English, please

It's a wonderful achievement on the part of the Project Arts Centre that the British Arts Council funded their just-published book on the artist Anne Tallentire, who is representing Ireland in this year's Venice Biennale. The book is stunningly produced, with clever stills from the artist's video and installation work, which emphasises process, not product, and is by its nature difficult to represent. The essays, by the art writer, Jean Fisher, the academic, Sabina Sharkey and Anne Tallentire's working partner, John Seth, render an impression of the artist's work, if one works hard at them.

Of course, it's desperately hard to write about the visual in plain English, but it seems as if a kind of discourse has evolved which is designed to point up this difficulty. There are passages in this book which are absolutely indigestible and quite incomprehensible (to me, at least). This is how the last paragraph from Valerie Connor's introduction reads, for instance: "The introduction to this following essays has really already been made on the front of this book. So circumventing my own end, I have contrived to detour onto a vulgar gloss of the etymology of `accolade', which gives me to understand that it once described the motioning of an embrace or a kiss upon a person being honoured. This publication is, in the first instance, offered to Anne Tallentire and that has been the privilege of the Project Arts Centre to publish this book should be considered a given. The written contributions give us reflections of a practice that continues to confound attempts to sublate all that constitutes a practice into some one finite thing." Hello, anybody there?

Aidan Dunne's report from the Venice Biennale will appear on these pages next week