Turner Prize 2009

No video art! That's been the media's astonished response to the current Turner Prize shortlist, as if the omission were an oddly inappropriate way to mark its twenty-fifth year. And you can sort-of see their point: if video somehow smacks of being more current or contemporary, it's because video - film, TV - is our culture's preeminent visual mode, the format through which most people daily engage with notions of artistry. And yet, what's interesting about this year's exhibition is the way it explicitly addresses such concepts to do with visuality and ways of seeing, much more so than in recent years - and as such makes for one of the most subtle and rewarding Turner Prizes in ages.

The exhibition opens with Lucy Skaer's work, which initially seems rather disparate and oblique. It includes a chair in the middle of the room, and a print on the wall of abstract shapes made by disassembled sections of that chair; a cluster of forms in the mold of Brancusi's famously dynamic 'Bird in Space', but cast in black so they seem weirdly static; and, most dramatically, the giant skull of a sperm whale, though exhibited behind a slatted wall so it can only be studied piecemeal. Skaer's intention, then, is to manipulate how we view things; to strip away the accretions of knowledge, function, history, so that all that's left is the perplexing sight of a thing itself.

Richard Wright is also concerned with transforming vision. His temporary, abstract paintings on gallery walls and surfaces are designed to alter the physical sense of a room - in this case, a baroque, swirling, symmetrical pattern of gold leaf, occupying one huge end-wall. Though actually 'occupying' isn't quite the right word, because the whole thing is so shimmering and reflective as to seem somehow fugitive, unstable, almost transcendent.

Where Wright's work is ethereal, Enrico David's is the opposite - an abrasive, cartoonish jumble of awkward paintings, tatty collages, and paper-maché egg-men all gaudily competing for attention on an elevated stage. The installation is a swollen stew of influences, from advertising through folk art to gay pornography - yet beneath the chaos you can sense David making painstaking sense of the operations of visual culture, with his motifs of figures looking, and being looked at, and the transformation of bodies into images.

The odd one out, then, in the final room, is Roger Hiorns - as well as probably the best known, following the success of 'Seizure', his crystal-filled flat in a South London housing estate. His work is primarily about materiality, specifically transmutations and entropy - a jet engine that's been atomised, for instance, the resulting metal dust piled about the floor like some soft, lunar landscape; or his pairs of abstract, libidinal sculptures made from powdered cow brains.

Yet despite his use of unusual substances, it all feels rather too pristine, too perfectly aestheticised - merely illustrating predetermined ideas, so that the actual works end up seeming curiously inert, almost superfluous. Although he's odds-on favourite to win the Prize, the other artists' shows feel more intriguing, their visual concerns extending beyond simply making their pieces look good.