THE Baltic in Gateshead is the most northerly of the great post-industrial temples of contemporary art which have sprung up around the country in the last ten years. Since it opened in 2002, the former flour mill on the banks of the Tyne has hosted
artists as diverse as Antony Gormley, Beryl Cook and Spencer Tunick, who lined the streets of Gateshead with one of his famous installations of naked volunteers.
Running several shows concurrently (there is no permanent collection), it mixes high-profile UK names with international artists. Steve McQueen is one of the former, a former Turner Prize winner whose film Hunger, about the IRA hunger strikes, has just come out and who has been chosen to make work for the British pavilion at next year's Venice Biennale. His major work in Baltic is proof positive of the theory that a certain type of art is best served by a vast post-industrial white space, the bigger the better.
Pursuit occupies the best part of a floor. It's a largely dark, mesmerising space where mirrored walls give the impression of extending infinitely in all directions. Ripples of coloured light, throbs and thumps create a sense that you are inside something which is both very large and very fragile, as if the walls were no more than tent canvas, being whipped at by the wind, or worse. McQueen refuses to explain the ideas behind it, but it is believed it may have been inspired by his time as a war artist in Iraq in 2003.
As contemporary artists strive to break down the boundary between work and viewer, to make us experience what they're saying rather than just look at it, one strand which has developed is for works of such size that they are all-encompassing environments. When they work, these bypass our attempts to understand them intellectually and cut to a more instinctive response.
Here, the first sense is of almost paralysing dread, slowly giving way to curiosity as the brain begins to process what you're seeing. It's clever and effective, though like many such works, it has a diminishing appeal for the viewer – the impact of the piece is strongest on the first visit.
McQueen's other work here is Running Thunder (2005), a 16mm film of a horse lying prone in a field. The stillness of the image, save for the occasional breeze across the grass, seems to contradict the whirring of the projector. It plays with the notions of still and moving image, rather like Gillian Wearing's group photographs. But the appeal is largely in the potential: what if the horse suddenly gets up gallops off? After a while, it doesn't and I leave.
A big, white space – the bigger the better – is what you need when you want to build a village. Yoshitomo Nara is a painter who creates images of wide-eyed children influenced by the Japanese "kawaii" ("cute") style. But working in collaboration with Osaka-based designers graf, he is mid-way through a long, ongoing project to create a village of 26 houses which his characters inhabit.
Exploring the three constructions here – one especially made for Gateshead, from locally salvaged material – has the feel of being in a Hansel and Gretel story, further enhanced on the day of my visit by two classes of primary school children clattering over the wooden walkways. In fact, the environment is so compelling, it's possible to miss the paintings, which have their own slightly eerie presence.
Of the three artists, David Shrigley, showing new work on the ground floor, is the least well served by the big white box aesthetic of Baltic's galleries. Nevertheless, he has done his best to take possession of the space, cordoning it off with a metal gate marked with the legend "Do not linger at the gate," which visitors must open, making us aware that we are participants, not just passive observers.
Inside, there is a collection of sculptures and objects which suggests Shrigley is keen to show he has more strings to his bow than the quirky felt-tip pen drawings for which he is most widely known. These works, however, have the same spirit – the deadpan one-liner, the sardonic eye to the preoccupations of humanity, particularly death.
There is a dead rat, a figure sitting up in a coffin, a clock made from a single bone, a gravestone etched with a shopping list. There are clever nods to other artists, from Banksy to Antony Gormley to Louise Bourgeois. But if these works are less satisfying than Shrigley's drawings it is because a sculpture needs more than just a punchline.
The two most interesting works here are films in which Shrigley brings his drawings to life. Lightswitch, a light being switched on and off by a giant finger, looks like an animated response to Martin Creed's notorious Turner Prize-winning lightbulb. But, unlike Creed's, this light clicks on and off irregularly – sometimes the finger rests and gives itself a flex as if tired. It's clever enough to keep you watching.
Sleep shows a figure asleep in bed, the bedclothes moving in time to the soundtrack of laboured breathing. It is this sound which makes this work truly disconcerting – the irregularity of it, the horrible half-second before a breath comes, the unexpected wheeze or a splutter. This sound permeates through the rest of the room as if the whole show were a single entity, wheezing towards mortality. This, more than anything else, seems to get what Shrigley is driving at.
&149 Steve McQueen until 23 November; Yoshitomo Nara + graf until Sunday; David Shrigley until 9 November
