This year, the Turner Prize show makes a lot of sense. This makes a change from the more usual cobbled-together feel, with four artists who have little in common bar their nom­in­a­tion gathered so that the public can assess them in advance of the judging panel’s decision.

The tie that binds Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes is a common interest in making art about art, and the way it is made. They all do this in very different ways, but the un­der­ly­ing theme of artists exploring, re­sear­ch­ing and revising the work of other artists, the art form in which they work, or, in Wilkes’s case, her own life and practice, makes this feel less like a parade of artists lining up for a cash prize, more like a group show, and a sa­t­is­fy­ing one at that.

Of the four, Macuga makes the most explicit art about art. Known for quoting from other artists, and for her interest in the way in which art is collected, curated, archived and exhibited, Macuga’s focus here is on two couples, personal and pro­fes­sion­al. She is showing a trio of sculp­tures that recreate designs by Lilly Reich, first seen in the German Pavilion of the 1929 Barcelona In­ter­n­a­tion­al Ex­hib­i­tion. These cool, stand-offish in­dus­tri­al struc­tures in smoked glass and steel must have packed more of a punch when Macuga exhibited them earlier this year in Berlin’s Neue Na­tion­al­galer­ie, a building designed by Reich’s partner, Mies van der Rohe, but her bid to reassess Reich still stands, thanks to the pieces’ rather pointed titles, Haus der Frau and Deutches Volk - Deutches Arbeit. Macuga’s new pieces for this show are collaged com­bin­a­tions of pho­to­graph­ic prints by British modernist Paul Nash, paper cutouts by his partner Eileen Agar, and other ephemera, all culled from the Tate’s own archives.

A snap of Agar in a swimming costume is layered over a Nash pho­to­graph of some tree trunks, and a Nash snap of a cliff top is enhanced with an an­a­tom­ic­al drawing of a hand pointing down from the heavens from Agar’s col­lec­tion - pos­thu­m­ous col­l­ab­or­a­tions enforced by Macuga that are oddly con­v­in­cing, sug­gest­ing an alternate history of a par­t­ic­u­lar corner of British art history.

Mark Leckey mines the past, too, but his tactics are more personal, more sub­ject­ive. His Cinema-in-the-Round is a film of a lecture Leckey has been giving, and revising, for the past two years, a roving, often funny look at the artworks and films that Leckey is drawn to, and the re­la­tion­ship between objects and images, quoting Marx one minute and Homer Simpson the next. Made in ‘Eaven trains a camera on Jeff Koons’s highly-polished steel sculpture Rabbit, which reflects a mirror on the wall of Leckey’s studio, which in turn reflects the materials he gathered while re­sear­ch­ing the work. It’s a dizzy­ingly self-reflexive trick, at once com­ment­ing on the vacuous sheen of Koons’s piece, and Leckey’s at­trac­tion to it.

Self-re­flex­iv­ity is the corn­er­stone­ of Runa Islam’s film works. Cine­ma­to­graphy sees a motion-con­trolled camera slowly panning around the workshop of motion-control expert Harry Harrison, with a soun­dtrack­ made up of the clicks and whirrs of the camera apparatus. You’d never guess, but the camera is tracing out the letters of the word “cine­ma­to­graphy”. For First Day of Spring, Islam returned to her native Bangladesh, and paid rickshaw drivers to rest, working as actors playing them­selves. Again, the camera pans slowly, ex­chan­ging an es­t­ab­l­ish­ing shot for close-ups on the drivers’ faces, but the sudden, un­scrip­ted in­ter­rup­tion of a passer-by, who looks straight into the camera, reminds us that this is as much a film about doc­u­ment­ary film-making as it is a doc­u­ment­ary. If all that sounds too clever by half, Islam’s work is saved by being simply beautiful, and by its present­a­tion in carefully-designed, dimly-lit screening rooms - watching them, enjoying the images presented, is enough, with the the­or­et­ic­al un­der­pin­n­ings of each film the cherry on the cake.

After these three, Cathy Wilkes comes as something of a relief. Her work is immediate, affecting and deeply personal. Rather than mining some obscure corner of art history, Wilkes looks to her own life, as­sem­bling large-scale in­stal­l­a­tions from everyday elements. Set on top of two su­per­mar­ket checkout units, there are bowls full of dried soup. On the floor, empty jars with batteries placed inside them. There’s a shop mannequin perched on a toilet and festooned with rusty hor­se­shoes, a tea cup and other detritus. A second mannequin is trapped inside a birdcage and draped in sliced up tea-towels. In part a diary of domestic life, in part a feminist critique expressed in jux­ta­pos­i­tions with a sur­real­ist bent, Wilkes’s work works because it is, first and foremost, sculp­tur­al. Those dirty bowls are aligned with perfect precision, a pair of jam jars mirror each other, the placement of the squat heaps of roof tiles, each painted with a cross motif, fizzes with tension. And, when that cross motif reappears, this time made of spoons and wadding, it comes, in­ex­plic­ably, as a genuine shock. There is, too, something deeply sa­t­is­fy­ing in the way that Wilkes borrows from her own work, slowly de­vel­op­ing a grammar of allied objects over many years - there’s a pushchair here that offers a reminder of a 2004 in­stal­l­a­tion in a disused Glasgow hairdress­er­’s, the tiny whelk shells that peppered a recent show at the Modern Institute have been replaced here by flower petals, the heart motif of a flat, rubbery sculpture is rendered in pink, not yellow as it has been in the past. These subtle re­pe­ti­tions, revisions and removals are, ad­mit­tedly, only apparent to viewers familiar with Wilkes’s past work, but there’s no doubt that fresh eyes would see that Wilkes has thought deeply about the objects she gathers together, and the re­la­tion­ships between them, even if the reasons behind the choices she makes remain a mystery.

So, who will win? Mark Leckey has been hotly tipped since the shortlist was announced, but he’s not a dead cert like Mark Wallinger, who took the prize last year. There’s no obvious stand-out, either, and none of the artists look out of their depth. Were it up to me, I’d have a hard time choosing between Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes. Both have developed complex, layered and weighty ways of working, but neither of them, unlike Leckey and Macuga, has slipped over the line into making rather dry, academic work. The result is film and sculpture that makes you think, and think hard, but, more than that, Islam and Wilkes make the sort of stuff that sticks in the mind for reasons it is im­pos­s­ible to explain away in a cur­at­or­i­al note, operating, for all its soph­ist­ic­a­tion, at a gut level, appealing to the viewers’ eyes and instincts. This doesn’t ne­ces­sar­ily mean that Islam and Wilkes are better artists than their peers here, but it does make it possible to fall in love with their work, rather than admiring its wit, rigour and soph­ist­ic­a­tion.

The Turner Prize 2008 is at Tate Britain, London, until January 18.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 3rd October , 2008.