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News imageThe BBC's David Sillito:
"The prize was intended to provoke debate about modern British art: this year it's certainly done that"
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News image Tuesday, 30 November, 1999, 04:48 GMT
Emin favourite for Turner Prize
Tracey Emin Tracey Emin's My Bed installation has invoked strong passions

Provocative artist Tracey Emin is the favourite to take Britain's best-known and most controversial art award, the Turner Prize.

Self-styled "Mad Tracey from Margate", the bad girl of British art, leads the field as 6-4 favourite to take the �20,000 title.

Steve McQueen Steve McQueen: Homage to Buster Keaton
Also up for the prize, the winner of which will be announced at London's Tate Gallery on Tuesday evening, are Steve McQueen, Steven Pippin and twins Jane and Louise Wilson.

Emin won notoriety with her 1995 work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 - a tent embroidered with the names of those the title suggests - and later through a drunken live TV appearance discussing the Turner in 1997.

But her work takes in a huge range of different formats, whether they be painting, neon signs, writings photographs or films.

My Bed, which formed part of her display for the Turner Exhibition at the Tate, featured her mattress surrounded by the detritus created after a week of being bedridden.

The other nominees all work in film or photography.

The Wilson twins have created a multi-screen film Las Vegas, Graveyard Time, for their exhibit, recording the opulent interiors of the US city's casinos in the deserted early hours.

News image Artistic licence
News image Last year's Turner Prize winner, Chris Ofili, used elephant dung in his painting
News image Damien Hirst won the prize in 1997 for displaying the severed halves of a cow and calf in formaldehyde
News image Artist Tony Kaye tried to submit a homeless steel worker for the prize
Photographer Pippin has exhibited a group of photos taken using a laundry washing machine as a camera.

For his Laundromat - Locomotion series he placed large pieces of light sensitive paper inside the drums of a bank of machines, then used a trip wire to trigger the shutter.

Developing and fixing solutions were then placed in the machine during the cycle.

Steve McQueen's three works in the Turner exhibition - designed to showcase the artists - include the film Prey in which a tape recorder plays the sound of tap dancing and is eventually seen being dragged into the air beneath a balloon.

In another he is seen recreating a silent movie stunt in which a building front collapses, falling around him.

He is seen from various angles escaping unscathed, standing where the window frame falls.

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See also:
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