Pick of the galleries

Ways of seeing and doing

Dorothy Cross | Frith Street Gallery, London

Dorothy Cross | Frith Street Gallery, London

Eyemaker, a video work, shows the almost extinct process of an oculist making a glass eye. He sits at his workbench heating rods of Venetian glass over a naked flame, blowing them in the traditional method to create a pupil and iris with painstaking precision. We watch as he streaks filaments of glass across the eyeball, as he turns and carefully heats it. Finally he destroys his handiwork by blowing it up like a piece of gum.

Dorothy Cross, an Irish artist, claims the starting point was a book called Downcast Eyes which examines how we look and see; she also mentions Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. Yet the problem is she does not transform our experience of watching the oculist. The film is intriguing, because the arcane process itself intrigues, not because she has created a metaphor for ways of seeing.

The same may be said of her other videos such as Endarken. This shows a ruined Irish cottage obliterated by a black dot that slowly forms centre screen. It might an illustration of how we erase memory, or see things from different perspectives, but this is not conveyed either viscerally or intellectually by the work itself; it becomes too dependent on interpretation or accompanying text. Someone has written in the gallery visitors' book, "artists, please leave video-making to the film-makers". They could have a point.

Until 23 February; 020 7494 1550

Temporary Accommodation | Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

Four artists or artists' groups have been encouraged to decorate/invade the gallery for a month or two. The ground floor is given over to Tariq Alvi, who makes himself at home, so to speak. His work consists of cut-up newsprint, torn magazines, letters, photographs, and other small-scale things. Somehow he manages to both fill the space, and to ensure that the work doesn't become repetitive, by constantly coming up with fresh ways to cut, pin and cross-reference quasi-domestic material. Particularly effective are the folded walls which create an intimate space in the cavernous gallery, allowing a single visitor at a time an opportunity to intimately engage with Alvi's busy aesthetic.

Upstairs, Ella Gibbs is using her space as an informal office to set up events for other people. A programme produced in situ, and constantly updated, tells the visitor what's happening, and the room is laid out in a way designed both to be flexible and to involve the visitor.

Next comes Szuper Gallery, and this trio's ethos is ideal for the show's theme. Three elements: a video of them messing about with a patch of orange material in an urban planning centre, a story about transforming a flat in Venice so as to pull off an art heist, and an appeal for an architect to come forward so that Szuper Gallery can find a more permanent home, are all put over with exuberance and style, although patience is needed to get into it.

Lastly, a room has been decorated with pixillated, near-abstract images. Simon Faithfull is in the White-chapel's immediate neighbourhood making Palm Pilot drawings which are then shown in the gallery and also via an internet site. Most of Faithfull's space is given over to a home-made balloon which is kept aloft by a gas-burner. An empty spectacle, I thought during my visit, but the Half-Life drawings since made available by email demonstrate that the artist is bearing the balloon in mind during his peregrinations, so the gallery installation stands a chance of coming alive in the visitor's mind after the event.

Until 4 March; 020 7522 7888