There are several good reasons to visit this year's Glen Dimplex Artists Award exhibition. One is that, if you get there before May 30th, you get a chance to guess which of the shortlisted artists will receive a cheque for £15,000 that evening. Another is a chance to see what the jury of curators and other art world types consider where art is at, right now, in Ireland. And, finally, you should go because the show, without being ingratiating or particularly easy, is very good. It is, admittedly, a little austere, perhaps just that bit rarefied overall, but individually rich and, if you give it time, cumulatively rewarding.
There is - and it is almost a rule at this stage - no painting, perhaps because in certain fundamentalist versions of the curatorial catechism, painting is still a mortal sin. Photography, on the other hand, which currently has sacramental status, is only obliquely represented in that it is both peripheral to, and the least satisfactory aspect of the work of Clare Langan and Petah Coyne. Which leaves us with a substantial amount of sculptural installation and what begins to feel, towards the end of the exhibition (laid out as it is along a single corridor) like a surfeit of video. This is chiefly because of the fragmented nature of the ambitious installations designed by collaborators David Phillips and Paul Rowley.
The show breaks down naturally into two pairings: video and film artists Langan, and Phillips and Rowley; and sculptors Petah Coyne and Maud Cotter. There is real empathy between the latter two, particularly evident if you flick through the catalogues of Coyne's previous work that are on hand.
Originally from Oklahoma city, Coyne established her reputation with a series of suspended sculptures, extraordinary objects initially consisting of "thousands of strung-up dried fish", though as time went by she worked her way through many different materials, notably wax.
Her use of materials is particularly good, displaying an almost Beuysian flair. And those dried fish were no one-off. Some of her "chandeliers" featured incredible masses of artificial birds or flowers, eerily coated in white wax, and you cannot help but notice that preserved birds feature prominently in her work at IMMA, big specimens but also a flock of tiny songbirds, snagged in masses of hair woven and knotted like tangled fishing nets. They make for powerful, disturbing images.
Coyne's work is usually fired by personal autobiographical references, the more public side of which relate to her Catholic childhood and, on quite another tangent, her interest in Japanese literature and culture. These do not explain the work, but they do account for nods towards narrative. And the Catholic ethos clearly relates to those pieces in which hair is concentrated into dark, ominous masses, shrouding diminutive penitential figures, not to mention the ritual, meditative process of their making (they are incredibly labour-intensive). There is a tension between the devout pose and the earthy physicality of the hair massed in such concentration.
If there is no mistaking the profound darkness at the heart of much of what Coyne does, it seems fair to say that the darkness is balanced by a kind of creative exuberance. Her work, with its air of excess, of physical pungency and curious over-ripeness, could be described as morbid rococo. Certainly it is wonderfully atmospheric, infused with mystery, psychologically layered, complex and rewarding.
It seemed at one stage as if Wexford-born sculptor Maud Cotter could devote the major part of her career to stained glass, such was her expressive command of the medium. In fact, with James Scanlon, she is widely credited with reviving its fortunes in Ireland, taking it from decorative craft to artistic centrestage. But stained glass was just one aspect of her wider sculptural concerns, and she has always been of a restless disposition. This restlessness has led her to explore outer and inner worlds. About 10 years ago, a trip to Iceland prompted a decisive personalisation of her work, something that has remained a central impetus since.
She has made a large, modular sculpture for the IMMA show, a huge, delicate, vessel-shaped structure made of plaster on card. Despite its malleable title, Flesh, it is an unmistakably brittle, skeletal construct. An ambiguous object, it is somewhere between a multi-cellular organism and a crystalline mineral - something like coral, perhaps, which it doesn't actually resemble physically, though its undulatory surface makes the air around it seem like water. Either way, it is a growing, developing form, and that idea recurs in Cotter's work of the moment.
In fact if Flesh were titled Skin it would more accurately reflect her on-going preoccupation with the notion of membranes, of vulnerable divisions between those inner and outer worlds. An appreciation of her work really does depend on direct sensual experience of it.
David Phillips, from Tennessee, and Dubliner Paul Rowley show three separate though related video pieces, all employing multiple screens in some form or another. The show's catalogue quotes some explanatory statements by them which are, alas, heavily armoured against any possibility of comprehension in a way that is depressingly familiar from so much catalogue-speak. It's a pity because their work, though not particularly easy, certainly has something going for it. Esther poignantly depicts a woman in what might be a hospital as she struggles to perform some simple exercises. This is blended, fairly crudely, with footage of an operation in progress. There is a sense of a trapped, vulnerable figure, at the mercy of impersonal, institutional authority.
The installation is fragmented, using two projectors and a monitor, for no apparent reason, whereas the logic of the second, Carbon 12, depends on six simultaneous monitors. A honeycomb pattern (a schematic of a carbon molecule?) moves seamlessly from one screen to the next, framing snippets of films or television programmes, all featuring people on the telephone. The never-ending telephone conversation is a nice image - one that also turned up in a video in the Venice Biennale last year.
Their third piece, Kimpo, achieves an effective marriage of deliberately banal imagery and a very good soundtrack. We are offered a bleached, hazy view of people on a walkway at Hong Kong airport, a sequence that alternates (but would certainly be much better if seen simultaneously) with other, closer scenes, projected in the opposite direction, notably a close-up of a waiting passenger listening to a walkman. It courts banality and risks succumbing to it but, taken with the slow crescendo of the cacophonous soundtrack, amounts to a persuasive account of the individual adrift in an increasingly depersonalised technological environment. There is substance to Phillips and Rowley's work, but it is undercut by odd decisions along the way, perhaps symptomatic of an over-indulgence in technology for its own sake, or merely of excessive tweaking. Clarified and tightened up a little, Kimpo would be quite a powerful piece. But then, they are the youngest artists in the show and perhaps just need a little more time.
Clare Langan, tipped by many as the favourite to win the award, offers the most concentrated experience. Her film Forty Below, which is, incidentally, in IMMA's collection, holds up remarkably well on repeated viewings. It is in essence a dark, brooding vision of a post-apocalyptic, post technological world. Yet it could also be interpreted as an entirely inner vision, a terrifying account of a world filtered through a damaged psyche.
Of course in her work the world is literally filtered through custom-made screens, often painted. She has always been concerned to make the world a strange place or, conversely, to capture a strangeness that was implicit. That duality runs through everything she does. Like some work by Bill Viola and James Turrell, hers is a recognisable descendent of the Romantic tradition: evoking the sublime, feeling awe and finding comfort in nature's vastness. For example, Forty Below and its predecessor, her photographic show Track, could both be seen in relation to Schubert's dark song-cycle Winterreise, in the way they feature a lone figure, occasionally glimpsed, negotiating desolate, barren landscapes. Certainly the mood in Langan's film is as bleak and unforgiving.
As is customary, we do not hear who was nominated and did not, for whatever reason, make it onto the shortlist. For example, one fairly obvious omission - and it is no reflection on those included - is the painter Hughie O'Donoghue. Perhaps no-one nominated him, who knows? But the hugely ambitious nature of his project in his Passion series, exhibited at the RHA Gallagher Gallery early in 1999, which closely relates to his fascinating bid to put the human presence at the centre of contemporary art through painting, marks him as an obvious candidate.
Furthermore, his work would have added considerably to the texture of the show, which founders somewhat towards the end of the corridor, as video-exhaustion kicks in. Still, it is quite a good year for the award. On the basis of what's on view, it could be a close run thing between Coyne and Langan, with the latter's concerted strength perhaps winning through.
The Glen Dimplex Artists Award 2000 exhibition continues until June 18th. The name of the award-winning artist will be announced on May 30th
