Aidan Dunne on Perspective 2002, Ormeau Bath Gallery (048-90321402) until tomorrow and Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Ulster Museum (048-90383111) until December 8th.
Don't underestimate the cultural impact of Ryanair. Low-fare air travel means that more and more artists and curators can travel frequently and can tap directly into what's going on in the world of the big art fairs and exhibitions. Which, along with other factors, contributes to the fact that the time lag between local and metropolitan, once measurable in years, is practically non-existent.
Or that what's hyped in Documenta in June will turn up in Perspective in September, as indeed happens in this year's Perspective 2002 the Ormeau Bath Gallery's annual open submission show. Selectors Sarah Pierce and Jacob Fabricius have come up with an identikit group show that is indeed current, open and outward-looking.
There's also a curiously low-key air to it, a feeling of business as usual, not so much because of the predictability of the work, more because of the oddly limited, hesitant, discursive quality that has crept into so much art internationally over the past few years. As though it's more "art?" than art: art as research, as documentation, as cultural idiosyncrasy.
A good Irish exemplar of this trend is Katie Holten, but she isn't in Belfast. There is, however, Philippe Hernandez, whose engaging installation is big on documentation - documentation, in a sense, about not delivering a work of art. His notes, doodles (really artless doodles), and masses of ephemera make up an edgy but oddly self-satisfied, shaggy-dog story. He doesn't do much with a good idea, which is to make a map of a region of Mexico city, composed entirely of flyers and other publicity material.
Dave Hulfish Bailey's various bits and pieces of documentation are by comparison directed towards a coherent end. He even provides a scale prototype. OK, his scheme to convert chunks of LA's freeway system into grain storage bins is unlikely to win over George Bush, but it has a crazed, demented energy about it. For his next project perhaps he'll start a cult in the jungles of Central America.
Annabel Howland's aerial photographs of agricultural landscapes in which only the boundaries and other incidental details are preserved - the land itself is cut away - are visually intriguing, but Wendy Judge's drawings of grandiose, isolated contemporary houses sitting incongruously against spectacular settings fall down in terms of technique. Christopher Reid's anecdotal Belfast Memories, as with his similar project in Dublin, is a compendium of personal recollections that make up an unofficial, alternative portrait of the city in time.
Drawing on Gainsborough's portraits of wealth and privilege, Ursula Burke placed a photograph of her parents at home in a local Belfast freesheet; a promising idea that needs a little more to actually come to life.
In Alan Phelan's video installation Sam Wagstaff Gives Good, hands flip through a Rolodex as a voice tries uncertainly to recall the destinations of items from Wagstaff's collections, which were donated to various institutions. The effect is ambiguous, but there is a certain poignance to the description of a vain fight with mortality.
Charlotte McGowan-Griffin's beautifully made fretwork cut-outs inhabit a self-contained world of gothic fantasy.
The highlight, though, is certainly Ellie Rees, a young artist who shows a series of short video performance pieces. Any one of these would make her a name to take note of, and pop culture seems to be her recurrent preoccupation but especially notable, all the same, is her artworld in-joke, a satirical tribute to the formidable Marina Abramovic, which involves a black wig and various brushes. It's not every day that contemporary art - which can take itself very seriously indeed - makes you laugh out loud, but Rees's videos do; all of them. She is a very good performer.
It is good to see that Perspective is a genuinely international show. An attempt to summarise this year's mood in collective, overall terms tends towards adjectives such as oblique, sketchy, provisional, tentative. Even the choice of Andrew McDonald's brief, agreeable, modest animations for the show's substantial €6,000 award suggests a certain wariness of strong artistic personality.
The 10 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci currently on show at the Ulster Museum are, in their way, also a form of documentation. Painstakingly preserved and presented, they are small, closely worked, obsessive. Some, you could almost say, are doodles.
Chosen to reflect da Vinci's omnivorous curiosity, which extends to human and animal anatomy, fluid dynamics, religious iconography, natural form and pattern, map-making, and warfare. Was his intricately detailed, speculative study of mortars bombarding a fortress selected because it might be oddly pertinent in the Northern context?
Da Vinci's drawings are among the most famous in the history of Western art. They have been widely reproduced so that we are familiar with his distinctive, probing style of intricately worked cross-hatching, and they are amazing documents with a remarkable aura about them. But more than that, with a handful of other figures, da Vinci has come to represent the artist as an isolated and inscrutable genius, and to see his work at first hand is to see something directly connected to the heart of European cultural history. All the more so because of the casual immediacy of the drawings.
