Total Object Complete With Missing Parts
Tramway, Glasgow

You could be forgiven for failing to spot the theme of the latest exhibition at Tramway. Total Object Complete With Missing Parts brings together works by 12 artists based on ideas from the work of Samuel Beckett - famous for his plays and fiction; less so for his art criticism.

The most obvious link with Beckett is absurdism. The two dungaree-clad painters working their way along Nedko Solakov's wall, A Life (Black and White) - one continually painting it black while the other repaints it white - do give you the feeling you're waiting for Godot (as well as watching paint dry).

But the common thread in most of the works is storytelling and the interrupted narrative. Glasgow-based Simon Starling's Ladder (Aluminium) 5.4m is a scaffolded crow's nest on which you can just see welding gear. From it dangles a rope ladder, and underneath sits a pool of molten metal - you know something good has happened here, but you're not sure what.

Angela Bulloch's fascinating pixel boxes also tell a story without giving away the plot - she took three 30-second scenes from high-concept sci-fi movie The Matrix, isolated the action from a corner of the screen and magnified it. The result is three towers of large, flashing light-boxes, each representing just a few pixels, reducing the narrative to utter abstraction.

Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn tells another kind of story, one without an end. La Cuisine Et La Guerre is a patchwork of references to the dysfunctional relations between the people of Latin America, their historical European conquerors, and their present-day political leaders. But the narrative does not stop there - the work is accompanied by the envelopes and documentation which track the material's own progress between the continents.

And with reference to the interrupted narrative, what could be more fitting than Fiona Banner's Full Stops? These monolithic black sculptures literally punctuate the entire gallery space, threatening to trip you up while you gaze at Starling's crow's nest.

Most of these pieces tell part of a story - whether the beginning, middle or end - but some don't seem to fit at all. Mariele Neudecker's sculptural realisation of light streaming through church windows is beautiful and intricately made, but it seems to have more in common with the ecstasies of the Renaissance altar-piece than the agonies of existentialism.

Equally, Digital Forest, made specially for this space by celebrated Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas (who has never before exhibited in Scotland) seems somehow too still and self-contained to play a part in any narrative. Resembling architectural elevations, the painstakingly drawn forests and branches represent a synthetic landscape - "a new third space", constructed from something close to reality.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.09.01