"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech... And they had brick for stone, and slime for mortar... and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." But God pronounced them universal upstarts and divided their old-time Esperanto into a multiplicity of confounding babble. And that was that for the Tower of Babel. But so began the mess of frustrating/exciting interbred ambiguities we call "art".
Babel: Contemporary Art and the Journeys of Communication, brings together an international array of visual artists all concerned with the codes, structures and poetics of the written, printed, digitalised and spoken word. Art about art and language about language. That is the nature of the game. Obviously we get a buzz out of the concentrated music of our mutual misunderstandings and some music is more engaging than others.
Some of the work here inclines towards the tragi-absurd. Xu Bing presents a video of two pigs covered in calligraphic graffiti, rummaging around an old barn full of books and attempting, most of the time with desperate clumsiness, to mate.
Some of the work is comic-absurd. Tony Kemplen's Polyglot classroom of chattering toy parrots repeat, parrot-fashion but with increasing inaccuracy, the names of artificial languages - Interlingua, Glossa, Esperanto, Soresol. When I was there, a little kid chuckled away with gleeful hilarity at it all. This might be a show for a fin de siècle age of intellectual self-consciousness and cultural paranoia but throughout it has been curated by Claire Doherty with an optimistic glimmer of creative mischief, intrigue and fun.
Wong Hoy Cheong's Definitive ABC Books of Government and Ethnography are pulped from pages of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Margaret Mead's the Coming of Age in Samoa. Cryptic engravings are accompanied by lists of alliterative cross-associations that hint at post-colonial resentment - Barbaric Brutes British Baffling Behaviour By Basins. Simon Biggs and Stuart Jones convert Franz Kafka's story The Great Wall of China into an interactive computer game of chance rearrangements. You prod the illustrated text on the monitor and the stream of digitalised virtual consciousness emerges - rich trees stop springs shut areas appear defects. William Burroughs was playing with typewriter and scissors at this kind of literary sampling, but with more subversive sophistication, decades ago of course.
You might come away thinking the roots of language have been exposed or that all sobriety and sense have been undermined by misguided gibberish. But go. You won't ever forget you were there.
• Until November 7, then touring. Details: 0121-248 0708
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
