IT MIGHT HAVE LOOKED as though the Turner was in for a tough time this year. This is the prize that is supposed to arouse controversy, draw a wide and often derogatory public into the gallery. But this year mention of the Turner seems to have stirred intense apathy.

The Britpack caught the imagination. But once they had clicked into cultural place as neatly as the mechanisms of a semi-automatic taking dead aim at the lowest common denominator, they were commonly announced to be “over”. And then no one seemed much to care what was upcoming for the Turner.

Indifference, however, can provide an ideal forum. As Tate Britain opens its show of the works of the four shortlisted artists today, it has the advantage of low expectation on its side. Shuffle in through the swing doors and you are smacked straight in the face by the work of Keith Tyson, by a Brobdingnagian scrapbook of energetic scribblings. These are the studio-wall drawings that form the backbone of Tyson’s visual experiments, the beginnings of ideas which then ramble off to find a new role in his texts and contraptions, his paintings and diagrams.

Tyson is a sort of Tracey Emin for the lads. While she does needlework and bangs on about boyfriends, he’s playing marbles with universal molecules. They ricochet off some pretty perplexing points: “Why things, why not nothing at all?” he asks.

It’s a bit like sitting at the back of the classroom and popping a tab of acid. Planck meets Pop Art as Tyson has made a smash-and-grab raid on the school science labs. Fantasy and philosophy collide and combine in his mad-professor pieces. His paintings are more like puzzles, his sculptures like solidified dreams.

But once you have realised that you don’t have to take them too seriously, you can delight in Tyson’s doodlings. They set you off on imaginative journeys and then cast you loose. I would give the prize to this candidate if only because his pseudo science offers such pleasant occupation.

Liam Gillick also lures viewers on mental meanderings. He instals a false Perspex ceiling in the gallery. It gathers its audience — whether ponderous or perplexed — under pools of prismatic light. Environments alter the way we behave. Using motifs from contemporary design, influenced by Utopian hopes, Gillick creates “scenarios” which are supposed to encourage those who occupy them to reflect. But though he provides the means, he doesn’t determine the ends.

The more he tries to explain his ideas, the more impenetrable they become.

Viewers who feel disorientated will grow positively dizzy when confronted by the videos of Catherine Yass. In Flight she screens a film of London taken from a helicopter camera and rotated. Roofs reel giddily, the ground inverts and revolves. A cityscape seems to have been loaded into a laundrette’s tumble drier.

The viewer stares numbly until he starts to feel nauseous. This is the point. In this piece, Yass seeks to evoke a sickening fear of flying, just as in Descent, in which a camera lowered from a crane tracks slowly down the length of a Canary Wharf tower, she tries to capture that giddy temptation to step off high buildings and let oneself fall. The impact of her work lies in its replication of visceral responses. Yass seeks mesmerising expression for a sense of dislocation.

Fiona Banner is also interested in visceral experience. Her “wordscape”, Arsewoman in Wonderland, a billboard-sized piece of text transcribes every lurid detail of a porn film. It offers the verbal equivalent of a sexual spectacle. But an attempt to read it makes the eyes boggle and blur. Queasy combinations of repulsion and attraction find expression in print. Banner attempts to recapture in a single static moment an experience that transcends description. She turns the power of words against themselves, uses language to reflect upon its own impotence.

Language can obscure as much as elucidate meanings. She isolates its formal components, examines how far they may express emotions. Giant-size typeface sculptures quite literally punctuate the floor space. A vast bronze full-stop seems made to lean against, to pause for a moment and reflect. It serves the same purpose as it does in the text.

For the average visitor, going to the Turner Prize can feel a bit like playing poker. The art world insiders often declare with a confidence that can be intimidating. The amateur grows increasingly unsure what to call. He no longer trusts his own instincts.

But this year the tables are turned at the Turner. The artists expose the weak hands that Post-Modernism has dealt them. They explore fresh ways ahead, reaching out towards other disciplines to refuel their art forms. They engage with architecture, with science, with the written word. Moving out into a sprawling collaborative realm, they embrace a broader spectrum of cultural possibilites.

This often dissipates the impact. The exploratory processes which are part of the making can seem more important than the end product. Few ideas seem finite. The debate is still in development. The public is invited to play an ongoing part.

And perhaps it is this complicity between artist and audience which most strongly marks out the work of this year’s candidates. They are conscious of the viewer’s relationship — whether this is more physical in the case of Yass and Banner, or more intellectual in the case of Tyson and Gillick — with their pieces. The visitor, like some battery slotted into an electronic mechanism, animates the work. Sometimes you run out of imaginative juice. Liam Gillick’s installation is puzzlingly pointless. But then you should remember that to feel unfeeling can be one of the strongest feelings you can have.

This year’s shortlist may not have set out to attract controversy (though Fiona Banner’s porn transcripts might supply an excuse to feign shock); it may have set out to be boringly well balanced (two male and two female candidates and with old-fashioned artistic accomplishments represented), but the public should still turn out for the Turner — if for no other reason than that, more than ever, it needs our participation.

• Turner Prize 2002 is at Tate Britain until Jan 5. The winner will be announced on Dec 8