Two exhibitions at Montreal’s MAC offer distinct uses of narrative

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Like many Scots before him, Simon Starling has sometimes made his living on water, or at least has made art there. In 2009, he paddled 125 miles down the Hudson River to New York City with a friend in a handmade canoe, which they then portaged through the streets of Manhattan to the American Museum of Natural History. In 2006, Starling set out on a Scottish loch in a small steam-powered boat, and fed pieces of the boat's hull to the furnace till the craft sank. A few years before that, he dismantled a small hut in Switzerland and made it into a boat which he then paddled to a museum in Basel, where he reassembled it as a shed. That piece, Shedboatshed, won him the Turner Prize in 2005.

My account of these somewhat farcical actions tells you little of what they are about, which is closely related to where they happened. For instance, the self-burning boat, which is documented in a slide show at the Starling retrospective at Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain, met its end in a loch used to hold and maintain Britain's aging nuclear-submarine fleet, which also runs on a chain reaction of destruction that may ultimately be self-defeating.

Starling's art relies heavily on research, which can seem like the lead plate dragging after the merry balloons of his performance pieces, and especially his more sober-sided gallery installations. One piece at MAC consists of a sheet of Romanian steel literally balanced on two helium balloons, and resting even more heavily on a complicated anecdote about Constantin Brancusi, George W. Bush and U.S. import duties. Once you've absorbed the story, there's not much more to be gotten from the objects themselves. Likewise, a piece that balances identically milled yet differently sized chunks of marble from China and Italy impresses you with the artist's cleverness, but offers little punch as an objective correlative for differences in socio-economic value.

Another Brancusi homage offers a room full of photos of pieces assembled for a 1927 Chicago exhibition, now widely dispersed, but brought together again through Starling's superimposed imagery of new photos of each piece, which he took with an old plate camera after hunting down the current owners. A colossal amount of work for the artist, with few kicks for the viewer.

Starling's best outing at MAC is Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), a film narrative in which the artist conflates a traditional Noh play with the development of nuclear fission and the story behind Henry Moore's sculpture, Nuclear Energy. While a voiceover reveals this amusing mash-up, we see the hands of a Japanese craftsman making Noh-style masks for its dramatis personae, including Moore, Enrico Fermi, Sean Connery (as James Bond in Goldfinger) and Colonel Sanders. On the other side of the screen, the finished masks stare at themselves, and each other, in an enormous mirror. All of Starling's wit and research lie right on the surface of this piece, which is also deeply involved in a nostalgic celebration of hand-labour, and a dynamic crossing of myths and storytelling traditions from different times and places.

Metamorphology, the Starling retrospective brought in from the Art Institute of Chicago, opened at MAC the same day as French artist Sophie Calle's Pour la dernière et pour la première fois, a touring show on its fifth global stop. Calle's focus is entirely on individuals and their narratives, and how we see the one in the other. For La dernière image, she asked a number of blind people in Istanbul about the last thing they could remember seeing. Their responses, which always include telling how they became blind, are posted next to colour portrait photos of them, and of an image that recreates or suggests the last sight they describe. You read each story, then inevitably look for signs of the narrative on the face and in the ruined eyes. Though we may no longer believe in the soul, we still believe that the face is its mirror.

Calle's Voir la mer takes off from another encounter with a blind man, who told her that the sea was the most beautiful thing he knew. She rounded up several Turks who had never seen the sea that surrounds their country, took them to the water, and gave them a script that said, more or less: "Look at the sea as long as you like, then turn and look at the video camera." The multiple large screens in the piece show us the back of the people's heads, then their mostly solemn faces as they execute their second instruction. This time our efforts to see narrative effect on another's features seems thwarted, perhaps because these aren't photos but active faces, which however are not inclined to reveal anything to us. The piece leaves you with a slightly voyeuristic feeling, magnified by the illusion that your voyeurism is being stared down by its objects. The only unambiguous element in the work is the thundering sound of waves crashing, heard as the sea's way of signalling its presence to blind and sighted alike.

Metamorphology and Pour la dernière et pour la première fois both continue at MAC in Montreal through May 10 (macm.org/en).