Playing in the ruins of western culture

Despite one brief stab at razzmatazz, the Ormeau Baths Gallery's annual open submission exhibition, Perspective 99, is a subdued, carefully measured affair. It was selected by Philip Dodd, director of London's ICA, and he whittled an entry of 254 down to just 16 artists. Their work is evenly, economically positioned throughout the gallery's several distinct spaces and, curiously, the show never generates any cumulative momentum as you work your way around it. It's not a bad show, and not an especially good one. It is just there, in a flat, methodical way.

"It is by turns," Dodd reflects in his introduction, "witty and elegiac, reflective and declarative." The word to watch there is elegiac, because arguably it's the sentiment that wins out in the end. Indeed, the abiding impression is of a certain emptiness and exhaustion. The day after the opening, Dodd gave an informal talk about the background to his selection. He is an engaging cultural commentator with a broad range of reference and he provided a surprisingly downbeat, broadly historicist assessment. As he sees it, we are at the end of an historical cycle, casting around for a path into the as-yet-unfocused multicultural future.

As to what that future might be, the evidence is that film and video, with emerging digital technologies, are the likeliest vehicles, and his hunch is that "the 21st century will belong to Asia as the 20th belonged to the West". So in a way the game is up. There is the implication, in this view, that the artists in Perspective 99 are playing forlornly in the ruins of Western culture. And, in the event, it is a plausible way of reading what we see in much of the work.

Shauna McMullan's paper cut-out, for example, in which she spent weeks carefully cutting around charcoal marks scribbled onto paper in the space of a few minutes, is a case in point. You wonder at her application, but there's also the feeling that it's the kind of work which emerges from a culture that has spent too long gazing at its own navel. One step forward, two or three steps back. And Stuart Purdy's indifferently painted, purposely bland images of empty tents pitched in empty building interiors are icons of futility. As if to prove that this is postmodernism-by-numbers he mirrors each image, raising the pseudo-issue of the original and the copy.

But for me what sealed the mood of the show was the purely chance circumstance that its one gesture towards razzmatazz, Clive Murphy's Car Chase, happens to echo one of the biggest, noisiest, emptiest and most bombastic pieces at this year's Venice Biennale. In fact Murphy's work is like a very, very poor relation of Jason Rhodes's collaborative boys-and-their-toys piece about car racing - all sound and fury. If that's the route Murphy wants to follow, maybe he should consider hooking up with the trouble-shooting Rhodes, who at least gives you bangs for your buck.

Dodd commented that, coming to Northern Ireland, he expected a lot of overtly political work, and, because it is fashionable, a lot of film and video but that none of these things materialised. He has chosen one tentatively political piece, Mark Dale's h, which refers to the way the pronunciation of the letter H is used as a cultural marker in the North. It involves row upon row of three dimensional lower-case Hs overlain with postcard and mundane views. But in practice it's a cumbersome work with an uncertain logic and an almost inconsequential pay-off.

It's possible to read a political dimension into Carol Murphy's video. Slightly stagey in execution, it plays on our habitual expectations in prompting us to interpret a narrative fragment as representing something menacing or trivial, and it recalls similar work by Willie Doherty. More persuasively, Colin McGookin, who lives in Belfast, brings us right into the here and now, giving us his daughter's-eye view of the world. There is a fairytale air to his re-invention of her cardboard house, not in any escapist sense, but in the realisation that something dreadful and terrifying can suddenly materialise in the midst of enchantment.

Kevin Francis Gray's video, featuring three men playing air guitar to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit is an elegiac work. It's triptych format suggests a reference to an altarpiece, perhaps to Kurt Cobain as a sacrificial Christ-like figure. But it is slackly done. The images are badly framed, of poor quality, and the sound is crackly. The usual riposte to such comments is: "But they're supposed to be."

For a real slacker aesthetic, look no further than Paul Rooney, whose At a Loose End Waiting is an apparently endless video marrying banal images to a banal, homespun soundtrack. "The mundane text and images are transformed into the obsessive, the scary or funny . . . " says the catalogue note. Fat chance. In reality, they never achieve anything like the level of energy implied by the term "obsessive". If anything, they might encapsulate the sad predicament of an indolent, self-absorbed teenager who'd vaguely like to be a singer-songwriter but hasn't got the energy, the insight or the talent to do anything about it.

Apart from some of those already mentioned, among the work that stands out is another Abigail O'Brien and Mary Kelly collaboration, Black Sole Bonne Femme, which, like Carol Murphy's video, plays on ambiguity. Apart from the nudge-nudge aspect of the title, the razor-sharp images and their instructional text, on peeling the skin from a black sole, are left hanging there, allowing us to read increasingly ambiguous and disturbing connotations into an apparently straightforward sequence. Lizzie Hughes' drawings are also impressive. Tentative and eclectic, they relate to a process of personal mapping.

Though badly positioned, Ronnie Hughes's cool paintings make a good case for themselves. They offer a cultural commentary of their own, evoking a distanced, anaesthetised view of things, suggesting the way contemporary culture is passively consumed as a parade of products. Theo Sims's curious, intense meditation on place and memory, which plays ingeniously with scale and space, stays with you. But I can't say I was convinced by the £6,000 award-winning work, Aileen Kelly's found sculptural assemblage. The conjunction of a door, a curtain and a teddy bear doesn't quite manage to become more than the sum of its parts.

Perspective 99 is at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast until September 11th.