Nothing we like more than a good shock

Belfast Festival at Queen's

Gilbert and George, Ormeau Baths Gallery until January 15th, 2000

Art from the Rucksack, Catalyst Arts until November 25th

Max Eastley, Kinetic Drawings, Old Museum Arts Centre until November 26th

Writing about the film M*A*S*H some years ago, critic Eric Rhode noted that director Robert Altman "reduces character to a kind of play-acting". The rationale is that the protagonists cope with the impossibility of their situation by adopting "a style, or silhouette", a cool, facetious, malicious persona they can inhabit. This act of impersonation is a survival mechanism that insulates them from the reality of their predicament. The problem is, Rhode suggests, that in the end this strategy evades "the moral density of experience".

He could well have been describing the Italian Gilbert Proesch and Englishman George Passmore, who more than 30 years ago were subsumed under the collective identity of Gilbert & George, and haven't been seen since. They still inhabit that collective, defensive persona, and still choose to see themselves as embattled outsiders, even though art critics and curators vie with each other to lavish them with hyperbolic praise and stage vast exhibitions of their work. The more they say they hate the art world, the more the art world falls over itself to demonstrate its love for them. They're not the first artists to discover that there's nothing the bourgeoisie likes more than a good shock now and then.

What lies behind Gilbert & George's defensiveness? They won't own up to anything, though something tantamount to a terror of conventional involvement with the world comes through. Difficult personal histories, perhaps. Yet at this stage of what has been, almost from the first, an extraordinarily successful career, their bristling wariness of being identified in terms of sexuality or ideology, two long-term thematic concerns, is difficult to explain, and the cageyness extends to work they continually advertise in terms of its accessibility and broad appeal.

There is something likeable and appealing about them, but something tiresome and even tedious as well. The tedious element of their art is its Beavis and Butthead humour, like their sniggering obsession with phallic puns which they endlessly, laboriously contrive and then, like schoolboys called to task, self-righteously disavow. They have been influential, spawning a host of imitators. It sometimes seems as if each country has its own Gilbert & George wannabes. Locally, for example, there are the Americans McDermott and McGough, and in England the Chapman brothers.

Gilbert & George's work consists of billboard-sized photographic composites that have the quality of grainy, enlarged photocopies flatly coloured with fluorescent markers. Visually crude, it has a punchy, graphic directness. It's brilliantly designed in that it's big enough to fill the most cavernous modern museum. It also looks as if it's cheap to produce, easy to transport because it breaks down into compact panels, and relentlessly concentrated on promoting the artists as a brand name: a non-stop barrage of very effective advertisements for themselves. For them, art is iconography. Everything is image.

But even humbly naked, immersed in faeces and bodily fluids, Gilbert & George still shelter behind their blank, camp persona. Their concept of transcendence seems, in all seriousness, to be nothing more or less than the universal acceptance of their art, and their art means them. And despite their talk of happiness and love, planet Gilbert & George looks like a singularly bleak, unlovely place.

There is a megalomaniacal edge to their theorising. One of their favourite words in interviews, "democratic", seems to translate, in their minds, as accordance with their views. Andy Warhol famously pioneered the idea of art as business, and Gilbert & George embrace it wholeheartedly. As art businessmen, self-promotion is what they are about. They do it very well.

To a large extent, Gilbert & George are the festival's visual arts programme. There are other exhibitions and events, of course, but in terms of resources and scale they are minor. Roping in a travelling show like the Jurgen Schadeberg photographic retrospective (at the Waterfront Hall), for example, or listing the Ulster Museum's 300 Years of Irish Art (it ended its run on November 7th) as a festival exhibition smacks of laziness.

The most industrious venue is the tireless Catalyst Arts collective, tucked down the alley of Exchange Place off Donegall Street. Besides its regular live art weekend, Catalyst is currently hosting the travelling, mixed-media Ireland-Slovenia artists' exchange exhibition, Art From the Ruck- sack. But Catalyst's highlight has to be Japanese-born, Cardiff-based artist Reiko Aoyagi's site-specific installation at Templecourt nearby. Taking over the vacant, open-plan ground floor of an office building, Reiko simply created shallow pools with water and plastic sheeting dammed with lengths of wood, so that the flooded floor reflects the constantly changing light from outside. When I was there, the fading afternoon light, reflected in the expansive space, together with the distant murmur of traffic and voices, engendered a distinctly Tarkovsky-like melancholy. It is a simple, very effective piece of work.

Though extremely limited in terms of space, the Old Museum Arts Centre has mounted some interesting exhibitions including, during last year's festival, Mary McIntyre's photographic installation. This year's show of Kinetic Drawings by Max Eastley, the avant-garde sculptor and musician, is also outstanding. His three "drawings", very loosely inspired by Japanese ghost stories, include one new piece. They are each strange, delicate mechanisms, powered by electric motors but, as he puts it himself, while each motor operates at a constant speed, he introduces various kinds of obstacles to thwart this regularity.

The result is an intriguing mixture of spare, elegant, animated forms that move, and produce distinctive sounds, in a disconcertingly lifelike way, occasionally falling quiet only to start up again without warning. Procession of 100 Ghosts, for example, refers to a story about an artist who spent a night in a haunted temple so that he could spy on and draw ghosts, but was so petrified that he was afraid to look. Emerging with the daylight, he saw that the spirits had left their outlines on the wall in the form of a kind of fungal growth, providing him with his material.

Eastley's interpretation, which is, he emphasises, in no sense an illustration of the story, features three forked steel cables dancing erratically on sheets of paper, producing a swish and scraping like nibs. It is a genuinely haunting work and, like everything he does, is beautifully judged and understated, and uses sound brilliantly. Incidentally, judging by recent international exhibitions, it's also emblematic of a wider resurgence in sophisticated kinetic art.

One of the best shows in Belfast, but not part of the festival, has just ended at the Fenderesky Gallery. Inscriptions on Stones was a group, thematic show, linked by four Stephen McKenna paintings. As it happens, he often paints stones, and is particularly good at rendering the way light falls on stone. Amelia Stein showed a set of photographs of gravestones in Venice. Tom Fitzgerald's grid of sandblasted slate, inscribed with anatomical-mechanical diagrams, was a terrific work. Also impressive were Graham Gingles Torso box and Alistair MacLennan's Living Stones.