Make-their-minds-up time

Orla Barry

Orla Barry's work is a varied elaboration of William Burroughs's cut-and-paste narrative technique. Her various assemblages of fragmentary phrases and narrative snippets might suggest that life is a series of disconnected events which momentarily promise a coherence that proves illusory. A series of photographs of rocks on beaches reinforce this idea. We instinctively look for patterns in nature, but apparent patterns may imply a significance that isn't there.

Though Barry was born in Wexford and studied at the NCAD and Belfast, the Glen Dimplex is her first Irish exhibition. Based in Brussels, she has shown in several European countries, including England. Her work falls into the established genre of artists's diary or journal.

In A Tear for a Glass of Water, a 1996 video performance, an actress performs a disjointed monologue, with apparent conviction, in a sparsely furnished interior, complete with stylised, Monty Pythonesque movements. We try in vain to orient ourselves to each successive narrative proposition. They go nowhere individually and they do not connect. We're left with a series of disjointed snippets and an impression of vaguely obsessive behaviour.

Similarly, Barry's Blue Volume notebooks, opened and laid out around a dining table, are a kind of abstract diary, their words snatched arbitrarily from the flux of each passing day, varying from the banal, cornflakes-for-breakfast kind of observation to completely opaque references. Again, there is an underlying feeling that there's a debate going on about order and chaos, but it's a heavily weighted argument.

Prospects: citing the example of Sheherazade, Walter Benjamin observed that story-telling is a way of postponing the future. Barry postpones even the narrative present. She evades and dissembles. Why doesn't she let any of her quasinarratives develop? Then we could see what is going on in her mind. But perhaps her work is an elaborate means of keeping us away from what is going on in her mind. In Travesties, Tom Stoppard has James Joyce come up with a Limerick that sums up the problem at the heart of her work:

A Romanian rhymer from Bucharest

had a system he based on roulette

his reliance on chance

was a def'nite advance

and yet, and yet, and yet . . .

Catherine Yass

London-based Catherine Yass has created a highly-praised body of photographic work. She documents architectural environments. Previously the spaces she depicted contained people. She devised a strategy of making portraits of individuals who commissioned artworks - not portraits per se - from her. But eventually people were edited out of the picture and we are left with images of spaces designed for people, a simple enough notion, but one that chimes neatly with the critical obsession with the metaphysical notions of presence and absence.

Yass throws her images slightly out of kilter by overprinting a blue negative image on the full colour positive. The resultant mixture of negative and positive gives the work a tinge of sci-fi strangeness, particularly as she displays it on brightly-lit lightboxes. Last year in Belfast she made images of the service areas of Waterfront Hall and exhibited them in the foyer, wittily disturbing the building's sense of decorum. Similarly, if less pointedly, in IMMA she is exhibiting modular views of claustrophobic capsule hotel pods for businessmen in Tokyo, and stalls in urinals: public, male spaces for private activities, as she describes them. But her most impressive-sounding work is Invisible City, made in Japan, in which Tokyo at night is visualised purely in the play of its multifarious electric light.

Prospects: Yass has flourished in the hermetic, rarefied environment of the London art world, studying at the Slade and the YBA finishing school, Goldsmiths, before going on to teach at St Martin's - a CV which could suggest that she needs to get out more. Her work has a crisp, contemporary feel, the kind of thing that could turn up on the cover of a CD by one of the sharper Britpop bands, which means she has to be a serious contender.

Susan Mac Willliam

Susan MacWilliam is a Belfast artist who works in a variety of media, often in a way that questions or subverts whatever medium she happens to be using at the time. Her installation Curtains at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin a couple of years ago mimicked a pair of theatrical curtains in meticulous, full-scale Plasticine relief, a feat of verisimilitude which seemed to imply that verisimilitude obscures rather than reveals the reality behind the curtain. Curtains was variously interpreted as a comment on the redundancy of virtuosity and mimesis in painting and sculpture, but one of its strengths was that it was open to a range of interpretations; it didn't just illustrate a text.

Similarly, her video Faint is quite open to interpretation. It features MacWilliam herself seeming to faint repeatedly in a lush parkland setting. It's funny and fascinating and perplexing, and it intersects with the subject of another video work showing at IMMA, The Last Person, inspired by the trial of Portsmouth medium Helen Duncan in 1944. It seems incredible that Duncan was prosecuted under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735, but as MacWilliam documents it, that was the case. Court reports of her trial accompany images of the artist re-enacting the drama of a mediumistic trance, complete with ectoplasm. Though contemporary in means and ends, MacWilliam's work does cumulatively project a sense of a distinctive, Gothic sensibility, of an artist drawn down obscure, revealing avenues of the past.

Prospects: Apparently locked in an obsessive, one-sided infatuation with video, the art world is blithely forgiving of the kind of shortcomings that simply wouldn't be countenanced in television, theatre or film. While The Last Person imaginatively broaches fascinating material, it is more like a rough draft than a finished work. Faint is better, and suggests that MacWilliam is learning fast. Her presence on the list might be a little premature, but if Yass is the favourite, she is a close second.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

You may have noticed that photography and its offshoots are the stars of this year's Glen Dimplex shortlist exhibition, and Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the artists who set the trend by firmly positioning photography in the fine-art frame. Born in Tokyo in 1948, he is by far the oldest and most established artist on the list, having crossed the threshold of artworld stardom some time ago and become a fixture on the international circuit.

Sugimoto works in series of black-and-white images and is a globe-trotter, often documenting identical subjects all over the world. His Dioramas are pictures of tableaux in natural history museums. The images are beautiful but they also prompt us to question the role of the camera as a documentary tool by recording an ersatz reality. His seascapes picture seas in terms of an unvarying format: sky, horizon line, sea. Some of these many images are quite painterly, recalling Mark Rothko's late monochrome abstracts. His drivein movie theatres feature a luminescent white screen: what he's done is to match the exposure to the length of the film being screened, the result is a photograph of a complete film each time. More recently he's embarked on a modern architecture series.

Prospects: In terms of accomplishment to date, Sugimoto is way ahead of the pack. But the award's criteria are ambiguously phrased - it's not for accomplishment per se, but for development in the work - and essentially what he exhibits is more of the same, so it's unclear as to how he even got on the list. As it happens, there has been a notable departure in his work in the last year, but, puzzlingly, it isn't mentioned by the judges. He made a time-based installation at Japan's Centre for Contemporary Art at Kitakyushu which effectively dramatised his habitual themes of time experienced and visualised. Since this isn't under consideration, and the modern architecture images are by no means his best work, it's hard to see how he can take the award.

The Glen Dimplex Artists' Award 1999 exhibition continues at IMMA until August 19th