Installations of bodies loitering with intent

Reviewed:

With Intent, Richard Kearney, is at the Limerick City Art Gallery until December 22nd (061-310633)

Andrew Kearney is a Limerick-born, London-based artist who makes large-scale installation works noted for their use of architectural space and their technological complexity. They are also notable for the interpretative difficulty they present. As his multifarious installation at the Limerick City Art Gallery, With Intent, demonstrates, you can experience the distinctive ambience and detail of his work and get an accurate and rewarding sense of it without having any clear idea of what it is about - if, that is, it is or needs to be "about" anything.

In fact, its trajectory seems to lead away from comprehension. While he habitually uses systems - lighting, remote sensing, video monitoring - that are usually deployed in an orderly, regulatory, functional way, and while he uses each component with due regard to its intended function; as configured collectively in his installations, their obvious utility tends to ebb away. One reasonable, recurrent inference might be the entropic notion that the conspicuous application of orderly systems leads inexorably to randomness and disorder.

There are other plausible associations and implications. The form of his work, and the kind of technological devices he uses, such as directional microphones and closed circuit televisions, have at times suggested a preoccupation with surveillance and control.

The idea of exclusion also recurs. It is evident as something enacted in certain pieces, like the huge corrugated metal castle, impregnable to the viewers working their way around it in the gallery, that formed the basis of one prize-winning installation. And it is evident by implication in others, in the sense of denying the viewer a conventional meaning.

It is tempting to view this motif as mirroring Kearney's own personal history of feelings of exclusion - that is, his experiences as someone who never felt quite Irish, who was educationally disadvantaged because he was dyslexic, who is gay. These are all aspects that tended to set him apart from a putative norm that is, to the outsider, coercive.

He has also used body imagery, sometimes linking the body to architectural spaces and mechanical or electronic systems, to circulatory and regulatory mechanisms, for example. His recurrent use of opposites, of light and darkness, hot and cold, inside and outside might relate to the opposition between life and death.

With Intent colonises a major part of the City Art Gallery and is a composite of several distinct, if related, installations. In Thread, mikes positioned outside translate sound into numerical displays on about 40 digital clocks hung around the gallery walls. In Nightshade, images of a fallen and segmented tree trunk perch atop a series of plywood sheets perforated by light bulbs which brighten and dim according to a pre-programmed cycle.

Black balloons adrift in the gallery basement are monitored on five ground-floor screens in Time To Time. In Watching, we see claustrophobically close-up views of a man, presumably Kearney, moving in a dark, basement space crammed with piping.

And in Silence, a vast white orb almost fills the white cube of the handsome gallery extension, again linked to cycles of sound and illumination.

Writing in a new Gandon Profile on Kearney, Simon Ofield boldly suggests that, while Kearney's installations can "divert, disrupt and disorientate the spectator" and thus "may be queer in the now well-established theoretical sense of this word". They also refer to "forms of visual and spatial design familiar to Cecil Beaton". This is not to say that Kearney is a "designer-aesthete" in the Beaton mould, but that his work "realises the sexualised tensions between art and different forms of design", as related to their production and interpretation throughout the 20th century.

Ofield's proposal is, as he admits, tenuously argued, but it is an interesting and helpful bid to situate Kearney's work in a wider interpretative framework. On the level of a personal response, one of the most striking aspects of With Intent is the artist's clear ability to generate a distinctive atmosphere partly through the incorporation and adjustment of the architectural environment, which certainly accords with Ofield's point about enlarging the context within which his work is viewed.

However, what also struck me was a consistent fascination with ideas of inside and outside and the interplay between, and ideas of integration and fragmentation or dissociation.

This tends to bring the focus back to the body, albeit not the adult body but the infant body. To a stage, that is to say, when we start to take on board notions of an autonomous outside, and the bearing it has on our developing sense of an inside, a self that is us, and within which we are.

Kearney is forever constructing simulations of this model of a tentative, developing self. His installations monitor the outside world and convert it into data which has an impact on the conditions of an inside world. This impact is real and ongoing, but we grope ineffectually when it comes to pinpointing its precise significance, just as we are at a loss when it comes to comprehending the inside, the mind and moods, of an imagined and, as we learn, actual other.

When Kearney depicts the body, it tends to be in fragments, on occasion inscribed with messages - tattoos - that, again, are not readily understandable. The self, in whose position his installations situate us, wavers between dissociation and coherence, between being a collection of disparate impressions and sensations and an integrated whole.

All those things that make up the world we come to know - a self, an outside, the other, a reliable framework of time and space - are there in his work, but we are perpetually on the borderline, the point between a kind of relaxed, undemanding incoherence and focused intelligibility.