Stephen Sutcliffe @ Tramway, until 30 Jun

Stephen Sutcliffe’s video installation Outworks is difficult to assess. It gives rise to myriad seemingly contradictory adjectives – at once humorous, bold and confident, it is nonetheless didactic and academic.

The 20-minute film is a collage of footage taken from Sutcliffe’s archive of largely British television and radio recordings. In one sequence he takes a drawing of a tank from a work by Scottish conceptual artist Ian Hamilton Finlay and superimposes it on to an animation by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. The marriage is drolly absurd, highlighting the unlikely similarities between two artists who appropriate text and images from other sources.

The flip side of this playfulness is the self-consciously academic way Sutcliffe frames the work. The film is split into different chapters, each with a title derived from a book by American sociologist Erving Goffman called Frame Analysis, which explores how one understands events and interactions differently depending on context. The chapter titles, such as The Anchoring of Activity, give Sutcliffe’s video a distinctly didactic tone, as though the artist looks to impart very specific, theoretical knowledge. However, the work fails to live up to its promise and we are left in the dark about Goffman’s book and the obtuse chapter titles.

An enjoyable and intelligent film, Outworks nonetheless highlights a trend shift. Critical of the tradition of producing autonomous works of art that bear little sign of how they came to be, some artists now evidence their research process in finished artworks – as Sutcliffe does by referencing Goffman’s book throughout. And although not in itself a bad thing, one wonders what is achieved by the addition of these elements. For instance, are Goffman’s theories not already implicit in what Sutcliffe has been doing for years? By showing television footage in galleries, has the artist not been exploring how audiences respond to context for over a decade?