Take a reality check

It is often said that recent art has generally tired of thinking about itself and has switched its attention to the outside world. Rather than muse about languages, visual or otherwise, and representation, it has turned its wearied eye on reality. Yet to count as art, these documents must firmly distinguish themselves from the ever-present documentary outpourings of newspapers, magazines and television.

If that work in the mass media tends to be up-to-the-minute, technically accomplished, full of incident and fitting comfortably into resolved, settled narratives, art must be otherwise - not only because it must clearly declare itself art, but also because much of it honourably sets out to resist mass-media cliche.

All the photographic and video work gathered together in the Barbican's show Witness: Contemporary Artists Document Our Time (running until 27 April) appears to record something, whether it is souvenir-shopping at the site of the World Trade Center, the conversation of a Turkish transsexual, or semi-naked ladies being sprayed with foam in a church. Collectively, these artists provide a larger document of the techniques employed to turn the documentary into art.

Artist Phil Collins displays a common tactic: unnerving the viewer with odd juxtapositions. For his piece Hero, he has filmed a very intelligent media commentator giving an hourlong analysis of press reaction to the events of 11 September.

His discourse is affecting, thoughtprovoking and often funny - recounting, for instance, how journalists in New York for the city's Fashion Week were suddenly co-opted into disaster and political reportage. But the commentator chain-smokes throughout and is urged by someone off-camera to keep drinking liquor from a mug, and gradually loses his considerable articulacy.

Meanwhile, a speaker above the viewer's head continuously plays one of those simultaneously highly emotional and highly anodyne US songs about heroes. So, who is the hero here? The one sung about, the commentator who, against the tide of convention (and alcohol), keeps an independent mind - or no one at all?

The Atlas Group is an example of artist fakers. The group was created to document the long civil war in the Lebanon. It has scraps of video from surveillance cameras and a moving interview with the longest-held hostage of the war. Or it would do, if the group existed and the footage was not mocked-up. The "group" was set up in 1999 by media artist and academic Walid Raad, and is meant to make viewers think about documentary conventions and, more specifically, the way they are often used to stereotype the Arab world.

One sure-fire way to mark off artistic production from television is to inflate it to the size of a wall, use multiple projections, or by the placing of screens or projections in unusual configurations and settings. This technique is used here by Santiago Sierra. His potentially salacious footage of foam-covered women is undercut by the oversized display of his bleached-out, low-resolution video - the gaze that would dwell on flesh is snagged on blurry pixellation.

Photographer-artist Boris Mikhailov favours the "make it look old" technique. He produces photographs that evoke the style and methods of the beginning of the 20th century rather than this one. When applied to the impoverished inhabitants of the Ukraine, the point was to indicate the feeling that progress had been thrown sharply into reverse in much of the former Soviet Union, as life-expectancy dropped and destitution and hunger rose in an unprecedented economic and social catastrophe.

The effect of this ageing technique when applied to how holidaymakers dispose in a Crimean seaside resort is less certain.