It is day one of EV+A 2000: Friends and Neighbours, and the exhibition's curator, Rosa Martinez, is having problems with the livestock. The parrot in Pery Square is keeping mum, sulking quietly on its perch. Admittedly it is a wooden parrot, a big, garish bird in a little tree in the tiny courtyard of an ordinary house that has been turned into a domestic-sized art installation. But somewhere, apparently, there is supposed to be an audio tape broadcasting real parrot noises.
Having tramped up and down the stairs, Martinez queries the young woman keeping an eye on the house: "From where do you listen to the parrot?" Nowhere, it seems, for the moment, at least until someone who is au fait with the parrot tape can be found. The parrot remains mute and remote beyond the windows, a symbol of unattainable exoticism.
Though there are other noises in the house, including the very loud breathy, squeaky sounds of a man and a woman, of whom we see only naked arms and torsos, inflating and wrestling with enormous balloons in two simultaneous video projections upstairs. These videos were made by Greek artist Nikos Navridis and they are oddly compelling.
There is, meanwhile, more squeaking just a few blocks away, in the multi-storey car park on Thomas Street. An abattoir famous for the production of Limerick bacon once stood here, and now the pigs are back. They are very real pigs, and very much alive, two of them, a male and a female, snorting and squealing and nosing around an improvised pen lined with old newspapers and magazines. A large crowd is present, surrounding the pen and aiming a veritable battery of cameras and camcorders at the hapless animals.
But they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. They are the performers in Chinese artist Xu Bing's A Case Study of Transference, which is an exploration of relations between East and West. The pigs have been scrubbed clean, and Xu Bing has painted fragments of newspaper texts, in neat, black, enlarged newspaper typography, on their hides, English on the male, Chinese on the female. No-one is saying it in so many words, but the idea is that, once introduced to one another, the pigs will mate.
So the crowd is assembled for a kind of live pig sex show. Except that the pigs are, so to speak, having none of it.
Martinez yells out a few encouraging Bravos! and extends her foot into the pen. The male pig sniffs curiously at her shoe and then grabs hold of it with his snout, a little too enthusiastically for her liking. She pulls it free with a little yelp of surprise, and laughs. Off to one side, Xu Bing has provided a video tape of two other pigs mating at a prior performance of his piece elsewhere. "They should have showed the video to the pigs," one woman comments as she passes by. The implication of Xu Bing's piece is that when East meets West, one or other gets screwed - but not in Limerick.
There is a problem with Santiago Sierra's barricade of cars, originally intended to block Glentworth Street. Prolonged negotiations with various interested authorities led to successive postponements until a proposed time of 7 a.m. on Sunday morning when, you may well think, the whole point of a barricade pretty much evaporates. But then the notion of a barricade arrived at by consensus seems in itself to miss the point, so it is difficult to work up any sympathy for Santiago "Ford" Sierra. He must be a persuasive man, though, because on the evening of the exhibition opening he apparently persuaded a stranger to allow himself be locked in the boot of a car outside the City Gallery for some time, while people chatted and sipped wine inside, unaware of this covert art event, with its overtones of political repression, proceeding in the background.
Such hiccups, concerning parrots, pigs and barricades, are par for the course when you bring artworks out from the preserve of the gallery into the civic arena, which is exactly what EV+A has done with great success since Jan Hoet started the ball rolling in 1994. Martinez's Friends and Neighbours is a relatively modest affair in terms of off-site activities. She selected work by 20 artists, mostly Irish, from open submission, and invited roughly the same number from abroad.
She prefers, she says, art that engages the viewer in a dialogue, and her choice of artists is intended to reflect not just that, plus some novelty value (which doesn't prevent the inclusion of some surprisingly old work), but also the pluralist state of contemporary art, with no prevailing critical orthodoxy. Rather, she argues there is a range of possibilities on offer, none intrinsically better than another. The communal informality implied by her title is best realised in number eight Pery Square, where the parrot resides. It is an ordinary terraced house whose rooms are still imbued with an aura of domesticity, despite the fact that the building is in the process of being substantially renovated. The decorative trappings, floral wallpaper, velvet drapes, bathroom fittings and so on, and the lingering sense of habitation, provide an atmospherically charged setting.
Art fills the house, room by room, like a sort of mad family next door. There, in the musty basement, is Katie Holten's busy work-station, all scribbled plans and cryptic notes, diagrams for the improvised "devices" for which she has run string "wiring" throughout the house. They resemble smoke alarms, bells and comparable gadgets. Caroline McCarthy's Garden is a garish image of blossom on the television screen, while leaves sprout from a speaker which relays sounds of nature. And, of course, upstairs Navridis's couple wrestle with their demons.
Nowhere else does the show achieve that level of intensity or strangeness. Most of the work is concentrated in the City Gallery across the road, where the installation is tastefully sparse and, with one or two exceptions, understated and even underwhelming. Swiss artist Pipiloti Rist seems at first to be understated but turns out not to be. A voice emanates from a tiny, circular hole in the floor in an otherwise empty room (and if you want to be surprised when you see it for yourself, skip to the next paragraph). You approach, crouch down to look and there, on a miniature video monitor, engulfed by an inferno, is a tiny figure looking up at you, jumping towards you and crying out for help.
Mona Hatoum's two cots, each given a sinister twist, would have been ideal over in number eight. Outstanding pieces at the City Gallery include Veronica Nicholson's photographs of road kills, Deirdre Morgan's intricate drawings (poorly displayed), Bernadette Cotter's comparable paintings (which fare better), Darren Murray's paintings of "real" birds in stylised foliage and Anna Seagrave's beautifully performed and produced video.
Federico Guzman's Blackboard Jungle Plants dominates the space in City Hall, the other main venue. A huge wall area is painted with green blackboard paint, and visitors are free to pick up a stick of chalk and make their own contribution, which they have, with gusto. Christine Mackey straightforwardly documents homelessness, while Charlene Teters, depicted in photographs wandering through Limerick in the traditional garb of her ancestors, the Spokane Indians, recounts the history of the systematic destruction of the Spokane Indian community. Teters points out that, though Limerick and Spokane are "sister cities", we are unlikely to hear much of this particular aspect of Spokane's history through official sources. She is there to remind us, with what is a worthwhile intervention from a friend and neighbour, however distant.
EV+A 2000: Friends and Neighbours continues until June 4th. A guide to exhibitors and locations is available from the City Gallery, Pery Square and several other venues
