Invited by the Kerlin Gallery to curate a show that would expand the gallery's programme, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith has come up with Kin, featuring four New York-based artists with a "common but varied experience of the Irish-American diaspora". They all display a dutiful, not to say neurotic concern with identity in a way that recalls the prescriptive orthodoxies of 1990s art and, to be fair, most of the work does date from that decade.
Mac Giolla Leith refers to the work as having a certain "mischievous" quality at one point, and that is pretty close to the mark. There's a little more, though. The prevalent tone is one of something like jaundiced whimsy, with the slightly bitter note that comes from people trying to figure out their place in a world they haven't made and which is in many respects strange to them.
You might find John Currin's obsessively finished, parodic icons of femininity fascinating in a horrible kind of way, or just horrible. More recently Currin has made similar reworkings of art history figures, uneasy crosses between classical nudes and knowing glamour models with cheesy grins.
He represents surgically enhanced breasts, for example, as balloon-like protuberances that look as if they are about to float away at any moment. It is as though objects of erotic fantasy have become so remote from fact as to be grotesque, which is, indeed, often the case. Yet the underlying kitsch aesthetic seems more like a Jeff Koons hangover than a bright new dawn.
The spirit of Koons also infuses a pair of green terracotta figurines by Sean Landers. He mines a familiar vein of self-deprecating masculinity - he's the clown, the buffoon, the stand-up comic who plays on his own inadequacies. Where the nightclub comic might dissect his own ineptitude in love and life, Landers owns up to vocational ineptitude as the artist he supposedly is: can't draw, can't paint, can't write, can't even spell, for heaven's sake.
This sort of approach wouldn't have cut much ice back during the Renaissance - when the attitude was pretty much: "If you can't paint the fresco, Giovanni, get off the scaffolding" - but in today's caring, liberal societies we've learned to cherish mediocrity. For behind the humour lurks, what? A putatively honest anxiety with which we might emphasise, that might encapsulate a truth about uncertainty common to us all. And does, pretty much.
In her video pieces, Cheryl Donegan comes across as being something of a performer, which is just as well since she opted to stage the last ever version of her performance piece, Kiss My Royal Irish Ass, at the show's opening. This involves her, stripped to her underwear, applying green paint to her bare bottom and imprinting it on sheets of paper to form four leaf clover patterns, all to a medley of Oirish tunes.
That's probably her most flamboyant work, but it gives a flavour of her skittish approach to myths and stereotypes, as in Practisse, which has a go at the notion of the celebrity male artist - Picasso, Matisse - painting, and thus in some way creating, the female model.
Ellen Gallagher's work comes across as an extended series of oblique, tentative improvisations on a few obscure motifs that hover between abstraction and figuration. Their sources are relevant: many of them derive from "the tradition of black and white minstrelsy". And it helps to know that, despite expectations aroused by her name, Gallagher is black.
So we have such devices as stylised versions of the exaggerated lips or eyes, and the blazer stripes, of minstrels, treated as elements of repeat patterns in casual approximations of formal, abstract compositions. These motifs, methodically embedded in low-key, almost haphazard compositional arrangements, could be seen as playing against the bold centrality of Modernist form. The same holds for the use of minute levels of detail, as opposed to museum-scale bombast. Yet it's all so curiously hermetic and inward-looking that it is, in the end, quirkily engaging rather than hugely interesting.
In May 1968, Magnum photographer Paul Fusco was on the train carrying the body of the assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy from California to Washington DC. Along the way he photographed the people who turned out in droves to mourn the loss of a future leader. A selection of his pictures, arranged in a frieze around the walls of the Gallery of Photography, puts us, the viewers, on the train, and offers a remarkable, continuous record of sorrow and respect. The images also recall another America. From small, relatively poor communities and isolated homesteads to larger towns, an incredible depth of communal feeling comes across, something that is difficult to imagine in these more cynical times. There is something extremely touching about the individual expressions of mourning, from organised civic displays to impromptu individual formality. In all it amounts to a valuable social document, with some stunning photographs.
In an appropriate piece of juxtaposition, in the upper gallery, Scott Hopkins's peaceIwalls is also a social document. It consists chiefly of portraits of community activists in Northern Ireland, on both sides of the peace walls in Belfast, each accompanied by a fairly comprehensive statement. It is a good, solid, sobering piece of work that implicitly points up the limitations of any facile appeal to common sense or liberal consensus, clearly conveying the complexity of the issues involved - and just how difficult it is going to be to forge any kind of cross-community understanding, given that the communities have, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, fundamentally different "centres of gravity".
