Audacious idea, not so audacious results

One of the two main strands that make up the visual-arts component of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival, Sited is an imaginative, audacious project.

Curated by Mark Garry, it entailed depositing seven shipping containers around the city, including slap bang in the middle of O'Connell Street. Artists from Ireland and abroad were invited to make "location responsive works" for these temporary, unorthodox galleries. Paint the containers blush pink and you know they'll stand out in a crowd.

The appeal is obvious. From early in the 1990s many exhibition curators have sought, with close to evangelical zeal, to release art from the white cube of the modern gallery space, with its aura of elitism and exclusivity. The idea of artistic interventions in the workaday social space of the city or town duly became a standard strategy for exhibitions worldwide. But it can be argued that art occupies a space apart, that it has to stand slightly outside the register of other activities and that the gallery space is also a logical reflection of that status rather than purely an instrument of exclusion.

Garry's project, in nominating a series of spaces apart and parachuting them as vertical invaders into the social fabric of the city, is an interesting hybrid. People can encounter artworks by emerging artists in the context of daily life but with the intimation that art is something else, that it occupies a space apart from the everyday.

Unfortunately, the best things about Sited are its rationale and the audacity of its conception. What the artists have chosen or managed to do is for the most part underwhelming.

It may sound churlish to say so, because the project is presented with energy, enthusiasm and efficiency, but having spent the best part of a day working my way around all seven containers, from the docklands to IMMA, the abiding impression is that the artists weren't ambitious enough. That may have to do with budget, briefing, experience, time or all of the above, but their location responsiveness is not all it might have been.

Situated in a container next to Barry Flanagan's rampant bronze hare outside IMMA's front door, Gordon Matta-Clark's Open House, a grainy Super 8 film, could be seen as an introduction to and a commentary on Sited as a whole. Proposed by the Metropolitan Complex, Matta-Clark's film is a historical document, a record of an artistic intervention on a New York street in 1972. In a huge industrial skip on Greene Street he built internal wood and plasterboard divisions, the areas linked by several doors. The transformed space, the domesticated skip, became the site for an impromptu performance.

Really we're looking at a group of people horsing around and engaging with passers-by, recorded in the shaky, blurry, haphazard manner of artists' early film and video efforts.

But in the appropriation, or maybe reclamation, of public space, in the sense of playfulness and uncertainty, the whole thing exudes a cheerful, anarchic energy and excitement. The contemporary projects in Sited are incomparably more constrained and inward-looking, which is perhaps a measure of where art is at now as opposed to then.

Nothing is without interest, but most of it is underachieved. On O'Connell Street Alex Berry's post-coital doodles in Plucked Many Times Over are an engaging composite of self-obsession, self-pity, bitterness, wariness, ennui, cynicism and copious pop-cultural references, all amounting to something like a cross section of an adolescent mind, with a nod to the mean street outside.

In an adjacent container, Mark Cullen's As Above So Below, an evocation of the night sky, does exploit the physical characteristics of the container but doesn't quite deliver.

Kristina Hoppe's Being Here, at the Hugh Lane Gallery, is heavy on logistics, with masses of illuminated imagery, but comes across as Bill Viola lite. Her high- definition portraits aim to "address the nature of human experience in modern society" but don't, particularly, at least in any dramatised or structured way.

At Dublin Castle, where there is always a busy flow of visitors, Jody Elff's Veils prompts us to slow down and listen. Her darkened container disorientates with light, darkness and sound. It does take you somewhere else, and it is atmospherically strong.

Also at Dublin Castle, Janice Hough's rotating world, in I Heard The Voice Of The Woods, is a green DIY vision of Utopia. Quietly and modestly it offers a contemplative experience. Hough's and Elff's pieces complement each other well.

Down in the docklands, in the midst of Dublin's emerging urban landscape, Louise West has stocked her container with meticulously painted images of a cartoon-like character. Her idea is to explore questions of Irishness through the construction of this comic-book persona.

The work both invites and doesn't really bear comparison with that of Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara, who has made brilliant paintings and three-dimensional figures featuring childlike cartoon figures who enact and embody adult emotions.

Promising in outline and attractively packaged, Sited delivered in terms of logistics but is ultimately disappointing in terms of content.

Sited continues until October 11th. The containers are open between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. from Tuesday to Sunday