What do Jesus and a pantomime horse have in common? They are both figures of unresolvable mystery, suggests Mark Wallinger's retrospective at Tate Liverpool. The pantomime horse catches you by surprise. The figures inside the soft brown costume are so perfectly lifesize, it's hard to shake the idea there really are people inside.
Then you do a double-take. The figure in the rear end of the pantomime horse is standing upright, thrusting its pelvis against the backside of the figure in front. Something very lewd appears to be going on. The horse's tail stands pertly upright and the horse is grinning. The title on the wall nearby says: "Oh no he isn't, oh yes he is."
Wallinger's art uses everyday, prosaic materials and yet its intentions are nothing short of visionary. The pantomime horse is a modern centaur, just as Ecce Homo - the statue of Christ he made for the empty plinth at Trafalgar Square - aims to be a new kind of religious art. Wallinger rejects the opposition of high and low, the polite world of art, religion and refined society and the coarse, carnival culture of the crowd.
He makes Greek myth slum it with British music hall, working out his salvation in the streets. In 1994, he had himself photo-graphed grinning in the middle of a soccer crowd at Wembley, holding one end of an immense union jack banner imprinted with the name Mark Wallinger. One of us, one of us, you can hear him chant at the world of high art that he mocks and brings down to his own level. Except his level turns out to be one of intense spiritual enquiry and introspection.
The exhibition is called Credo. I believe. But everything in Wallinger's art induces doubt. On the walls are biblical texts over-written in red and green, so you can only read them clearly when you look through 3-D glasses, when you seem to see words float off the wall like the writing at Belshazzar's feast. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Ecclesiastes 18, says one.
On video, Wallinger stands in a park wearing a white shirt, black tie and dark glasses, breathing helium from a rubber mask and singing a morbid Victorian hymn about the special place in heaven for little children. In his hand, he clutches a balloon with a boy's face on it. His voice is squeaky and he has to breathe more helium between verses to keep it that way. It's creepy, but the man's sincerity challenges you to accept him as an innocent.
Wallinger has excluded from this retrospective the works he became known for in the 1990s, and that got him nominated for the Turner prize in 1995. So there are no paintings of horses or portraits of his friends as homeless people. Instead, he juxtaposes recent explorations of religious imagery with his paintings from the 1980s. These are hilarious journeys into the British cultural past. Stately Home (1985) remakes history with deranged abandon. Wallinger has enlarged an 18th-century mezzotint print subtitled "Hare Hall in Essex, the Seat of John Arnold Wallenger Esq", and crossed out the "e" in Wallenger and replaced it with an "i". In the picture, ladies and gentlemen take the air in their private parkland. To the left is an ornamental canal with a man punting and then_ there's something out of place, though perfectly in style. A servant stands in the water carrying his master on his shoulders, so the red-coated landowner can hold the skinny claws of a tyrannosaurus rex. The aristocrat and the dinosaur appear to be dancing. Oh no he isn't, oh yes he is.
In Lost Horizon (1986), a china model of a blinkered shire horse and toy guardsman stand guard on a rural scene reminiscent of Constable, while painted on the evening sky are five ghostly names: John, Paul, George, Ringo and Lord Wilson of Rievaulx. You don't know whether this is mournful or bitter about recent cultural history.
Wallinger loves Britain and wants to redeem it. In The Bottom Line (1986), he juxtaposes an image copied from a snapshot of him and his mother visiting Tower Bridge with an upside-down Constablesque landscape. The two pictures have been sandwiched together with red paint suggesting an eviscerated British soul, a gory rupture in the national psyche.
In his recent photowork Word in the Desert I (2000), he appears upside-down in a Roman cemetery, again in his blind persona, with black suit trousers and no shoes, and through an optical illusion is apparently lying in the grave, with Shelley's tombstone looming above him. The stone is engraved with Ariel's song from The Tempest:
"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange."
Is it a romantic, optimistic statement, that Shelley lives through art?
In the video installation Prometheus - Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound - the blind Mark Wallinger sings Ariel's song in slow motion while strapped in an electric chair. When he reaches the end of the song, he jerks as if being shocked while the tape rewinds with a high-pitched scream. He dies - but in art, perhaps, everything is redeemed: those are pearls that were his eyes.
More and more, Wallinger's art is about mystery. The statue of Christ he placed in Trafalgar Square last year was also a statue of a man suffering, forced to stand naked in the middle of London in a crown of thorns. What lay ahead of him was unknown. He stood on the edge of the huge plinth as if on a cliff, about to step off. Like Holbein's devastating painting of the Dead Christ, Wallinger's statue strips the story of its ending.
Wallinger's success in Trafalgar Square led him to be chosen to represent Britain at next year's Venice Biennale, and this exhibition demonstrates the depth and scope of thought that make him the right choice. Now fetching top prices in the sales rooms, Wallinger is one of our best artists and is getting better.
In his new work Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), he has placed a secret camera in a British airport arrivals hall. Its findings are projected in slow motion, to sacred music. The double door into arrivals opens mysteriously. People come out of this portal looking strangely exalted. They've cleared customs, they've been saved. It's a work of art that finds spiritual beauty effortlessly in the everyday, a video installation in the mode of Robert Bresson, as mysterious as a pantomime horse. Is that businessman smiling because he has glimpsed paradise? Oh no he isn't, oh yes he is.
• Credo is at Tate Liverpool (0151-702 7400), until December 23.
