Textbook conceptual art

Reviewed:

Perspective 2001: Out of Sorts, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, until October 13th (048-90321402)

Cold Heaven, Don McCullin, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast (048-90235053)

Peter Liversidge's work in Perspective 2001: Out Of Sorts, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, could be described as textbook conceptual art. It consists of a series of proposals for what he might do in Perspective 2001, including the possibility of blocking the gallery doorway, to deny the public access, and that of fitting it out as a garage, complete with mechanics, order book, customers and, with luck, profits. None is implemented, of course.

Reading them is point - and entertainment - enough. But they make us think of what we expect from an art gallery and of what, if anything, might make us think it had stepped beyond the bounds of being an art gallery.

In an odd touch, Liversidge's work is lent a retrospective quality, as each proposal is typed on an old manual typewriter. It is almost as if it harks back to the good old days of 1960s conceptual art, when there was an idealistic belief in the potential for revolutionary change, for redefining the possibilities of what art might be and how it might alter our perceptions of the personal and political worlds.

As the work by 17 artists that makes up Perspective 2001 readily demonstrates, those days are long gone. Liversidge's piece, for example, with its retro jokiness, is like a pastiche of a classical conceptual artwork. Most of the paintings, installations, videos and photography selected by Annie Fletcher and David Wilkinson reflect the guarded irony, rigorous compartmentalisation and small horizons typical of a great deal of contemporary art.

Not that Perspective 2001 is a bad show. By conventional standards it is, in curatorial terms, a well-balanced and consistently engaging event. It ranges from Katrina Moorhead's whimsical model swimming-pools, made from discarded polystyrene packing, and Diana Kingsley's apparently ordinary but curiously edgy photographs, to Martin O'Leary's dead animal puppets and Isabel Nolan's snappy T-shirt sloganeering. And, to be fair, undercurrents of Utopian idealism and irony-free expression are occasionally apparent, in, for example, the work of Katie Holten and Fabienne AudΘoud. Holten's transplanted weeds colonise and symbolise the cracks in the grandiose National Development Plan. AudΘoud's prize-winning performance, seen only in a video documentation, took the form of a lecture, an objective, measured account of intensities of feeling, contained and corralled until finally allowed climactic, operatic expression.

Incidentally, it is notable that Perspective 2001 features a remarkable line-up of big musical names, including Henry Purcell, Ludwig van Beethoven and Emmylou Harris. They are all there, more appropriated than sampled, all playing big roles in the proceedings, though none is credited or mentioned by name. AudΘoud takes Dido's lament from Purcell's opera Dido And Aeneas and uses it, so to speak, as a soundtrack for her life - as people do use music. More, though, it is as if she is borrowing the emotion of the music because she, or perhaps, in a wider sense, we post-modern souls can no longer manage such authentic emotional expression.

This notion of borrowed emotion is also employed by Erik Aalto, who juxtaposes a Harris recording with video footage of a woman riding a horse in what looks like a park. There is a pointed disparity between the prosaic nature of the imagery - the woman looks as if she is exercising the horse and herself, rather than galloping into the sunset - which jars slightly with the lush feeling expressed in the music. But the song is pretty good and the imagery is fairly banal.

"It's supposed to be banal" is a weak defence, but one that would presumably be trotted out also in relation to Seamus Hanrahan's videos, which also use music, and quite well, but are, perhaps intentionally, visually nondescript, even poor. Ben Pruskin tries for a kind of synaesthesia in his admirably ambitious video installation, co-opting a movement from a Beethoven piano concerto. It is a pity that the choice of music and the nature of the narrative he builds on it seems to reinforce the pop-culture stereotype that links a taste for classical music with criminal insanity, α la Hannibal Lecter.

In a way, the following juxtaposition is unfair, but the same day I visited Perspective 2001, I went to see Don McCullin's photographic show Cold Heaven, at the Old Museum Arts Centre, which has now finished its run. McCullin, who is a war photographer with a long and distinguished record, set out to photograph some of those coping with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at his work, it seems he cannot take a bad photograph. His straightforward black-and-white images are more portraits than reportage. On a matter of fact, one-to-one level, as he made them, and as we encounter them in the gallery, it seems to me that they are unanswerably compelling.

It is not just that looking so directly and unequivocally into the eyes of some of these people would break your heart. McCullin is carefully direct and unsentimental. Many of his images are great in the way that Rembrandt's paintings are great: through the marriage of technique and content.

Like those paintings, the photographs are compelling statements of our common humanity that transcend boundaries and disparities of time, place and culture. Most of the work in Perspective 2001 is concerned, typically and blamelessly, with the language of representation, working quirkily inventive variations on the conventions of art practice - reasonable stuff, but mostly art-world stuff. On the way back to Dublin, it was McCullin's images that disturbed me, the people in them who stayed in my mind. Which means that, as an artist, he must be doing something right, or perhaps something that art isn't doing.