All mouth and no trousers

Visual Arts: Voice Over

Arnolfini, Bristol

A red church (well, a painted portakabin with a steeple) lies on its side in the gallery. You enter through a right-side-up doorway into a pleasingly den-like interior and take a seat on a wooden bench. Facing you is a wide-screen video monitor standing, like the church, on its side, so that the screen is in portrait rather than landscape format. On the screen is the rear view of a man with the words "Real Life" tattooed on his back. He's sitting on a bare wooden floor and he's singing hymns in a rousing, not unmusical, voice. You listen to "Amazing Grace" and "Jerusalem" and then exit the church through a second doorway. Only when you read the catalogue essay by co-curator Michael Archer, do you find out that the video portion of the tape (but not the soundtrack) is actually running backwards. Aha!

This is Dead Church/Real Life by Ross Sinclair, one of nine artists represented in the South Bank Centre touring exhibition Voice Over: Sound and Vision in Contemporary Art. Sinclair's installation is witty and well thought- out, and while it's hard to suppress the feeling that perhaps there should be a little more to it, the fact that there isn't makes it all the more complete. It's a closed circuit: Dead Church/ Real Life. Boom! Boom!

With Tacita Dean's Magnetic, there may be too much of a good thing. Dean has taken strips of magnetic tape representing recordings of noises, marked each strip with a chinagraph pencil giving a description of the noise, and then mounted the pieces of tape in series and framed them. A kiss is a 3in length of tape; a French kiss is a couple of feet, etc. It's a simple yet poetic and even beautiful conceit but its fragile charm wears thin over the course of seven frames and two gallery walls.

The American artist Joseph Grigley, who has recently begun an installation at the Barbican as part of its Inventing America season, uses his deafness as a means of investigating issues of meaning and communication by exchanging written notes with members of the public. His installation here is low- key to the point where it almost escapes notice entirely. A table full of written messages is set up next to a fridge and a coffee urn. You're meant to pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit down and read the messages, but not to write any yourself or to open the fridge, which holds supplies of coffee and milk. After three visits to the gallery, I can report that this isn't becoming a very popular attraction.

Jeremy Deller's The Uses of Literacy, first shown at the Norwich Gallery last year, is one of the most intriguing exhibits, and also the most contentious. Deller made contact with fans of the Manic Street Preachers pop group through a fanzine and here presents a display of their pictures and poems about their heroes, and a shelf of favoured books, with no editorial comment. As anyone who has ever laboriously traced a photo of their favourite pop star will know, this is a painfully sincere business, and there is real love and devotion involved. The possibility that Deller might be taking the piss out of his subjects' naivety is therefore too awful to contemplate. By borrowing the title of Richard Hoggart's book - a classic English Studies text dealing with the notion of discrimination in relation to popular culture from a perspective that was hardly Elvis-friendly - he seems to be doing something different, or at least the catalogue thinks so, but really, who knows?

Elsewhere, Lucy Gunning presents a two-screen video installation, The Singing Lesson (first shown in 1994), that comically juxtaposes the bravura instructions of the teacher against Gunning's own faltering attempts to follow her.

The most technically assured exhibit, however (and, boy, does technique go a long way in a show like this), is the Canadian Stan Douglas's laser- disc projection of a free-jazz television recording on to two sides of a single screen, where one side shows the selected vision-mix from the two-camera set-up, while the other shows the "unselected" mix. There's a tendentious panel of text that tells you what it's about, but it's the relative pizzazz of the presentation that one remembers.

The concerns of Voice Over appear to be numerous: some artists don't use voice or sound at all; some do; some appear to hit, some to miss, though in almost all cases one's response is provisional at best, for there's often very little to go on. Despite the catalogue essay's invocation of the French Symbolists and their interest in synaesthesia, much of the material in the exhibition remains stubbornly immutable, mute even. And, like Michael Archer's description of an orange mobile phone ad's visual pun on the digits of a telephone keypad - where, he says, "the black rectangle becomes a sublime space containing the possibility of all the telephone calls and fax transmissions that have ever been or will ever be sent, as well as all the others that might only be imagined" - the show has a tendency to over-reach itself. Like Sinclair singing hymns in the buff, it's sometimes dangerously close to being all mouth and no trousers. Or it may be that, as an elderly lady in the gallery said to me, "It's all so Sixties, isn't it!"

To 22 March, Arnolfini, Narrow Quay, Bristol (0117 9299191), then touring to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (4 April-17 May) and Nottingham Castle Museum (12 Sept-1 Nov)

Phil Johnson