Germinations X is the latest in a series of annual exhibitions arising from a programme of projects for young European artists. This year's show is currently installed at The Factory, an annexe of the Athens School of Fine Arts, and it will later be seen in Flanders. The Factory (an accurate description since the building is a disused clothing factory, but also, perhaps, a wry homage to Andy Warhol's ironic term for his studio) is a fine, capacious venue and, incidentally, makes a good place for an art school.
The works exhibited there, by more than 60 artists from 15 countries, were made during or in relation to a series of workshops in different European locations. The conception behind Germinations is entirely laudable, even valuable. It is more than ever a good thing that young artists from different parts of Europe should meet and that their work be seen in juxtaposition, not to mention the contacts between curators and critics that also ensue.
The whole project seems to owe its existence in large measure to a remarkable level of personal commitment on the part of its main co-ordinator, Horst Wegman, whose main area of concern is sport in the EU. The current President of the organisation is Willis Ainley of the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. There is an appealing idealism to the whole enterprise that recalls the pioneering days of the European Economic Community.
Yet the atmosphere surrounding the opening of the show was never quite celebratory. It was even a little uneasy, perhaps taking its cue from the art itself, which is on the whole not hugely ambitious. Indeed, a great deal of it is positively glum, inward looking and even apprehensive in tone. A touch of millennial unease, perhaps? It's hard to know, but if Germinations is taken as an indicator of the state of young European art, things do not look good.
It is natural that the anxieties of the age will find their way into art. The channels cut into the top of Stephanie Nava's Union Table do not quite match up, suggesting the disjunctions that outlive alliances. Coming from the Czech Republic, Alena Kotzmanova's hazy black and white photographs, Temporary Person, articulate a generalised unease at the status of personal identity in a world of opaque, possibly malign forces. It is true, as well, that though we have emerged from post-modernism - to post-postmodernism? - irony and scepticism are apparently still the most attractive stances for young artists.
At The Factory many exhibits inspire a sense of deja vu and suggest that the 1970s revival extends to the field of fine art. There are pieces that could be variants on experimental art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Thierry Dalat, for example, who has assembled a formidable apparatus to generate sound dictated by an arbitrary act (peeling an apple), recalls interdisciplinary workshops blending sculpture and music: shades of Duchamp and John Cage. Or there are Fiona Jardine's tabulations of random statistical data (potentially interesting but visually inert), or Peter Ondrusek's conceptual whimsy, in which the specifications of the available space become the work.
There is an important distinction, however, between art produced back in the 1970s and this work, and that is the present lack of a socio-political edge. The first time around there was a heady sense that experimental art could change things, not least the existing patterns of cultural production and consumption. Here, a piece like Kristof Kintera's naive critique of consumerism doesn't inspire confidence in the current level of analytical thought, in terms of politics or art.
There was much speculation about the extent to which the selection was deliberately guided away from painting - there is, it seems, just no getting away from the debate on the status of painting in the art world. In the event, there is what seems like a reasonable proportion of painting in the show. However, quantity is one thing, quality another. The generally very poor quality of the painting on view all but confirms the gloomy diagnosis that we have produced a generation of art students who have neither an understanding of the history of painting, nor an appreciation of its technical demands.
Even the better paintings would have to be described as uninspired. These include Magdalena Angeletou's all-black composite, Julie Williams's flat, hard-edged transcriptions of architectural details and Michael Setek's attractive, small abstracts, painted on thick blocks of perspex and then displayed reversed. Veronica Schwegler has produced a series of delicate, tentative drawings, like pages from a sketchbook, details of landscape, plants and animals. They are nice, but almost apologetic.
Very little of the work on view is stirring or exciting, but much of it is competent. Gert Robijns, whose room is a floor-level miniature environment of circuitry and tiny video monitors, looks like an interesting artist. Kathrine Schroder has a distinctly upbeat installation, a field of babies, cut- out blackand-white images of a crawling infant, suspended at a uniform height, moving randomly, humanising formal sculptural language. Piotr Grzybowski paints comicbook superheroes on copies of Classical pottery, a la John Kindness.
Carol Green, Simona Brinkman and Peter Frimand all show effective video installations. The Danish partnership Rasmus Knud show a video on English football hooliganism - they are the artistic equivalent of a tribute band, with Gilbert and George as their models. Photography is everywhere, either as a primary medium or as a component. It is foregrounded in the work of Jesus Segura, whose surreal, manipulated images undercut our instinctive faith in the veracity of photography.
Ireland is represented by one artist, Susan Farrelly. The Girl From Nice is a video plus objects. Farrelly's habitual concerns relate to social identities, and her work here has a sense of humour in its evocation of a "withered sun goddess" and her poodle, playing on the notion as opposed to the reality of beach culture. But this brittle joke doesn't really challenge from the dominant mood of unease. Rather than looking ahead to the new century, most of these young artists are looking nervously over their shoulders, wondering where it all went wrong.
Germinations 10 can be seen at The Athens School of Fine Arts, The Factory, 256 Pireos Street, Athens, until December 31st. Next Spring the exhibition will travel to a venue in Flanders.
