Why heading for the bookies doesn't guarantee a winner in art

Two art exhibitions draw on literature for inspiration, but the results vary widely, from thesis-like installations to a moving testament to love

WHEN BOTH Dublin Contemporary and the Lyon Biennale announce the same theme for their exhibitions – a line from WB Yeats’s poem Easter 1916, “a terrible beauty is born” – you know something’s up.

Art and literature have often turned to one another, for illustration, insight, illumination. Writers wrap words around art, sometimes obscuring, but often opening up ideas, thoughts, and emotional spaces in the work. At Convergence, the positions are reversed and this exhibition, across two sites, looks at how literature is at the heart of what informs and inspires many leading artists.

There are high points. Sean Lynch's investigation of the cult of Flann O'Brien, played out through The Irish Timesand a bicycle carried to the top of Carrantuohill, recreates a parallel to the reason-in-madness of The Third Policeman. Julie Louise Bacon sets up a writer's desk, looking on a vista of Twin Towers plinths, set on an Afghan rug, woven with a pattern of AK-47s. Old-fashioned viewfinders on the desk give windows on to the world, and into outer space. A jigsaw swirls around the wall, its pieces arranged for colour, rather than image. It's a testament to the scatterings of inspiration and of history remade. And yet the whole exhibition doesn't quite gel.

For one thing, there is too much reading. This might sound odd in relation to an exhibition about literature, but the logic of each art form extends to how we consume it. Therefore, we stand in front of (and in, and around) works of art with a certain set of expectations; and sit down to read books with another. Artists and writers can confound these in various ways, but when, to take one example from this exhibition, Tacita Dean's work consists of a framed set of pages from an article she wrote for the influential, if niche, publication October, I found myself muttering the refrain of the philistine: "Is that art?"

Elsewhere, and frustratingly, Rodney Graham's book The System of Landor's Cottageis a look-but-don't-touch affair; while Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, which you are allowed to read, is a weighty tome consisting of every word the artist uttered for an entire week. It made me smile, although I was not tempted to do more than flick through while standing in front of its plinth.

One of the gems of the exhibition is easily missed, however. On a reading table, thick with books, Jens Hoffmann's trio Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz, and Huckleberry Finndon't re-tell the famous stories.

Instead, the artist presents images by other artists that made him feel the way the books themselves made him feel. One of his prefaces states: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted. Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished. Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” However, the books are a wonderful moment of synergy between the ideas and desires that give rise to both words and images.

More visually satisfying is Davide Cascio's large structure, complete with strip lighting and flowers. Polyhedrais subtitled as a room in which to read Joyce's 'Ulysses', which would have been even more marvellous had the artist provided a chair. Fun too are a series of posters by Nick Thurston, in which texts from Samuel Beckett's Watt are reprinted with nouns replaced with the word "noun", making you realise the creative precision and genius that led Beckett to put each word in exactly the right place, and that words, like brushstrokes, work together to create a picture.

A large print by Brian O’Doherty is from his ongoing series exploring Ogham, a language that was written, but never spoken aloud. O’Doherty reduces its signs to pure pattern, showing the structures that underpin both art and language.

On the whole, though, it all feels like knowledge hard won, a thesis hung on the walls and ranged on plinths. One gets the sense that the curator has drawn an exhibition out of a subject that fascinates her deeply, but doesn’t quite communicate the key differences between the disciplines, or the pleasure to be found alongside the didactic impulse.

For an exhibition that handles the interplay between art and literature with a more satisfying lightness of touch, see Tom Molloy's Doubtat the Rubicon Gallery. Subplot rewrites George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but only those lines of text that relate to the affair between Winston Smith and Julia.

Making their way across a sea of otherwise blank pages, the lines are a moving testament to literature and to love.

Convergence: Literary Art Exhibitions ends September 29th at Limerick City Gallery of Art’s off-site galleries, Istabraq Hall and Ormston House,

gallery.limerick.ie

Doubt by Tom Molloy runs until October 9th at Rubicon Gallery Dublin, rubicongallery.ie