Visual art review: "You seem the same as always" | Cara Tolmie

THE hand of the artist is an idea which both fascinates and repels. In the romantic age, it was the vehicle of genius which bestowed on the rest of the world the "work of art". More recent artists, desperate to distance themselves from this way of thinking, have tried to eliminate all trace of it in their work.

So what does it mean to be looking at the enlarged handprint of Marcel Duchamp, not to mention those of Andr Breton, Alberto Giacometti, Aldous Huxley? The prints were collected by psychologist Charlotte Wolff in Paris in the 1930s, and are displayed as an artwork by Hans-Peter Feldmann in the current group show at The Common Guild, You Seem the Same as Always, -. The handprints tell us little, but they do send a frisson down the spine.

This group show brings together an impressive catalogue of artists, including Douglas Gordon, David Shrigley and Richard Serra, on the theme of hands. It's a clever, rewarding little show in which the works speak clearly to the theme and to one another. Many illustrate the same paradox: the more an artist tries to show there is nothing special about a hand, the more special that hand becomes.

David Shrigley gives us his own take on palmistry with a wall diagram indicating "The line of hidden meaning" and "The way we are diminished" as well as "The line of the liver". His work is both funny and poetic, the hand in his picture a closed fist, resolutely refusing to be "read".

Dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer creates a kind of dance for a single hand in her film, Hand Movie, made in 1966. Filmed when she was in hospital recovering from surgery and unable to dance herself, it is elegant, acrobatic, as if the hand were standing in for the dancer's whole body.

Richard Serra was influenced by Rainer. His Hands Tied film becomes a drama of escapology, until at last his hands shake themselves free from their bonds. Kate Davis references Rainer too, though her 16mm film shows a hand shaping and working an invisible ball of clay. Meanwhile, Gabriel Orozco's photographs show him grasping a real ball of clay in his cupped hands and opening them to reveal a heart-shaped imprint of the space between them, both spontaneous and intimate.

Douglas Gordon presents a series of photographs of wax casts of his own hands, on which the ring finger has broken off. Severed at the wrist, these hands tread a fine line between macabre and poignant, the stub of the broken digit looking like a wound.And, Gordon being Gordon, he can't resist the humour of doing one with the broken digit taped to the back of the hand itself, like a strange genetic mutation.

If The Common Guild compresses an uncommon number of well-known artists into a relatively small space, DCA is doing the opposite, opening up its large galleries to two young talents having their first show in a major British institution.

Cara Tolmie is one of the new generation of twentysomething artists associated with Glasgow, though in fact she is a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee. Her work here is all derived from a 42-second film clip of mountains in North America, made through the window of a moving car. First she analyses the dynamic of fore-, mid- and background in a text description. Then she translates this into a graph. Finally, she uses the patterns derived from it to create a narrative for a 20-minute film.

Though its characters are deliberately artificial, Chronicle is surprisingly resonant, unwinding its story of three people in a room via sentences on a screen while human voices sing a cappella almost-harmonies, and the camera pans around a stage-set with a wood veneer image of the same mountain. It feels like an experiment about process, but the end result is more than that, a work with a presence of its own.

Both Tolmie and Nina Rhode, in the gallery next door, have an interest in performance, and both are musicians. While the strange, insistent music from Tolmie's film filters out into her space, Rhode's is underpinned by a droning middle C, made by a circle of harmonicas spinning on a disc.

Rhode is based in Berlin and spent 15 years making work with the collective Honey-Suckle Company before deciding to concentrate on her own sculpture. Her works often perform in themselves - kinetic wheels spin in a range of colours, materials and effects. Others invite input from the audience. Who, for example, could resist Gong, a tree trunk suspended horizontally at roof height between two metal discs, with a rope dangling tantalisingly towards the viewer? Even The Procurator, a grand church-organ-like structure made from discarded firework cylinders, suggests objects which once performed, and may again.

Rhode's work is as varied as Tolmie's is streamlined. The melted carcass of a wheelie bin, which seems half submerged in the floor, alludes to the May Day anti-capitalist riots in Berlin, while bitumen feet melting by the window suggest they might be all that is left of a person who has spent too long in the heat of the sun. It may not plumb the depths of meaning, but it's lively and isn't afraid to have a sense of humour. That's rare in the world of contemporary art, and more than welcome.

• "You seem the same as always,-" runs until 30 July; Cara Tolmie and Nina Rhode both run until 31 July

Visual art review: "You seem the same as always" | Cara Tolmie | Nina Rhode