Some things you just have to come clean about straight away. Alan Currall's new show at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art is not visually spectacular. It can be a bit boring, too. There are moments in my visit, I must admit, that I find myself idly picking my nails, or wondering when was the last time that someone swept that tricky bit of floor in the corner.
Currall's acting skills are unpolished. His voice - there are three videos that feature himself and one sound piece - slow, tentative, a little flat at times, puts you in mind of a particularly home-made meditation tape, the kind likely to send you to sleep until the crappy electronic music and wave noises manage to wake you up again.
None of this means, though, that he isn't a good artist. And if you are the kind of person who persists, Some Things I Want to Show You turns out to be a good show: sinister, sad and close to the bone.
Currall, who studied, and now teaches, at Glasgow School of Art and was one of the Beck's Future's Prize finalists last year, has been showing his video works for around a decade.
In Word Processing, the invisible narrator harangues a tiny microchip, using the language of corporate training. In another work, titled Survival Kits, set in a cosy Christmas sitting room, he quizzes his parents on what he might need to do to survive emergencies such as a shipwreck, a plane crash or a nuclear war. In another long monologue, he eulogises his best friend, who you quickly realise is vain and shallow, as well as almost certainly disloyal.
Imagine Tony Hancock and Sam Beckett had a love child who spent an awful lot of time watching Channel five, and you would get close to Currall's video persona. Currall's world is funny, but ineffably sad, full of a desperate desire for comfort and safety that is bound to be disappointed. It's a world of hierarchies and systems and the individuals caught within them. His characters tend to be on one side of the divide or the other; hapless everyman or deluded authority figures.
In two of his new works on show, he is the latter. Both videos take the form of instructional films. Quite what is being instructed is unclear.
In Come in like This, Currall is in a brick-walled warehouse, empty but for a table and two chairs. He is telling us how to prepare ourselves for an unspecified encounter.
''You've got to tap into these primal feelings,'' he tells us then sits down at the desk and smiles and grins in the most awful, fake kind of way. He does it again - deep breaths, psychological preparation - then begins to cry terribly and messily, banging his head on the table, spittle running down his chin. What on earth is he teaching us? It might be how to behave when chucking your girlfriend or being chucked. It might be a nightmare interview scenario - one thinks of Ewen Bremner's brilliant turn in Trainspotting.
In How I Would Probably do it, the setting looks like some kind of studio. There are bright lights, cameras and a stray microphone. Currall fiddles with the lighting, takes his T-shirt off, begins to bump and grind, as though he's gently encouraging an invisible and nervous participant to relax for the camera, but its all a little odd.
''I'm just going to do a gyrational thingy,'' he says and begins to gyrate. ''I'm just going to do this like I'm getting an electric shock,'' and he vibrates horribly. At the end of this semi-orgasmic little scenario is the comedown. ''Bring yourself back to reality in a calm and measured way,'' he says placidly, ''and don't leave yourself out there thinking that you're something you're not.''
In Head, Currall recites his plans for his own perfect body as though he was shopping for a kitchen. ''I knew I wanted solid and dependable ankles, flexible where necessary.'' And the tummy? ''I believe the expression is six-pack.'' Somehow listening to him suddenly reminds me of speaking to artists describing their work. Currall's characters are his own work of art, his own constructs, but what he is suggesting is we are all equally constructed. Perfect fakes, simulated replicas.
It's self-help therapy culture and reality TV all rolled horribly into one. Currall's videos used to remind me of Big Brother, back in the halcyon days when the housemates were carving funny animals out of potatoes rather than fighting and having sex. Now Currall's work is like an extended episode of Channel 4's Faking It. We are all faking
it all the time he implies, desperate to please, totally uncertain of
our place in the world, always open to self-improvement and therefore to instruction.
Alan Currall, Some Things
I Want to Show You, is at Goma, Glasgow, until August 22.
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