Alienation once again

Visual Arts: NOT TO BE READ IN OPEN COURT is an installation by Gerard Mannix Flynn consisting of a series of enlargements of eight official documents which collectively chart the progress of a child - with the suitably Kafkaesque name of James X - through a series of state institutions.

While it is obvious that James X needs care and treatment, what happens is that he is inexorably routed through to incarceration of various kinds, and pushed emotionally to increasing degrees of alienation. Purely on the basis of the tone of the official correspondence, it becomes chillingly clear, almost immediately, that this is going to happen.

What emerges is an oblique but vivid account of the way one individual is processed through the institutions that embody the authority of state and church. And, as we now know only too well, the closed, repressive worlds of those institutions, including here the industrial school at Letterfrack, enabled further, opportunistic levels of physical and sexual abuse.

If that were the sum total of what the show manages to convey, it would be striking and effective, but it does much more, it's not just a question of heroes and villains. Very economically, it conveys a sense of the prejudices and biases built into the very language of authority. The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, coined the term symbolic violence in relation to the way, he argued, the French educational system promulgates a sense of cultural normalcy in a way that disguises the underlying facts of power relations.

That is, a supposed professional neutrality unwittingly reinforces the rule of the dominant ideology, not in terms of bald, coercive force, but in the form of cultural values that appear self-evidently normal and legitimate. While it is in a sense extremely simple in form and presentation, the great virtue of NOT TO BE READ IN OPEN COURT is that something like this much more complex picture emerges in the space of a small number of documents.

Curated by printmaker Cora Cummins Elsewhere from Here at The Workroom is the second in a series of group shows there exploring themes relating to the city. She looked, she says, for artists "who articulate alternative spaces." Alternative, that is, to the crowded rush of urban life. The idea is not narrowly or strictly applied to the work on view, but the exhibition is a good one.

Cummins herself is on message with her characteristically calm, understated prints depicting the spirit and appearance of typical oases in the urban jungle, including a roundabout and a golf green, both preserves that are in their different ways out of bounds and hence all the stronger as symbols of the inaccessible. Joy Gerrard's architectonic abstracts refer to the idealised urban spaces of utopian modernism.

Jason Oakley creates auditory spaces with a series of Six Interludes, a very capably fashioned sequence of pieces of ambient electronica on CD. There's trouble in paradise in Jonathan Hunter's visionary evocation of a burning tree. Marcus Oakley's Ruralism is a faux-naif composite that celebrates an eclectic range of alternative, homespun cultural phenomena, all antidotes to the polish and glitz of urbanised culture.

In Ciaran Walsh's installation a futuristic cut-out studio set is relayed via CCTV camera to a monitor in the main exhibition space. The paradoxical thing about it is that it is also nostalgic: nothing dates more quickly than the predicted future. Alison Pilkington's elegant sequence of paintings describes a continuum that might extend from microscopic to cosmic.

There are two Fiona McDonalds included. One shows a set of beautiful, incredibly intricate ink drawings inspired by the clustering of starlings in flight.

The other shows remarkable sculptural pieces based on the electrolytic process. Metal plates suspended in tanks of salt solutions engender "miniature landscapes", at an imperceptible but cumulatively dramatic rate. McDonald has previously exhibited related work in the form of plates, that is, end points of process, but the tanks with their strange, dynamic, self-generating worlds, are a new and exciting departure.

As it happens, Siobhan Hapaska's cease firing on all fronts at the Kerlin Gallery would be right at home in Cummins' show, with its cryptic allusions to an imagined elsewhere. Though composed of a large number of individual pieces, there is an overall, concentrated vision to the exhibition. Several ambitious sculptural pieces complement a series of elaborately staged photographs, most of them featuring a woman attired as a flight attendant.

Yet as with the sculptures, there is something awry in the world of the images. The world, that is, of recreational travel turns out to be something illusory and misleading. As in Holiday, it is laced with menace, filtered through paranoia. A donkey is kitted out as both armoured security operative and primed bomber (in fact an ass and cart were used to deliver a bomb recently in Iraq, circumventing elaborate security procedures). An idyllic island destination of palm trees is sand-bagged and protectively padded.

Elsewhere Hapaska uses coconuts as symbolic animal presences - perhaps wombats. Burrowed protectively into their lairs, they are also horribly processed in the sardonically titled Living, fed into a sleek machine and shredded. It all amounts to a surprisingly coherent and convincing spectacle, and the images have an exceptional, weird quality about them.

NOT TO BE READ IN OPEN COURT, Gerard Mannix Flynn, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until January 5th (01- 8740064)

Elsewhere from Here, The Workroom, Hendron Building, Dublin (01-8303211)

cease firing on all fronts, Siobhan Hapaska, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until January 8th (01-6709093)