Escaping from the white cube

The escape from the white cube has been a recurrent theme of group exhibitions in Ireland over the best part of the past decade. That is to say, getting art out of the privileged space of the gallery and into the real world.

Nowhere is this more so than in Limerick, where EV+A pioneered the trend and which boasts, incidentally, in the form of the extension to Limerick City Gallery of Art, the nearest thing to a gallery that is actually a white cube.

A large part of the argument for the strategy is that it makes it more likely that the art, and the artist, will engage directly with an audience composed of more than the usual suspects.

The policy has been applied in an almost ruthless way to the annual Claremorris Open Exhibition (coming up on September 15th), with mixed results.

The visual-arts strand of the Kilkenny Arts Festival has played its part in the trend in recent years. Sadly in this regard, the complementary Sculpture At Kells didn't happen this year, apparently because of the foot-and-mouth crisis.

But in Kilkenny itself, Gottfried Helnwein, the Tipperary-resident Austrian artist, has taken to the streets in a big way. His photorealist images are much happier dispersed around the town and in the castle courtyard than they are penned up in Butler House, where their upfront directness and aspirations to cinematic scale sit a little uneasily.

Helnwein is famously confrontational, and his bold conflations of Nazi and Christian iconography, in Epiphany and other prominently displayed pictures, predictably generated some friction. Yet, in a way, one shouldn't rush to condemn condemnations of, or expressions of reservation about, Helnwein's work, no matter how superficial or uninformed they turn out to be. Because, let's face it, a large part of its effectiveness has to do with its calculated, barbed ambiguity.

The point of the images is that they put it up to you as a viewer. Given that, one potential line of criticism is that they are designed solely to be provocative, like Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley. But the abiding strength of Helnwein's work is that provocation is a means rather than an end; it is - however uncomfortable - morally grounded, if not necessarily in a way that will please all observers.

His beautiful photographs of Kilkenny children are, collectively, a recognisable derivative of his work Selection, which implicitly placed the viewer in the position of someone marking children for extermination. Strong stuff.

If that seems irrelevant in an Irish context, one could always point to Northern Ireland and to the scandals that have shaken the complacent authority of church and state in recent years.

What is more innocent, more open, more charming than the face of a child? Except that we are more than ever uncomfortably aware that the act of looking is not at all innocent, and Helnwein's children, with their closed, downcast eyes, decline to meet our collective gaze. Why? Perhaps because they insist on remaining within the orbits of their imaginations.

There is also, however, a slight unease arising from the uniformity of the images and the awareness that the subjects are being directed. Helnwein has a knack for throwing responsibility for what we are looking at back onto us, the viewers.

The Butler Gallery's exhibition of new and recent work by the Swiss artist Roman Signer is an altogether lighter affair.

Signer is a veteran of deadpan installation. That is to say, he is adept at making the kind of engaging, even intriguing installations that have become a generic staple of big international group exhibitions.

The cynical view might be that such events demand something that will hold the viewers' attention for a few minutes and stop them moving immediately on to the next attraction. Truth to tell, it wouldn't be far wrong.

Signer sees himself as a sculptor who sculpts events in time rather than static objects in space, and that is an accurate enough description. A vein of absurdist play runs through a great deal of his work, evoking echoes of Dada and surrealism - but in a distinctly well-mannered, even, dare one say, stereotypically Swiss way.

Even his evident liking for bangs and minor cataclysms is carefully managed, as with the meticulously marshalled row of exploding paint pots in drums that make up the images in his Portraitgalerie.

One short video piece, a shaggy-dog story in which he features, carrying a metallic suitcase that unravels a yellow plastic tape, is almost terrific - you'll have to watch it to decide for yourself whether the "almost" is fair.

Another video piece, Kayak, obviously but ingeniously presents us with fore and aft video views of the shores of a lake as the kayak plies to and fro. Signer's work is diverting, clever and very accessible. Perhaps it is unfair to ask for more.

The four artists featured in Master Printmakers - Ireland and UK at the Grennan Mill in Thomastown are institutions as much as individuals. Louis le Brocquy and Tony O'Malley are two of Ireland's foremost 20th-century artists, with long, exceptionally productive careers to their credit. And the same could be said of Leon Kossoff and Albert Irvin in the British context.

Le Brocquy shows prints and masses of preparatory drawings - too much in the space, perhaps - featuring two recurrent, even obsessive themes: personal variations on a painting by Cornelis Bisschop of children playing in a wood, and a 1939 newspaper photograph of a procession of white-clad Dublin schoolgirls with lilies. Both are joyful, bucolic images and in both le Brocquy emphasises the intermingled mass of bodies and the sense of movement.

Travel has been an important stimulus in O'Malley's work since his original trips to Cornwall in the 1950s; his spare, colourful carborundum prints here refer to Lanzarote and Italy. Bands of colour and flurries of marks punctuate the surfaces.

The effect is to create calm expansive spaces framing bursts of local incident, like landscapes in which the movement of birds, water or vegetation catches your eye without disturbing your equanimity.

Kossoff, best known as a painter of city life - more, London city life - with a trademark style of thickly encrusted pigment often worked to the point of chromatic exhaustion, can be much more economical in his prints, particularly his fine figurative prints.

The lines try nervously to get a sense of the subject, try again, and again, then leave the rest to our imagination. Out on the streets, with looming buildings, he is inclined to work the images more heavily.

Irvin is an exuberant colourist, and with a combination of Japanese-inspired woodblock printing techniques and screen-print he has found a tremendously flexible equivalent for his fast-paced painterly method, plus certain additional freedoms, perhaps.

These include the liberty to extend the work outside the compositional rectangle, which he clearly relishes. His images are built through a process of continual attack, layer over layer, yet preserve an essential lightness of touch.

Several good solo shows in Kilkenny significantly contributed to the festival, including Sonja Landweer's annual display of body adornments and other objects at the Rudolf Heltzel Gallery, a substantial collection of work by Paul Mosse at Gallery 1, William Grace's brightly coloured landscapes on the Parade and Journey, Stevey Scullion's railway-station installation.

Another form of escape from the white cube is exemplified by another initiative: the artist's studio trail. At the county-council offices, you could see representative samples of the work of close to 30 artists based in and around Kilkenny.

They include many well-known names, from Elizabeth Cope to Jane O'Malley and Blaise Smith. Something like half of these artists are amenable to studio visits. All you have to do is phone and make an appointment.

Apart from the fascination of seeing an artist's working environment, much of the work is intimately connected to the landscapes in which it is made, in ways that even the artists may be unaware of.