Strong on theory,weak on meaning

Two new exhibitions in Dublin’s Temple Bar complement each other, but despite some highlights in both, as is often the case with conceptual art, the interest generated is more theoretical than visual

A MacGuffin and Some Other Things

Vaari Claffey curates a show by Lucy Andrews, Isil Egrikavuk, Alice Rekab and Judith Scott

Project Arts Centre, 39 East Essex St, Temple Bar, Dublin Until June

entrance, entrance

Isobel Harbison curates a show by Alan Butler, Garbiele Beveridge, Juliette Bonneviot, Mick Peters and Peles Empire (Katherine Stoever and Barbara Wolff)

Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin Until June 2

CONSIDERABLE EFFORT and resources have gone into two new group shows that seem to complement each other neatly and are sited just a stone’s throw apart. A MacGuffin and Some Other Things is at Project on East Essex St and entrance, entrance is at Temple Bar Gallery just up the road. The first is about the object and the second about the image. Both are curator-driven, in the way that more and more exhibitions are these days, and the curators in question are Vaari Claffey and Isobel Harbison.

Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the role of a “MacGuffin” in films as an object that drives the plot – everyone wants to get hold of it – but that possesses no real meaning. In fact the more unexplained it is, the better. It’s an obscure object of desire, a floating signifier. That’s Claffey’s starting point for her exploration of the role of objects in narrative forms, as manifested in the realm of fine art.

The MacGuffins she has rounded up include one of the late Judith Scott’s wrapped sculptures. Scott, an American artist who died in 2005, was born with Down’s syndrome and was severely disadvantaged as her deafness was misinterpreted as mental disability. When, eventually, she was given a chance to express herself creatively, she began to produce amazing sculptures consisting of found or appropriated objects elaborately wrapped in coloured yarns. Definitely a MacGuffin.

In Isil Egrikavuk’s film, a subject is interviewed about a small, non-indentified object notionally retrieved from a mysterious library. There’s a nod to thriller narrative structure in the work’s wider framework, but Hitchcock it ain’t. In fact, judged in terms of MacGuffin deployment, it’s perfunctory, even lazy.

Alice Rekab incorporates cryptic, perhaps functional objects in her versions of mind-body-spirit instructional exercise videos.

In 1971, David Hall interrupted television programming in Scotland with succinct sculptural videos, reminiscent of pioneering works of 1960s conceptual art. For example, in the show at Project, a tap intrudes into the frame of a television monitor and the screen fills up with water. Claffey suggests that he momentarily turns “the television into a sculptural object in the living room”. Except that now the television is, less transformatively, a sculptural object in a gallery.

Lucy Andrews, the remaining artist, takes materials from the innards of the building and places them out in the open.

For reasons that are unclear, however, to see the exhibition entails negotiating an un-credited “major structural intervention in the gallery space”, a suspended, inverted canopy of fabric that spans the room from wall to wall. It doesn’t help.

The title of Harbison’s show, entrance, entrance, refers to two aspects of the image in contemporary culture. Images still literally entrance us in the sense of casting a spell over us. But any image is, as she puts it, also “an entrance point” to a dizzying world of multiple and endlessly protean digital versions and variations.

Two works dominate in terms of scale. One is Alan Butler’s huge sculpture of a cartoon dog, engagingly fashioned from recycled wooden palettes. It’s embellished with hand-made protest posters. Does it help to know that the dog is taken from the first animated music video screened on MTV, accompanying Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing? And that the palettes and the posters refer to the dismantled Occupy Dame Street encampment, sited close by at the Central Bank until recently? It’s an involved though curiously abstract rationale, and the piece might have been better without the posters.

The other big work is a kind of entrance in itself. Part of Peles Empire (an ongoing collaborative work by Katherina Stoever and Barbara Wolff), it is a vast, distorted, three-dimensional image of the entrance hall to a Romanian castle – Castle Peles, in fact. The artistic collaboration is exclusively devoted to this castle and has since 2005 made reproductions of many of its rooms. The appeal for Stoever and Wolff is that the building, completed in 1913, is an architectural composite, consciously copying myriad styles to arrive at a kind of ideal castle.

Harbison presumably likes the way they use the castle as a source from which to generate endless strange, manipulated, inherently unstable images and sculptural forms. Yet although the installation is big and detailed, it is not visually compelling. The complex conceptual rationale doesn’t lead to a coherent visual conclusion, to any real transformation of the material; it’s just inertly there, a record of a series of sources drawn on and steps taken, to arrive nowhere in particular.

Image as branding is the starting point for Juliette Bonneviot, whose cutout, life-size model of a track-suited raver is visible from the street outside and attracts curious looks from a non-stop parade of passers-by. Branding, the piece didactically implies, turns us into images that are walking advertisements.

Also alluding to advertising, Gabriele Beveridge arranges two rear headshots from hair-product advertisements on either side of a blank panel of office divider. To Beveridge’s credit, the blankness of the styled hair works both visually and conceptually with the blankness of the ubiquitous divider. In the context, it’s an unexplained, almost poetic work, which is no bad thing. The show’s final day, June 2nd, incorporates a series of screenings introduced by Harbison at 2pm.

Thematically, the MacGuffin and the life of the image in contemporary culture are rich subjects for exhibitions, and both exhibitions are certainly of some interest, with a few notable highlights, including Butler’s giant Trojan dog and Beveridge’s enigmatic collage. Yet generally you work hard for the level of interest on offer, and then not much of it is visual. Rather it’s drily theoretical, a feature of a great deal of contemporary conceptual art, embracing video and installation.