Video art takes on Hollywood

Lisson Gallery, London

I would hate to give away the end of Rodney Graham's 1998 film, Vexation Island, which makes the fact that it is endless particularly helpful. The nine-minute narrative of Graham's movie goes like this. An unconscious man, wearing 18th century pantaloons, wakes up on a tropical beach. Thirsty from the sun, he walks to a palm tree, looks up at the water-filled coconuts and shakes it. One falls on his head and knocks him out. An unconscious man, wearing 18th century pantaloons, wakes up on a tropical beach, etc. etc. etc.

Vexation Island - sometime star of the 1999 Venice Biennale - is the most eye-catching piece in a new show of video and filmwork assembled in a Covent Garden loft space at 9 Kean Street by Nicholas Logsdail, the Lisson Gallery's director. Logsdail's rationale for holding the show is the coincident opening of the Tate Modern. Video has been the happening medium of the past five years, he says; what apter celebration could there be than a show of (coincidentally all-Lisson) video artists?

This show may very well convince you that he is right. If the concatenation of gallery-owner and loft-space smells of self-interest, the fact is that Lisson Gallery is a museum-quality show, full of passion and raising all kinds of useful questions.

Vexation Island is a good place to start. A common current running through the Lisson show is the need its works clearly feel to define themselves by what they are not. The most obvious candidate for mistaken identity is commercial film; a medium which Graham's piece squares up to by apparently imitating it. Shot in Technicolor on a relatively vast budget ($250,000), employing its own crew (including a wardrobe mistress) and location in the British Virgin Islands, Vexation Island is not just an allegory of human striving. It is an allegory of Hollywood film-making, a self-referential work that uses its own medium to traduce itself.

It is the familiarity of the experience that makes Vexation Island unfamiliar. We've all seen Robinson Crusoe, we click that Technicolor-blue sea is a cue for paradise. Yet the pantalooned man isn't Crusoe, but Graham himself; the subject of his film is hellish and its narrative makes a maddening point of never developing. So what's going on?

To understand that, start with a chronological rewind to Julião Sarmento's Faces (1976). A 45-minute loop of two women kissing, Faces plays around with our expectations of climax: that is to say, there isn't one, either sexual or narrative. After a very short while, boredom begins to set in, not something you usually associate with watching sex on screen. (Logsdail maintains that any video piece that can hold your attention for 30 seconds is a masterpiece. On the contrary, boredom - typified by the endless loop - seems to me to have been an essential part of the video aesthetic since Warhol.) Lulled into a non-coital trance, we lose any specific sense of what it is we are looking at and are caught up instead in an abstracted vision of tumescence.

Sarmento being a painter, his preoccupations are painterly: Faces slides about in the vexed area between representation and abstraction. Now, this kind of painting- with-film has itself become a source of creative annoyance for one school of art video makers. If artists like Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky (whose Fog is a Whistlerian evocation of New York) and Marijke van Warmerdam Jules (whose Skytypers is a mobile Olitski) follow in the Sarmento tradition, Mat Collishaw's playing around with Velázquez and Botticelli - reviewed last week - clearly rejects it.

Likewise, Jonathan Monk's LeWitt 100 Cubes Cantz/ slow, slow, quick, quick, slow ... defines itself as anti-painterly (maybe as anti-high art) by taking on the Grand Old Man of Minimalism himself. Monk's movie is a quick flick through Sol LeWitt's gouache cubes, his 16mm film imposing a new set of rules on LeWitt's own fanatical rule-making. Just to show who's boss, the film is stored in a rubbish bin - presumably the proverbial dustbin of history - underneath the projector, from which it is rescued by the miracle of Monk's movie-making. (LeWitt, happily for Logsdail's lawyers, is another Lisson artist.)

Various things emerge from this intelligent show, including mild bemusement that Jane and Louise Wilson should somehow have ended up as Britain's best-known video mak ers. (Why?) Their work in this show seems irritating compared with much of the rest. One of the most surprising is the level of seriousness in the art it contains, its engagement - beneath all the irony and puns - with film as both a medium and a material. See it.

The Lisson Gallery at 9 Kean Street, WC2 (020 7724 2739), to 26 May