wallow in all the gleeful tawdriness of popular culture, with the interior of Leckey's own flat. The physical contours of the flat were something to do with – had an enormous amount in common with – that oversized rabbit. Or so we were led to surmise. Now how much sillier could you be than that? But there is a pleasing, reckless and no-holds-barred verve about the work, and that is fairly uncommon for the Turner Prize.

Runa Islam

Islam's videos are finickily self-conscious. She tweezers out tiny segments of films by others, splices and refashions them. She takes the promise of a narrative, then slows it down so much we yearn for a narrative resolution – which is denied us. In First Day of Spring, rickshaw drivers gather in preparation for... what exactly? Not plying their trade, certainly not that. No, the very inertia of the film, how it lingers on one man's face after another, obliges us to attend to the tiniest change in each facial feature precisely because... well, what else is one to do with one's precious time? The exercise feels smoothly cerebral but lacking in human interest. We are being obliged to sit in a lab as a scientist subjects us to an experiment being undertaken for their sake. That is how her work feels, undertaken for reasons of private satisfaction, and not to engage a wider public. We feel marginalised.

Cathy Wilkes

As a kind of figurative sculptor – pay heed to that note of doubt – Wilkes takes bits and pieces and puts them together, oddly. Sometimes she will take a human likeness – a fragment of a mannequin, for example – and attach to it part of a child's buggy. What is all this strange mix-and-matching all about? Perhaps it is something to do with the female identity, a woman living as part human and part an extension to a child's buggy. There is rich humour, and a feminist message. It is shambolically pleasing and close to the way we often feel.

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