The new Douglas Hyde show, Hungry Ghosts, marshals a diverse range of work by nine contemporary artists. The cryptic title suggests a theme, but don't expect it to be illustrated by what you see in the gallery, for the connection between title and show, like the various connections between the individual works, is a matter of hints and possibilities. But what of the title? Buddhist enlightenment entails freedom from desire. Spirits that are drawn back again and again to earth through desire are hungry ghosts.
The implication is that the work in the show exemplifies desire and, more, a certain emptiness, a hunger that comes with the helpless realisation that desire is a condition, not a need that can be met. Sometimes the association is straightforward, as with Sarah Lucas's tawdry, spent Bunny Girl, or the dark, driven eroticism of Nobuyoshi Araki's photographs, famously based around the teeming streetlife of Tokyo's Shinjuku district. Equally with Philip diCorcia's beautifully staged colour photographs of rent boys in the US. Having failed in their bid to live the American dream, they find themselves living out the dreams of others.
But arguably the most striking pieces are Rineke Dijkstra's colour photographs of matadors. Formally posed and needle sharp, these post-fight portraits are unsettling. At first the images look fairly innocuous, then you notice the mixture of exhaustion and adrenalin in the eyes, the slight disarray, torn quilting in the jackets, splashes of blood on collars, scrapes and cuts.
John Currin's parodic society portrait works in a similar way. It looks like a rather poor academic portrait of a woman in evening dress until you register the awful, clotted paintwork that forms the head and lends the image an aura of rottenness.
Marlene Dumas also has a version of a society portrait. An artist who has built up a strong association with the Douglas Hyde, this time around she tackles two contemporary icons in paintings hung side by side. A gaunt looking Naomi Campbell stands next to a smiling Princess Diana in pink. The Diana is a loose pastiche of a formal portrait, but not much else. The Naomi is a stranger, wilder take on its subject. In terms of the show's title, their inclusion could relate to the public desire for iconic figures with whom to identify, or equally to the worldly ambition of celebrities.
Icons - of pop culture and style - turn up as well in Karen Kilimnik's doodles, slight works that have attained a degree of popularity on the crest of the Brit culture wave. They are terrible drawings. The argument for them is that they are not supposed to be any good, but that they exemplify adolescent dreaminess. They have something in common with the work in another show that's on at the moment, Desmond Shortt's less-is-more pictures at Jo Rain.
In an engaging collection of offhand paintings that suggest an unlikely combination of whimsicality and bleakness, Shortt demonstrates that you can be dead-pan and smart and still produce something of visual interest. His quartet of donkey portraits, for example, play ingeniously on our penchant for sentimental anthropomorphism while undercutting it. It's hard not to laugh out loud at some of his work, including the appealingly lugubrious Donkey With A Plan.
There is currently a revival of interest in ultra-realistic figurative sculpture, a trend represented in Hungry Ghosts by Keith Edmier's Ethiopian baby and young woman, both finished in a waxy red pigmented vinyl. Perhaps they are supposed to be admonitory presences, because they are obviously starving, and they embody a simple need rather than desire.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is odd man out, in that everything else in the show is figurative. His one exhibit is a photograph of a film screen. But it too is figurative, in an appropriately ghostly sense. He makes the picture by leaving the shutter open throughout the screening of a film. In the area of the screen, the accumulated light of the projected images burns the plate to a glowing whiteness. So he's produced a photograph of a certain amount of time. There's a lot of action stored up in that static image.
As it happens, you can currently see a one-person exhibition of his work at the Kerlin Gallery. So far he has built up three broad series of images: museum dioramas, theatres, and seascapes. The Kerlin show is drawn from the latter. Each series that he produces has a uniform format. As one writer remarked, he spends his time travelling to different places to take the same photograph. For the seascapes, probably his most ambitious project, he has travelled to different seas and made identically composed images, the simplest possible. The horizon line bisects the compositional rectangle, with sky above, sea below. The photographs are compelling and in fact they do vary in many ways. Some are made in daylight, some in darkness. Sometimes the focus is sharp, detailing the recessive pattern of hundreds of waves, sometimes it's blurred, bleached out by glare. The night-time shots are like minimalist paintings, but give them time and slowly subtle variations become apparent. Hungry Ghosts offers us a modest cross-section of some contemporary art. As far as that goes the title might be just a handy catchall. What gives the show an edge is its aspiration, through selection and juxtaposition, to sketch in what might be described as the spiritual context within which that art is made. That context inevitably contributes to the art, in ways that may not be immediately apparent. It sets the mood and goes some way towards explaining the unease, even the negativity that attends so much of the work.
Hungry Ghosts continues at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until July 25th.
