DUNCAN MACMILLAN
MODERN INSTITUTE, GLASGOW
WE NEVER look our best in passport photos. Whatever they are supposed to say about our identity, they are

almost the antithesis of a true portrait. We do not commonly see people straight-on, full-face, and the classic mugshot has neither expression nor movement to conjure a living presence. Nor is there anything to help us locate the image in any mental map of real or social space. Nevertheless, the new work created by the artistic partnership of Dalziel + Scullion (with a little help from their friends in the film and music departments) for the Kelvingrove Museum consists, in effect, of 240 mugshots.

Called The Earth Turned to Bring us Closer, this is the first show in the new exhibition space created in the recent refurbishment of the art gallery. Clips of film are projected in steady succession on to three large screens, two on either side and one in front of you. In each clip, the camera pans slowly past a different face staring into it in classic passport pose.

As the camera pans, the faces enter from one side then disappear out of the other. A variety of backgrounds relieves the monotony a bit. Because of the steady procession of the images on the three screens, if you relax your gaze for a moment it is the gallery that seems to be spinning slowly past an array of people looking in. Hence the reference in the title to the turning Earth. And, as in silent movies accompanied by a piano, this sense of movement is reinforced by a musical score composed by Craig Armstrong.

This work is intended to be a portrait of the people of Glasgow, made up of a random sample of individuals; or at least it would be random if it had not been tweaked to provide gender and ethnic balance. A great many more portraits were taken than are included. Most of the portraits are of passers-by, people casually invited to gaze into the camera for a few moments wherever the artists and their team set up the camera.

Some of the locations are recognisable – the art gallery itself, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Necropolis, the Merchant City, the Cathedral. Others show Glasgow streets with betting shops and derelict premises. There are indoor shots too, including a printing workshop, a canteen and the art gallery again.

The sitters are all anonymous, but there is great variety among them, certainly. Very young children were difficult, but the one or two who stood still for long enough steal the show. What appears to be two men in drag suggests a little artistic licence. Mostly, however, because of the scale, the apparent absence of any sophisticated lighting, with the close-up mugshot formula, these people do not look bonny. Perhaps in defiance of the cult of celebrity and the new aristocracy of beauty, these images reassert the democracy of the plain and the ordinary. However, the effect is more surreal than that, more disturbing. The gap between a portrait and a mugshot is too wide. One is social. The other is not. The effect of trying to make a social portrait from a collection of asocial mugshots is strangely dysfunctional. But perhaps there is a kind of truth in that, too.

In a way, Migratory Projects by Andrew Sunley Smith at CCA also reflects a dysfunctional world. The artist is an English-born Australian. He’s a migrant. So there is an autobiographical reference in the title and you can see how the idea of individual migration provides at least part of the theme in the work on show. The foyer is occupied by a rather dusty van. Custom-built to his own design – his drawings for it are on the wall behind – it is a sort of survival vehicle. It has a built-in garden where vegetables grow as he travels. It was rather a matter of the survival of the fittest, he says, as to which ones lasted long enough to be eaten. Then there is a film which shows how he used the engine to cook his food. As a migrant he, like a snail, metaphorically at least, carries his house with him.

But if he takes his house with him, it is a different matter when it comes to the furniture. The main gallery is full of smashed chairs, tables, wardrobes – even a piano – all mute witnesses to a display of licensed vandalism.

The gallery is dominated by a projected film that shows how the furniture was reduced to muddy piles of wreckage. He tied it all behind his van, a few pieces at a time, and drove it along till it fell to bits. He has done this in various places. Most recently, it was along a muddy track in Bute where the furniture was reduced to its present state. He seems to enjoy this process and there is something slightly hypnotic about the film as you watch the various constructions deconstructed.

But what’s the point? There are echoes, perhaps, of the pictures we see of the pathetic bundles refugees try to carry as they leave their homes, bundles that will no doubt be sadly reduced before they reach any destination, if they ever do. If there is a metaphor here, it might be to do with the mental baggage we carry, how flimsy it is and how little real purpose it serves, but I am not convinced.

I was even less convinced by Jeremy Deller, at the Modern Institute. He is a serious artist and social critic, and in 2004 he became one of the most interesting artists to win the Turner Prize for a long time, but this show does not convey much of that. The two main works are television screens, each showing random bits of film spliced together: an anti-war demo; a brawl outside a club; people dancing; the swooping view from a fairground roundabout, arbitrary scenes with no discernible thread.

Life can be pretty random, but mostly we look to art to help us make sense of it, or at least to celebrate the simple, astonishing existential fact of it. Sunley Smith’s show at least does that. It has energy, even charm. This has none of that.

These films are called Edited Rushes, but they are pointedly not edited, just raw material. Sometimes you put on the telly in the middle of a programme. You are wasting your time, but you keep watching all the same, vaguely wondering what it is all about. It is like that here but, with two televisions to watch, it’s even worse.

• The Earth Turns runs until 25 February, Migratory Projects until 18 November, and Jeremy Deller until 28 October.