Visual art: Fighting for attention

Only one of the Project's Make Your Move billboards seems to have gleaned a significant public response, and it wasn't a positive one. By Billy Leahy

Aposter by Öyvind Fahlström's – 'ESSO-LSD' – has been vandalised. Even for an artist that prized the idea of the public interacting with his work and encouraged people to react passionately about the arts, the recently-added rips may not have been a welcomed event. But Fahlström can be grateful; his contribution to the Project-organised Make Your Move has been noticed.

The other four posters assigned to various billboards around the city are either neatly tucked away or easily overlooked. In fact, the only poster aside from Fahlström's piece that is in anyway visible is Garrett Phelan's 'The Avian Proclamation'. That poster happens to be at street level and contains an arresting image of a member of the Phalacrocorax genus of birds giving the Dublin-city authorities the middle finger.

It is hidden on Essex Gate, off Temple Bar's beaten track, but strategically placed between the Civic Offices and City Hall. Phelan's open letter to Dublin City Council opposing the Poolbeg incinerator is certain to have grabbed their attention as intended, but whether it has made it into the public eye and increased awareness of the potential environmental cost of the project is debatable.

The visibility of Fahlström's work is aided from its location on one of Temple Bar's main thoroughfares and its striking Pop Art aesthetic. Sadly, the image, which presents the Esso logo alongside a second Esso logo with the oil company's name replaced by the letters LSD, is not a particularly strong one. It is a poor parody that can only be faintly excused by the fact it was created in 1967, when it was probably more subversive. Today, it looks like a bad t-shirt a pimpled pubescent might purchase at a music festival in a lame attempt to look politically aware.

Elsewhere, Didier Rittener's 'The Family' is a well-constructed piece that joins together various mass media images using an innovative process that results in an interesting, collage-like end product. However, the image, which is located just off the quays on Tara Street, escapes the attention of the public – something that is not just a personal opinion but one backed up an impromptu vox-pop.

A similar problem arises with Ferdinand Kriwet's 'Super-Sehtext' on Townsend Street – it is too easily overlooked, and if it is noticed, it is unlikely that it would be immediately recognised as an artwork. And again on Cuffe Street, Shannon Bool's beautifully and delicately executed 'Swallows' also gets, well, swallowed up among the surrounding adverts. Thankfully, a scaled-down version of her work and the other posters in the exhibition are available at the Project free of charge – something that also allows the lazy a chance to see all five pieces in the same place.

Make Your Move states that it "seeks to engage directly with audiences during the course of their daily lives via the billboards ... to highlight the importance of subjective, marginal and nonconformist thinking". Lamentably, it fails to do so. In a society blanketed by advertising and billboard posters designed to catch the consumer eye, most of the five works struggle to be noticed, never mind to engage the minds of the general public. And to make matters worse, the weakest work happens to be the most prominent one. Rightly, it has had strips torn off it.