Perfect parables of futility

Former Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, whose work depends on elaborate explanations and a tortuous process, is a remarkable artist - though some of his projects do make you wonder about his sanity, writes Aidan Dunne

SIMON STARLING, whose fascinating solo exhibition, Concrete Light, is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, is a remarkable artist who won the Turner Prize in 2005. The piece that is generally regarded as having won it for him is, in many respects, typical of what he does.

It was called Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) and it looked, from what one saw of it in the Tate Gallery, like a kind of big, ramshackle wooden shed. In fact, it was a big, ramshackle wooden shed, something that prompted some sarcastic remarks about the Turner DIY prize from visitors. What made the shed a work of art was Starling's tortuous, perverse, but oddly intriguing interaction with it.

That began when he came across it in its original incarnation, standing on a bank of the River Rhine. He persuaded the owner to part with it, then carefully disassembled it, and converted it into a raft. As it happened, the shed came complete with an oar, which hung on one wall. The raft was launched into the water and Starling proceeded to navigate it downstream as far as Basel. There it was removed from the river and, in a museum in the city, dismantled and reconstructed as the shed it had been.

A number of Starling's enduring preoccupations were crystallized in all of this. He is clearly interested in how objects and materials are malleable and can become something else.

Although he is a fine arts professor in Frankfurt, there is something of the eccentric English boffin about him (he was born in Epsom in 1967). He is obsessed by prolonged, painstaking processes that conceptually add up to zero, like the protagonist Bartlebooth in Georges Perec's extraordinary novel, Life: A User's Manual, who devotes his life to a perfectly futile project.

Bartlebooth devotes 10 years to becoming a proficient watercolourist, then travels the world making paintings of every port he visits, dispatching the pictures back home to Paris. There they are made into jigsaw puzzles by an expert craftsman, puzzles to be pieced together by Bartlebooth on his eventual return. Each is then carefully restored to a pristine state, sent back to the port it depicts and submerged in salt water until the pigment dissolves.

The intrepid Bartlebooth's aim is to end up with a collection of blank sheets of paper. Starling, one feels, is reading from the same hymn sheet. Both artists are devoted to parables of futility that are revealing of human nature, industry and inventiveness, and our relationship to the wider physical environment.

STILL, IT CAN make things a little difficult for the viewer when one encounters what are, in essence, blank sheets of paper, the culmination of processes that are curiously self-negating. But there was an impressive symmetry to Starling's original Shedboatshedproject that didn't translate to its Tate Gallery incarnation as part of the Turner Prize exhibition. There, it was just a shed that had been transported like any piece of goods, and installed in a gallery. The interesting thing about the project was not the patchwork wooden shed, however incidentally interesting such a structure might be, but the process that Starling had drawn it into.

Shedboatsheddoesn't feature in the Limerick show, where pretty much every work on view makes a convincing case for its own physical presence. That includes the centrepiece, a substantial work made specifically for the gallery. Mirrored Wall Headis, as it seems, a dry-stone limestone wall that neatly bisects one of the main rooms. At first glance, it looks like an entirely ordinary dry-stone wall and, as such, the product of a traditional skill, which it is (it was built by dry-stone wall builder, Bob Wilson, and a team of workers). But the longer you look at it, the more it seems that there is something slightly odd or unsettling about it.

What's odd is that Starling took the "wall head", the eight stones chosen to form one end of the wall and which generate the subsequent pattern of building, and cut exact copies for the other end of the wall, so that the symmetrical, mirrored ends initiate patterns that meet in the centre. As you look, your eye registers the familiar organised chance of the dry-stone wall, and then registers the disturbing symmetry. One half of the wall is a mirror image of the other. What Starling has effected is, of course, close to nothing.

State-of-the-art technologies, three-dimensional scanning and a computer-guided milling machine have been applied to an ancient building method in an ingenious though almost imperceptible intervention.

You would be hard put to figure out what's going on with another piece on view, Work, Made-ready, Kunsthalle Bern, from 1997. We see a bicycle and a chair (in fact, a Marin Sausalito bicycle and a Charles Eames Aluminium Group chair), except that, as we know now with Starling, things are never quite as they seem. According to the accompanying explanatory note, he has taken the metal from each and swapped them around, so that what was the bicycle is now the chair, and vice versa. There's something strangely appealing about the notion that one manufactured object can be transmuted into another, a form of industrial alchemy. It refers us back to the nature of the manufacturing process and its basis in the materials of the earth.

There's also the consideration that both are signature items of Modernism, another preoccupation of Starling's.

STARLING HAS BEEN criticised for being inordinately dependent on the often tortuous rationales underlying his work. Without the long, involved explanations, it is suggested, what we see in the gallery doesn't really mean much. And that's true most of the time. It can be argued that all art depends on interpretation on the basis of implicit or available knowledge and information, but the difference with Starling's work (and with a great deal of other contemporary art) is that it doesn't mean much not just in the absence of an explanation but also without the dimension of process. In fact, the work consists substantially of the process of its own making. If Starling hadn't converted the shed into a raft and guided it downriver, the shed would be just a shed.

When it comes to the intricacies of their reasoning, some of his projects do make you wonder about his sanity. Musselled Moore ( Project for Lake Ontario) documents a two-year project that delved into the byways of cultural history. Anthony Blunt, the British art historian who was also a spy for the KGB, advised Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, in which capacity he advocated the gallery's controversial purchase of a Henry Moore sculpture, Warrior With Shield. The sculpture was apparently inspired by a pebble Moore found on a beach.

Starling made a steel replica of the sculpture and submerged it in Lake Ontario for a year and a half. It took that long for zebra mussels - a species indigenous to south-east Russia which, once imported into the Great Lakes, quickly became disastrously invasive - to colonise it.

Starling cites the nationalist opposition of the local artists to Moore's sculpture and draws parallels between that invading warrior and the countless mussel invaders. There are several other inter-connecting strands at work here. But in the end it's all more than slightly demented.

Starling talks of "forcing" a relationship between "Moore's introduction into Toronto" and "the story of the introduction and infestation" of the zebra mussels. It's semi-convincing, but the language used is the giveaway. The project aims for something like the symmetry of other works but never quite comes together.

In a way, this reflects well on Starling's work generally. After all, if he can get it wrong, it means that he can also get it right.

Concrete Light Works, by Simon Starling, is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art until Nov 16, admission free