Tate Britain | turner prize | curious symmetries

Arrived in london on the redeye, dropped bags, and headed to the tate britain for the last day of the turner prize exhibition. Artists this year included dexter dalewood, angela de la cruz, the olitith group, and susan phillipz.
I found with each artist's work a curious symmetry with art of the past.
This symmetry elicits the question: what position are these artists taking in relation to that which has come before?

Dexter Dalewood
Collage | Large canvases referential to landscape painting and all manner of art styles and artist works, visualizing obscure references to authors, but not portraits, rather the images are of spaces absent of the subject.
"white flag" 2010 | Jasper johns, Joseph beuy's chalkboards
"Death of David Kelly" 2009 | yves Klein blue, surrealism in distorted moon, flat painting.
"Burroughs in tangiers" 2005 |rauchenburg, pop, Richard hamilton, twombly, bottecelli, da Vinci
"Greenham Common" 2008 | Mel chin's revival field, chris ofilio or aboriginal circles.
"lennie" 2008 | "of mice and men" 1937 great depression, swath of verdant Kelly green cuts
across the middle pushing the representational, storybook riverbank beneath it.
"Herman Melville 2005 | amalgamation of Picasso, Dutch interior paintings

The Otilith Group
Montage | The Otilith is a collaborative pair and the word Otilith refers to the inner part of the ear that senses gravity. The artists presented two pieces for the Turner prize exhibition. The first was a series of 13 video monitors with headphones attached. I was able to view one complete video in Xenos Zenakis is speaking of music and ancient greece. "When you are young you have many facets that are then worn smooth with age", this was being said as in conjuction with a montage of images of the ancient faceless Greek statues. The piece seemed very much a re-presentation of Chris Marker's "Oak Legacy" 1989. I was left wanting for more insight into what the artists actually presented in this work.
The second piece in the exhibition was much more engaging visually, albeit it was in a very dark room and I struggled through nodding off from jetlag to view the entire 45 minute video. The piece, Otilith III, depicted a story of a boy who befriends an alien. The footage moves back and forth between cotemporary city scenes of London and India, and scenes from old Bollywood films and found footage. Much of the editing and the black and white footage was what held my focus. The question arose in the film: "what do we look like from an aliens perspective?". I found a curious symmetry with this price at that of Chris Marker's film, La Jette. La Jette YouTube link
As I was waiting for the video to begin an excerpt of the catalog on the table captured my attention and seems particularly relevant to the moment.
Nostalgia or impossible return | Episode 4
"Nostalgia, Homeland, Miagration, and Diaspora -each of these notions opens onto another and allows for a cultural movement between definitions which remain relational rather than absolute". Bourriaud's notion of the wayfaring altermodern artist comes to mind here.