Visual art review: Roll up for smoke signals that prove the party's over

Published on Saturday 20 September 2008 17:13

RICHARD HUGHES, NOTHING LEFT, IT'S ALRIGHT The Modern Institute, Glasgow

AT FIRST you might think that what you are seeing is the weird by-product of some secret industrial process. Or that the building is on fire in a most peculiar way. Eventually, though, you simply have to concede: someone or something is blowing enormous smoke rings out of a city office block. Is there a chain-smoking giant inside?

One of the joys of Glasgow's Modern Institute is the apparent mismatch between what it does and how it looks. One of the UK's leading commercial galleries and an established incubator of wave upon wave of artistic talent, it is currently housed in an unprepossessing Edwardian tenement in Robertson Street at the less glamorous end of the city centre.

It is one of the few galleries that might be ambitious enough to install a giant smoke machine, virtually unannounced, in a city street and the artist Richard Hughes one of the few young artists daft enough to have devised it.

Birmingham-born Hughes, who is in his mid-thirties, is a kind of poet of a rather grim, modern melancholy. Among his keynote works are tiny facsimiles of cigarette butts, and a lemonade bottle of clear golden liquid which is undoubtedly meant to be urine.

Like those smoke rings, there's a stoner, slacker tone to much of his work; a deliberate defusing of the polar values of much contemporary art which can tend to be shinily optimistic or hammily downbeat.

The theme of this show is the end of the party: perfectly timed to open the week in which the credit crunch turned into market free-fall. The gallery walls are peppered with tiny deflated balloons. A celebratory banner has fallen off the wall.

None of these items is real-life detritus but careful casts in resin and fibreglass. A glittering mirrored pillar turns out not to be reflective, but meticulously constructed from cardboard and hundreds of photographs of the room and adjacent views.

Much of this work is great fun but a bit tricksy. If the smoke rings are a lovely joke, then their companion piece, a giant roll-up which glows intermittently, looks less charming and a bit more like an escapee from a fairground or stage set.

The initial frissons set up in Hughes's work – its love of marginality, ordinariness and a kind of dogged suburbanism in the face of the metropolitan aesthetic of the art world – can only take us so far. All falls into place, however, with the artist's most committed work.

Robertson Street is in a part of the city that is being relentlessly reshaped. From the gallery's rear window you can see one last pocket of scrub land firmly fenced and sign-posted for development.

In the centre of this scrappy wilderness Hughes has placed an old and withered tree; clamped to its branches is a broken chair, which, as the tree has grown has been carried aloft, like a strange outgrowth or bloom. The whole thing is in fact a beautifully cast and patinated bronze, a humble counter to the monstrous lumps of civic bronze that litter British towns.

It is subtle and charming and crazily ambitious. Imagine a city filled with subtle monuments like these. Perhaps it exists already: the kind of place where trees might appear overnight and buildings puff mysteriously.

• Until October 4