Visual Arts reviews Offside, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, until Sept 30, 01-2225552 and was du brauchst, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until Saturday, 01-8740064.
At the end of September, The Hugh Lane Gallery will close its doors for the final stage of the building and refurbishment programme that will culminate in the reopening of the existing building, Charlemont House, and the new wing. With the permanent collection in store, the exhibition rooms have been given over to temporary projects under the auspices of the gallery's Offsite programme. Hence the ambitious, compendious and uneven Offside, which is currently installed. For this one, the Hugh Lane drafted in Mark Cullen and Brian Duggan of the Pallas Heights project.
There is a lot of work in Offside, which has a strong international flavour, and it is augmented by two projects further afield (Garret Phelan at the Civic Offices and Niamh McCann in Docklands).
Cullen and Duggan placed their faith "in artists to deliver authentic artworks and projects according to their own agendas", which may be curator-ese for inviting artists to participate and then letting them get on with it. Certainly several artists have made the most of the opportunity.
Nina McGowan's monumental steel-and-cardboard sculpture alone merits a trip to Charlemont House. Tie-Fighters are a pair of abstract sculptural forms. Well, in a sense they are. They are also directly drawn from notional spacecraft in Star Wars. They are oddly, even uncannily, at home in the Hugh Lane's beautiful oval room, recalling Kubrick's juxtaposition of classical architectural style and the abstraction of the mysterious monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. McGowan's management of form, scale and space is really impressive, not to mention her breadth of reference.
Equally striking in terms of fabrication is Cristophe Neuman's ingenious Beautiful City, an enclosed environment composed entirely of plastic carrier bags, the typographical and coloured sections of which make up an expansive city skyline. The profiles of Abigail Reynolds's corrugated cardboard model of a jagged, mountainous landscape are derived from graphs charting the incidence of violent crime in London. In her schematic landscape, vertiginous falls and hidden depths metaphorically equate to fear and the unknown, though the work's concerns don't quite connect with its substantial physical presence.
The most off-the-wall contribution comes from Nathaniel Mellors, who crams half a room with a plethora of untidy pieces. His ramshackle, DIY aesthetic is as evident in his film and video works. In First Blood, he offers an impromptu, informal remake of part of the film of the same name. Quite how he arrived at the rationale for Hateball is anyone's guess. The film documents party political broadcasts on behalf of MACGOOHANSOC, an imaginary political party, by a seven-foot-tall woman who claims to be possessed by the spirit of Patrick McGoohan, in character, in his cult 1967 television series, The Prisoner. One can see why Mellors is drawn to the series, which can be readily interpreted as an allegory about conformity, coercion and freedom. What he makes of it is another matter entirely. Perhaps the seven-foot woman is a nod towards Mrs Thatcher. In the event, his film is compelling for a conventional reason: the main performer is terrific, holding forth with fierce conviction and, paradoxically, a mischievous glint in her eye, in a way that closely recalls Daisy Donovan. Who knows? Perhaps it is Daisy Donovan.
German artist Andreas Gefeller, who took part in this year's EV+A in Limerick, shows two of his remarkable photographic composites of deserted apartments viewed in plan, as though magically, from above. These optically impossible, digitally manipulated images are fascinating and even haunting. They resemble paintings exploring space and texture. Richard Diebenkorn comes to mind. But they are also invested with histories of human occupancy, and they anticipate future occupancy.
Some pieces do disappoint. The six-artist collaborative group, Antistrot, for example, has made a huge wall drawing inspired by comic-book illustration. Exuberant and anarchic, it's a free-for-all in which myriad characters clamour for attention. Great. Except that it falls down, fatally, in terms of the quality of the drawing. The graphic originals are simply an awful lot better. As it happens, Anna Boyle's wall-sized grid of images also highlights drawing, and it too falls down on the quality of the drawing involved: a join-the-dots device just doesn't work. So Offside is uneven. But then, it features work by more than 20 artists, all given free rein. Most of what they've come up with is good, and some of it is exceptionally good.
Five German artists feature at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in was du brauchst. The star of the opening night was the strikingly named Stefanie Trojan, a performance artist in the classical, hard-nosed Marina Abramovic sense of the term.
Stationed close to the door, she set about sniffing the armpits of new arrivals. The subsequent responses and interaction make up the working space of her art. If you missed the event itself, you can see a video that conveys roughly what it was like.
Lachein (Smile) documents another performance piece in which Trojan, rather bravely, approached people in the street and, with her two hands, tried to shape their mouths into a smile. We are not told whether these people represented a pre-selected sample, whether they were an art audience, say. But it is intriguing to watch the responses of individuals to her abrupt approach. Many are amused, puzzled, inquisitive. Only one, in this record, treats her gesture as an assault and smoothly, repeatedly, blocks her arms. The amazing thing is that she keeps trying, risking a violent rebuff that, thankfully, never comes. Trojan's concentration and persistence elicit telling responses, focusing attention on our sense of self, conventional roles, social space and interaction. She is a formidable performer.
Klara Hobza's Morse Code Communication is a visually spectacular video that is actually rooted in an attempt at communication and is about communication. Perched high in a glass-fronted block in New York, Hobza triggers the building's lights to flare on and off in Morse code, now largely unused. There is a certain poignancy in the image of the building signalling vainly to the city at large.
Notburga Karl's fluorescent-tube installation is beautiful, if unremarkable; Thomas Trinkl's graphite-coated sculpture effectively conveys a sense of physical, human presence; and Ulrich Vogl's Chandelier, as with his other pieces, is thoughtful and witty.
