Art that's off the walls

Willie Doherty is prominent among a generation of Northern artists whose work has been decisively shaped by the Troubles. Working from an informed, detailed knowledge of his native Derry, Doherty's early photo-text pieces set out to deconstruct the representations of the landscape of conflict.

He explored the various constructions placed upon it, from conflicting ideological appropriations of place to shorthand media representations. Eventually he shed the text element of his photographic work in favour of images sans text, but words have continued to play a central role in the context of his video work and, through the 1990s, he established and consolidated his reputation as one of the few outstanding Irish video artists.

In Double Take, a major exhibition of his work at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, he shows an ambitious new video installation, How It Was, plus an older Turner Prize-nominated piece, The Only Good One is a Dead One, together with a large number of photographic works, including a new series, related to the video, called I Was There and I have Doubts.

The Only Good One, with its ominous, striking imagery of stalking and surveillance, slyly eased us from our customary stance of distance and detachment, prompting us into an examination of our own position. We may be in the middle of something sinister, but Doherty leaves us to draw our own conclusions. This became symptomatic of his approach throughout the decade, up to the elaborate narrative strands that made up Somewhere Else in 1998, a remarkably rich video work that seemed to look beyond the Troubles while implying that the complexities and contradictions persist behind any putative, neat conclusion.

The retrospective but stubbornly unreconciled aspects of How It Was suggests that those sentiments still hold true. In it, three characters reflect, individually, on a past event. Despite witnessing fragments of action relating to this event (or perhaps its dramatic reconstruction) we are never sure what it is or was and, as the non-narrative loops back on itself and contradicts its own logic, it becomes evident that none of the three is at all sure, either. In fact, their staccato, intermittent commentary, which sounds as if it might be a series of replies to unheard questions, progressively undermines any possibility of narrative closure. We do not know if any one of them is victim, perpetrator or witness. Not only does the work decline to offer any overt coherence, it is also intent on warning us off placing our own constructions on its determined indeterminacy.

Yet How it Was could also not thwart our expectations, if it did not raise them, however obliquely. It does so by tempting us to read its mise en scΦne in terms of certain conventions relating to reportage and drama. The non-action unfolds in a murkily lit garage workshop space equipped with some potentially significant props - workbench, tools, what might be a photographic darkroom, a worn filing cabinet. It could all be entirely innocuous or, equally, fraught with sinister implications. The three protagonists loiter moodily, and always separately.

Perhaps all this sounds like hard work, or like a roundabout way of getting nowhere. But, provided you give it a chance, the installation is really gripping, not so much, though, on the basis of feeding us sufficient snippets of conventional narrative, so that we are lulled into expecting a neat conclusion - you realise pretty quickly that just isn't going to happen. It is, rather, persuasively atmospheric, and it grips primarily through the cumulative, fluid momentum engendered by continuous, interlocking, overlapping camera movement.

Even though, strictly speaking, nothing happens, we're always moving forward towards something, even if that something is the dawning realisation that we can never pin anything down to our satisfaction. The shadowy space of the setting spills over into the darkened gallery, just as each screen bleeds into the other, and this space is strikingly akin to Caravaggio's dark pictorial space, with its plethora of narrative questions and secrets.

Doherty is not unique in setting out to disrupt or question conventional narrative structure. And as The Only Good One makes clear, How it Was is a sophisticated consolidation of a trend in his own work throughout the 1990s. Negatively, its implied stance could be interpreted as a retreat into a murky relativism: if everything exists only as the sum of conflicting subjectivities, what happened will never be assimilable in an authoritative, objective narrative framework.

In his catalogue text, Daniel Jewesbury interprets this as implying that the past is irredeemable in terms of our retrospective efforts to reformulate it in terms of an agreed truth. We can never settle the debt to history. There is a sense here that the past is as mutable, as up-for-grabs, as the present, which is certainly true of the protean history of Northern Ireland. The meaning of an action will be contested, will be different depending on your point of view. It is as if Doherty, warily questioning the import of every loaded image, honourably undercuts the possibility of his own authoritative potential as artist and arbiter in his title I Was There and I have Doubts (a series of dark, forensic-looking yet, predictably, ultimately uninformative photographs).

Yet, even while acknowledging that partial truths and vested interests are all that we have, in a way the entire Peace Process is an account of working with the contradictions, not an attempt to pretend that they do not exist. Perhaps the debt to the past cannot be settled, but our responsibilities to the future persist.

To go from Doherty's show to Claudio Hils's Red Land-Blue Land at Belfast Exposed is to wonder if there is any getting away from the Troubles. Hils is a German photographer, and his work here documents the Sennelager Training Centre in North-Rhine Westphalia, a place requisitioned by the British Occupation Forces in Germany following the second World War, and apparently used until recently as a training centre. Concrete block and corrugated tin streets inhabited by mannequins and articulated cut-out figures serve as elaborate models of scenes of conflict, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland.

Hils's approach to depicting this surreal, film-set world with its bullet-riddled props and odd touches of humour is matter-of-fact, deadpan. It is extremely effective as a vision of the ostensibly ordinary and everyday, shot through with an undercurrent of strangeness and anxiety.

The Old Museum Art Centre's Ten Men Artists (now finished its run), curated by Gavin Weston, could be seen as a parody of shows fixated on gender issues, and a riposte to the habit, still surprisingly prevalent, of referring to "women artists". The main drawback is the limitation of the Centre as an exhibition venue, particularly on this scale. Apart from one smallish, dedicated room, all other spaces are compromised in one way or another. Yet there is some very good work; and arguably the shock value of finding a large-as-life VW camper van in the midst of the show would be greatly diminished if the space wasn't in essence a domestic-scaled living room.

Frank Corry is responsible for the van, one of the best pieces, with its evocation of youthful restlessness. Michael Trainor's This Is A Man, a customised coffin complete with portable record player and a host of laddish paraphernalia, is a mordant, funny, outstanding portrait of anorak masculinity. In a similar vein, Robin Carson's garden shed as refuge installation is also strong. Weston's own barber's pole represents man as phallus. The entrance is guarded by Bill Penney's witty cut-out Bouncer.

It is a light-hearted show, occasionally too smugly whimsical, but an effective antidote to darker musings elsewhere. So, it is only fair to say, were several other Festival projects, including Rita Duffy's collaborative event in the Divis flats (in which residents each nominated an image which best represented his or her life), Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stone's video projection documenting activity in St George's Market, and a huge inflatable paper sculpture installed in City Hall and, presumably, kept inflated with hot air.

Willie Doherty, Double Take is at the Ormeau Baths Gallery until December. Claudio Hils, Red Land-Blue Land is at Belfast Exposed until December 14th