There's No Accounting for Other People's Relationships is a sure-fire idea for a group exhibition.
Visual Arts at the Belfast Festival: There's No Accounting for Other People's Relationships, Ormeau Baths Gallery until Dec 7th (048-0321402)Invisible Cities and Into the Blue, Naughton Gallery at Queen's until Nov 9th Veneer, Robin Carson, and Willie Heron, new work, Fenderesky Gallery until Nov 8th and Nov 22th respectively (048-9023545) Zone, David Bate, Belfast Exposed until Dec 13th (048-90230965)
The subject - "the complexity of human relationships" - provides a very rich vein to mine, one that might contain works by any number of interesting artists. In the event, the actual selection, while thematically consistent, is fairly offbeat.
Firstly there is a distinct Scandinavian emphasis. Then there is the fact that the exhibition is basically a show of video with a couple of films and photographic pieces tacked on. As one visitor noted, the videos are distributed throughout the gallery like paintings.
Admittedly, there were reports that American photographer Nan Goldin should have been more substantially represented. As it is, there are just two of her photographs, and while they are individually strong, the voyeuristic-confessional nature of her work does depend on its providing a glimpse into an emotional world, something best built up through multiple images. A larger showing of her photographs would have been very welcome, but might also have helped with the balance of the exhibition. The other photographic piece, by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, featuring multiple juxtapositions of six family members, is frankly overblown.
By far the strongest individual piece is Yang Fudong's black-and-white film. Something interesting happens with this work, An Estranged Paradise, which is that nothing much happens in it. It is a moody, feature-length film that doesn't feel the need to adopt feature-length conventions. Fudong concentrates on periods of restlessness, introspection, waiting - the moments between what usually comprises cinematic narrative. It's not unique and it's not his idea, particularly, but he does it well. We observe the interaction of a young and not particularly ingratiating man and his girlfriend over time. There is a retrospective quality to the soft black-and-white cinematography and a terrific feeling throughout for what is in this context more than just background.
The Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, who isn't included in this exhibition, has been enormously influential in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Her polished film and video works explore the complexities of human relationships with a relentless emphasis on angst, trauma, failure and breakdown.
Any one piece by her is impressive, but seen en masse, as in her Tate Modern show earlier this year, there is something almost parodic about her Bergmanesque concentration on emotional bleakness.
And there are sub-Ahtila works included here, such as Monika Oechsler's lugubrious In the Shadow of the Dog, in which various observers recall how a woman became a killer, and Julika Rudelius' Train, which eavesdrops on the emotionally callous, salacious sexual boasting of a group of young men. Pekka Niskanen's video installation is more loosely, informally structured, and presumes our knowledge of the work of children's author Tove Jansson.
Dara Friedman spies on a succession of couples kissing at a Rome beauty spot. Despite the endless clinches, it's a curiously blank work that comes across as vague and under- thought. With her no-nonsense pop culture instincts, Pipilotti Rist can usually be relied upon to provide an imaginative lift. But somehow, in this company and confined to a monitor, her blurry deconstruction of a music video doesn't quite cut the mustard. Overall, There's no Accounting . . . is a good idea that goes astray somewhere along the way, but is, if for Fudong alone, more than worth seeing.
Invisible Cities, the title borrowed from Italo Calvino, consists of a series of concise sound-portraits of 20 cities by 20 artists. In the Naughton Gallery at Queen's you face a wall-sized map of the world, dotted with earphone sockets. Don a pair of earphones and you can work, or listen, your way around the world. The presentation is sober and dull, but the pieces themselves are incredibly vibrant and evocative, and demonstrate the power and possibility of sound pictures.
Invisible Cities leans towards the category of art as entertainment spectacle that is increasingly employed by festivals. Similarly, the massed balloons of Scanner's Into the Blue, apparently inscribed with people's thoughts on the title colour, is ambient art. At the Fenderesky, Robin Carson's commissioned audio-video installation Veneer boasts high production values. In a central panel, feet stride purposefully while flanking, symmetrical images offer views of the environment being created by Belfast's ongoing building boom. But an interesting soundtrack, hinting at sub-surface tensions, isn't enough to lift the overall piece which in the end doesn't, so to speak, go anywhere and is visually bland.
Several of Andrey Tarkovsky's films have been a significant influence on visual artists, none more so than the strange, hallucinatory Stalker, released in 1979. In this story, the title character leads clients through the Zone, a dangerous, poisoned, post-industrial wasteland, touched by an alien presence. At the heart of the Zone is a room where every desire is realised. An allegory open to multiple interpretations, Stalker is both slow and incredibly intense, unremittingly bleak and visually startling.
Tarkovsky shot it in Tallinn, in Estonia, and David Bate's exhibition Zone, at Belfast Exposed, consists of a series of photographs of Tallinn more than 20 years later. In the interim, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Some of Bate's atmospheric photographs refer specifically to Stalker, but they also document Tallinn in a more general way, exploring the plight of a society caught somewhere between hard austerity and consumerist decadence. It's not giving too much of the plot of Stalker away to say that the protgonists realise that the consummation of all desire means an end to life, and consumerist culture is based on the manufacture and perpetuation of desire.
You walk into Willie Heron's exhibition at the Fenderesky and it immediately cuts you down to size - very agreeably. To your left, a group of sculptural constructions sit atop a wooden trestle table. The table is unusually high, pushing the adult viewer into the adoption of a child's eye view. And what you view is toy-like. Heron calls them the Mayo Coast Series, and they consist for the most part of scraps of floats from fishing nets washed up on the Atlantic shore.
Heron takes them and bolts them together so that they resemble models of some kind - perhaps of molecules in the science lab. Over on the right he comes up with another variation on the convention of the sculpture on a plinth, this time cutting the platform down to floor level. In his Painted Wood Series he takes slabs of tree trunk and paints their chain-sawn faces with flat, bright colour. Again he conjures up odd, hybrid objects, suggestive of playful possibility. His work is upbeat, inventive, beautifully made and inspiring.
