Incommunicado
Until May 8; City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Mphferlmp. Using mere words to describe art has always been a challenge, but after going to see Incommunicado I’m left wondering whether I should try communicating at all. The show, organised by London’s Hayward Gallery, is ostensibly about communication breakdown, but actually it seems to be saying that all communication is broken, period. At least that, in itself, is some form of communication.

With a big proportion of film and video art from the 1960s to the present, this show is pretty adventurous for the City Art Centre, and a far cry from the painterly Iona exhibition downstairs. If a work here doesn’t make sense, the chances are it’s not meant to. “WATER MADE IT WET”, say huge vinyl cut letters on one wall. This is the recent work of the celebrated American conceptual artist, Lawrence Weiner. What the water made wet is entirely a matter for the beholder.

If communication breakdown was a sport, playwright Samuel Beckett would be the world record holder. It is his film Comédie, made in 1966 with filmmaker Marin Karmitz, which is the kernel of the exhibition (along with a number of Bruce Nauman works). Three powdered figures in urns deliver quick-fire monologues, gaps removed in the edit. The characters are indecipherable (even if you have fluent French) and apparently oblivious to each other. Although their tales of adultery intertwine, they are each isolated in their own solitude.

Spread over two floors there are more black box spaces than most galleries could accommodate, giving many of the video works their own room to breathe (and shout and scream). Unfortunately there are just too many sound-based pieces operating on the upper floor, interrupting and (certainly in the case of Angus Fairhurst’s droll piece) drowning each other out. You might argue that this is a statement of communication breakdown in its own right, but the artworks tend to manage that for themselves.

One silent, and compelling, piece is Christian Marclay’s Mixed Reviews. A man interprets verbal descriptions of music in American Sign Language, and he looks like he’s dancing. Whether this dancing corresponds at all to the original music is not revealed, but it’s fascinating that language becomes choreography in his hands, and therefore much closer to its source than written words could ever be.

While numerous works make reference to television as a source of misinformation, only one artist, Phil Coy, specifically deals with the internet. In a world whose communication habits have been hijacked almost completely by the world wide web – and with it a whole new vista of messed up communication – this exhibition feels about 20 years out of date.

Finally, if you thought activity areas were just for kids, think again. Plenty adults have clearly had a field day in the Resource Area, shredding their secrets, typing a sentence or two into the collective stream of consciousness, and – a particularly interesting exercise for me – composing reviews of the exhibition with the restricted vocabulary of fridge magnets.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.03.04