Elisabeth Mahoney 

Lei Cox

CCA, Glasgow
  
  


This is not the time or place to say, "Will the real Lei Cox please stand up." Versions of the artist - digitally replicated and manipulated versions of him - spring up throughout the arts centre, appearing in the foyer and cafe as well as in the formal gallery space. There are hundreds of him.

Maybe it's to do with the World Cup, but the most involving piece in this survey of Cox's work in the past five years is Wave. Across six monitors, he has created a Mexican wave, composed of a series of moves made in succession by the artist himself. It's slick and funny (in his white suit, Cox looks like Morph). It has all the haughtiness of avant-garde performance art but uses a familiar gesture, and has an aural dimension to deepen the visual fun: the noise of the wave sounds like an old-fashioned football rattle.

Conductor, a projection of 36 people (all Cox) clapping, is similarly engaging. As you watch the pairs of hands meet, the action itself becomes surreal and then dull in turn, and you remember how tiring lengthy bursts of enthusiastic clapping can be. Almost all of the clappers share the same serious expression and pace, but three of them are different, deliberately pulling their hands apart, never quite making contact, disrupting the unity.

It's not all group dynamics. In the most recent work here, Monument, a single Cox walks repeatedly on to a computer-generated landscape, throwing a rock each time eventually to form a cairn that obscures him from sight. There are echoes of Sisyphus in the pointlessness of the gesture, but the work also raises the question of what our memorials might be in the digital age - will a quiet collection of stones suffice?

If Cox's work has a limitation, it comes from his inevitable debt to much that has gone before, from the language and playfulness of surrealism to Monty Python via much video and performance art from the 1970s and 1980s. Technically, though, Cox's work is fascinating, and it nudges us to ponder not if, but how identity and our very sense of self will change as technology advances.

· Until July 13. Details: 0141-352 4900.

 

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