IN HIS recent collection the Spirit Level Seamus Heaney evokes the fraught relationship between politics and art at the time of the H Block hunger strikes:

The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent

Like something out of Dante's scurly hell,

Drilling their way through the rhymes and images...

Over the last 15 years, the red eyes of the hunger strikers have continued to drill their way through both rhymes and images, both literary and visual art. Those traumatic events have been shaped into poems, paintings, plays and the film, Some Mother's Son, due to be released here soon. And now there is, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Shane Cullen's Fragmens sur les Institutions Republicaines IV, a monumental transcription of some of the "comms" smuggled out from the H Blocks during the strikes.

The comms, themselves, are not new to anyone with an interest in the hunger strikes, since most of them were published in David Beresford's rivetting account, Ten Men Dead. Cullen has simply, if laboriously, painted them onto 64 panels, covering four walls of the gallery. There is no attempt to use "artistic" calligraphy: all 35,000 words are painted in a uniform typeface onto an unchanging dark green back ground.

Traces of green paint in the white faces of the lettering do have the effect of making the words shimmer slightly when viewed from the middle distance but this is about the only hint of purely visual opulence that the work provides. In a perverse way, this minimalist severity makes a kind of sense, since it dodges the question of how to aestheticise an event that is already saturated in aesthetics. One of the difficulties with attempting to make a work of art from the hunger strikes is that they were themselves already a work of art.

What happened in the H Blocks was a self conscious deployment of images, symbols and actions to evoke a response shaped by tradition and history. Within Irish republicanism, the hunger strike has been a recurring motif working in precisely the same way a motif works in an artistic tradition - each time it is used it draws meaning and force from the previous time. Bobby Sands, writing his last poem to his mother before his death, for instance, knew that he was playing out a role created by Patrick Pearse.

And at times the relationship between the politics and the aesthetics of hunger striking has been extraordinarily intimate. It is not for nothing that David Beresford's Ten Men Dead is laced with quotations from William Butler Yeats's 1904 hunger strike play, The King's Threshold. Nor is it all that strange that what happened in the H Blocks was prefigured almost exactly on the stage of the Abbey in Seamus Byrne's 1950 play Design for a Headstone. Here, for instance, is the IRA prison commander in that play: "The form of resistance will be non co operative. Those convicted will do no work, accept no orders, wear no prison clothing do nothing, in fact, implying acceptance of criminal status.

For a painter the problem posed by this entanglement of art and politics can be expressed crudely by asking the question: what can you put on the walls of a gallery that can compete in visceral force with the faeces and menstrual blood that the protestors smeared on the walls of their cells? The answer is either a work of extraordinary skill and courage, taking on and transforming the language and imagery of the hunger strikers, or nothing at all.

Shane Cullen falls between these alternatives. His work is too timid to really confront the hunger strike itself and too minimal to celebrate it. His intention presumably, is to take the aesthetic dimension out of the event and to allow the comms to stand on their own. The rigorous, rigid form of the panels suggests a desire to strip the reality of drama and spectacle. But the effect is merely to aestheticise the event in a different way. By altering the scale of the comms - from tiny words on cigarette papers to huge slogans on - the walls - he robs them of their pathos. And he also literally disembodies the messages, losing the strange mixture of heroism and self abasement that comes from messages that were carried inside bodily orifices. What is left is simply a kind of fetish.

What happens, in effect, is that an extraordinarily dirty political event is cleaned up. A political campaign that was characterised by the use of the human body at its most exposed and obscene as a political weapon is made entirely abstract. We get the H Blocks without the sickening smells and the terrible sights. We get words without the context that gives them meaning. The people and organisations mentioned in the comms - the army council of the IRA, Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison, Denis Faul - are literally reduced to cyphers.

Both as art and as politics, this is an act of evasion. It evades the responsibility of art to transform what it touches. And it evades the responsibility of anyone reflecting on events whose meaning is still being played out in games of life and death to consider the continuing consequences of words and images.

Maybe some day it will be possible to view such testaments to a time of death and disaster with the cold distance of an archaeologist scrutinising hieroglyphs. By pretending that such a day has already come, and that we can look on blood and excrement as mere shapes on a wall, this exhibition does nothing to hasten its arrival.