New schools of thought

Vinyl and Superbia 2 are unrelated but neatly complementary projects that currently occupy school buildings in different parts of Cork, reports Aidan Dunne

Reviewed

Superbia 2, St Columba's Boys' National School, Douglas, Cork, until Aug 20

Vinyl, Christian Brothers School, Sullivan's Quay, Cork, until Aug 13 (086-1759109)

The former is spread throughout the exceptionally atmospheric premises of the Christian Brothers School in the centre of the city, while the latter is in a more modern building, St Columba's Boys' National School in Douglas. Both are related to their institutional settings, albeit in different ways, and both are imaginative and ambitious exhibitions.

Superbia 2, curated by Stephen Brandes and Darragh Hogan, follows on from the first in an open-ended series aiming to deal with suburbia. The original was located in a two-storey suburban house in Ballymun. Several of the pieces dealt with the inner world of teenagers. This time, many of the 14 artists take on the inner world of children. Not all, though: there are also inventive explorations of the experience of being in school or institution, and pieces that take their cue from the pedagogic context. Part of the appeal, but also the challenge facing the artists, is that what they do is worked into the fabric of the building, among the desks, notice boards and teaching aids.

Working very much within the setting, Isabel Nolan has a nice, simply achieved coup de theatre. Walk into her classroom (so to speak), and you're confronted with a quasi-normal scene abruptly contradicted by a huge, gravity-defying cluster of chairs, bound together by plastic ties, an intrusion of anarchy or chaos into the order of rules and timetables. Equally, there's apposite humour in Rhona Byrne's low-key interventions involving unlikely pets on leads. In this and her other piece Tree House, her surreal wit is thoroughly at home in context.

The most beautiful work is probably by Clodagh Emoe, who shows a series of linked drawings which share a sense of wonder at the scale and extent of the physical world, together with an underlying doubt as to whether we can ever really grasp the nature of that world. Her Blackboard is just that, except that its surface consists of a huge expanse of lustrous graphite. It's terrific in itself, and it encapsulates the idea of making the imaginative leap from the confines of the classroom to infinity.

Kevin Kelly's Monkey Palace, a mini-institution within the school, is ambiguous but intriguing, containing many framed portrait images of monkeys and apes, as well as a video montage of clips from films and television programmes about or using monkeys and apes. Part of the point of Superbia 2 is to reflect our attention back on the setting, to make us look at the familiar environments within which we live our lives, and Kelly's installation does that in a striking, even troubling way. David Kavanagh does something similar, though his fable of tiny creatures exploring the limits of their world is perhaps a bit twee.

More demanding are Linda Quinlan's extraordinary installations, which ingeniously combine a bewilderingly eclectic range of materials, from test tubes and Petri dishes to props for dolls, costume jewellery, pharmaceutical products and surgical implements to generate a picture of a narcissistic, technologically obsessed consumer culture.

Contrast Quinlan's sharp vision with the engaging, laid-back whimsical fantasy of Brian Griffiths's video, made with David Thorpe, We live a life of endless pleasure. Finola Jones appropriately revisits and reworks her Tom and Jerry soundtrack piece; Antonio Scarponi subverts the conventions of cartography to offer people-based representations of the world . . . All in all, Superbia 2 performed very well this term and can look forward to the next with some confidence.

By its nature, Vinyl, curated by Simon Cutts of Coracle publishers, is a more subtle, relatively understated event, and in a way more difficult, more demanding of artists and visitors. But there is also something quite brilliant about it. It's original, it really challenges the artists, and it draws some fantastic responses from them. More, it concludes in an Aladdin's cave of a bookroom, a treasure trove of publications by Coracle and other, mostly small and often unorthodox publishers. To find so much of such materials gathered in one place is amazing, even a little overwhelming.

The one bad thing is that Vinyl does not seem to have found its audience, or at least the audience it deserves. Perhaps scheduling is a problem here: autumn or spring might have been better than the months of the academic holidays. There are no stated arrangements to bring the show, and the bookroom, elsewhere, but it would be well worth doing so. Something so good, entailing so much work, deserves other incarnations.

That said, it is a good fit in the Christian Brothers school. The title refers to the stipulation that all artists use vinyl film as a medium, plotted and cut by computer and adhesively fixed on site (in the event this stipulation is imaginatively stretched). As Cutts notes in a statement, the show is predominantly "a textual and graphical project" and hence "an anthology" using the fabric of the building rather than paper.

Its textual, graphic nature is one of the most refreshing things about it - particularly the textural aspect. You might be inclined to think that visual artists let loose with words will become insufferably pretentious, but that is not the case and as it happens the participants include writers and poets as well.

Vinyl directs our attention to the aesthetic qualities of typography. Text printed large can be beautiful, and there are many beautiful, intriguing or funny texts here, including those by Cralan Kelder, Kathy Prendergast, Trevor Joyce, Caroline Koebel, Marton Koppany, Susan Howe, plus Brian Kennedy's abstract typographic compositions and Ian Whittlesea's powerful one-word installation: DESPAIR imprinted on the top of a desk.

You can literally explore a huge version of Tim Robinson's celebrated map of the Aran Islands in the courtyard. This emphasis on the textual and literary is not meant to take from the purely graphic responses, which are generally good, but in the end, Vinyl is a project that hinges on the myriad pleasures of the text.