Art - Ned Denny on an exhibition that bores viewers out of the gallery and into open spaces

In his book Invisible Cities, the Italian author Italo Calvino imagines a city with neither bounds nor character. To arrive at Trude is to arrive at a place that exactly resembles the place you travelled from, to feel an immediate desire to resume your journey, to be elsewhere. But the search is futile, because the whole world is covered by this same, vast, bland megalopolis, "which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes." Trude is a fiction, but this is precisely the world evoked by Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), currently on display at the Serpentine Gallery in its "En Route" exhibition. A narrow, snakelike, seven-and-a-half-metre-long card, it pictures an interminable, lead-grey succession of bungalows, budget rent-a-car shops, drug stores, banks, vacant lots, motor inns and the odd crumbling mansion, hidden behind hoardings. Hatched in California, then, but destined to swallow the earth.

The world of Martha Rosler's photographs is also the world of Trude, except in this case we don't even get out of the airport. Each piece is left untitled, quite appropriately, in the circumstances, the location given only in brackets. This is the airport as space station, a timeless, seasonless, hermetically sealed environment where fluorescent strips are reflected in gleaming floors and glass vitrines display single, silk-swathed bottles of expensive whisky. The only local colour (Untitled (Madrid), 1990) is given by a poster showing the moustachioed faces of known pickpockets. The German artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, as if seeking a way out from this softly tinkling hell, point their cameras through the plate-glass windows of departure lounges. But all this reveals, whether in Munich, London or Rio, is the same floodlit no man's land, the heroically puffed-up jumbo jets able only to exchange one non-place for another.

So, a show purportedly about travel seems to be spending a lot of time showing us that there ain't nowhere to get to. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all of the artists so far mentioned are photographers, fixing the living world in cool, unapproachable poses (the exception is Catherine Opie, whose shots of desert highways under charged, lowering skies would have fitted in perfectly).

What, though, of the wanderer, the old-fashioned vagrant? Where do drifters and dreamers stand, in this world where merely to get out of your car is to arouse suspicion? For Richard Long and the similar but lesser-known Hamish Fulton, the answer lies in epic walks far beyond the limits of city and suburbia, carefully logged journeys that blur the lines between travel, sculpture and ritual. Francis Alys's Narcoturismo, Copenhagen, 6-12 May (1996), an account of wandering the city for seven days under the influence of a different drug each day, shows a quicker way to escape urban mundanity ("ecstasy - everything I turn to moves, not physically but conceptually").

But the best of these works that document a voyage of some sort is In Search of the Miraculous: one night in Los Angeles (1973) by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, 18 black-and-white snapshots recording a nocturnal walk from an inland valley to the Pacific coast. Written at the bottom of each print, from shots of motorway verges ("yeah, I've been searchin'") and bleak underpasses ("if I have to swim a river you know I will") to the beach at dawn ("you know I'll bring her in some day"), are lines from the Coasters' 1957 hit "Searchin'". Not only does Ader's jaunt seem far more heroic for being conducted in the midst of Mammon, but the piece has a poetry and wit that make Richard Long's tallies of miles covered and stones deposited seem somewhat po-faced.

The only misgivings I have about these "I went there, I did this" works is that, well, most of them are a little dull. Perhaps that is the point - they're trying to bore us out of the gallery and into wide open spaces. What they don't do is attempt to recreate the outside world, to transpose into the gallery anything other than information. In fact, it is the only piece in the show that does make that effort, the only piece that can really be said to be beautiful, that makes these shortcomings clear. Heike Baranowsky's AUTO SCOPE (1996-97) is a film shot through a car windscreen while driving around the outskirts of Paris, then projected four times on the gallery wall with the second and fourth images reversed. What you actually see is a pair of weirdly symmetrical views, each with the same houses, bare trees and featureless offices seeming to flood from an invisible meridian. And so she gives suburbia a strange, alien face, her work not merely logging the world but making it live.

"En Route" is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (020 7402 6075) until 27 October

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website