Quotes of the Day

There's a peculiarly local flavor to the latest show of contemporary art at London's Tate Britain, which opened last week. It's evident even in the work of featured artists who hail from Japan or Turkey. Shizuka Yokomizo photographs strangers at their windows by appointment — a perfect comment on the land of net curtains. Kutlug Ataman devoted earlier film and video work to a transvestite and a faded opera star. Now, in The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read, he chronicles a year in the life of the woman who keeps Britain's official collection of amaryllis lily varieties in her West London apartment.

Rather than showcasing the next big trend or school, "Days Like These," the gallery's second Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, "takes the temperature" of the last three years, says co-curator Judith Nesbitt. And she senses some powerful currents in the work of artists of all ages and career stages, one being "the interrogation of the everyday." As well as Ataman's flower fanatic and Yokomizo's Strangers, there is Rachel Whiteread's plaster casting of the inside of a flat and the space under a staircase. Margaret Barron paints tiny cityscapes on adhesive tape that are stuck on handy surfaces somewhere near the actual locations. Several are sited in the Tate environs, at risk of being peeled off or fly-posted over. Young guns Nick Relph and Oliver Payne first made a splash with video works showing the city from the perspective of skateboarders or graffiti artists. In their latest adventure they visit the disappearing underworld of the gents' public toilet, and find the gap between London's image and its reality.

Not all the work is quite so intimate or quotidian, but neither is there a deliberate attempt to become the next sensation by piling on the shock value. Dexter Dalwood's Ceaucescu's Execution (earlier works include imagined views of Bill Gates' Bedroom and Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse) disturbs mainly by inference. A traditional oil on canvas, it refers to the patriotic legends of 19th century history painting. There is no glory here, though. All we see is the detritus of revolution: blood vividly stains the walls of a deserted ballroom stripped of everything but some random litter and a tacky chandelier.

Many of these artists take aspects of life that earlier generations painted, drew or wrote about and render them in photos, film or video art. Mike Marshall doesn't paint sun-dappled scenes but his video clips, such as Sunlight (shifting shadows on a patio) and Days Like These (plants and lawn periodically drenched by a sprinkler), do the unexpected: watching grass grow is exciting.

This technological art depends on a collaboration between artist and subject — no longer passive, models provide their own narration like Veronica Read or, like Yokomizo's Strangers, decide how they'll be depicted. And processes and mechanical aids once hidden behind the Romantic image of the artist are now deliberately exposed and documented. David Batchelor's The Spectrum of Brick Lane, a tower of light boxes, reveals its naked anatomy of trailing wires and reused components, echoing the untidy aspects of a built-up area as well as its brash artificial sources of color.

Another theme Nesbitt detects is art that "invites a direct encounter," like Jim Lambie's jazzy floor of multicolored vinyl tape that follows and magnifies the pillars and doorways of a double-height gallery. In contrast, Susan Philipsz's art is meant to be overheard — a tune picked out clumsily on a piano; her own voice singing mournfully. David Cunningham's A Position Between Two Curves picks up ambient sound and builds it up through feedback until it reaches a certain pitch of loudness. Like Ceal Floyer's Bucket, which "catches" a recorded drip, this could be encounter by irritation. The show will continue to serve up a feast of fresh ideas through May 26.

• LUCY FISHER | London
• Tate Britain finds the extraordinary in the ordinary