Hannah Forbes Black

Art displayed in a converted church is inevitably going to be responding to tradition whether it wants to or not. So you can see the thinking behind A Tradition I Do Not Mean To Break at former Methodist chapel 176, in which three video artists explore their relationship to folklore, popular culture and the past. (I'd hoped for a more challenging interpretation of what 'tradition' means, but didn't get it.)

There were striking superficial similarities between the films - all three featured weirdos cavorting in sunlit countryside. Teresa Buskova's Spring Equinox had folk dancers in increasingly bizarre states of partial nudity; Henry Coombes's The Bedfords was a half-grotesque half-parodic mini-biopic of Victorian painter Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, and David Blandy's Crossroads was cinematic footage of his travels around blues country in the American South.

To my mind, the latter was the least successful, skimming the surface of a world that Blandy neither belongs to nor seems to have anything new to say about. There are more interesting and challenging things to say about cultural appropriation. Better, a wooden shack in the gallery with a rocking-chair porch gave the experience a tactile dimension and said something about how we all inhabit an ersatz American inner world. All dreams are American.

Except Teresa Buskova's, perhaps - they remain determinedly Czech. Buskova has declared her intention to explore "raw human sexuality", but actually Spring Equinox does something more interesting, revealing the finicky cultural elaborations that cluster around sexuality like barnacles on a boat.

Folklore fetishes and transmutes sexuality into dances, costumes, rituals - that's both Buskova's subject and the central difficulty of this exhibition. Contemporary art about 'traditional' art has to simultaneously elaborate and unpick a mystique that doesn't really belong to it. Buskova's solution, to treat it as a re-enactment on her own terms, was plausible and elegant.

Awkwardly for video artists, the majority of gallery visitors are probably more used to watching video in super-controllable environs, i.e. on their laptops. During The Bedfords I kept involuntarily almost reaching forward to touch the nonexistent cursor to the bottom of the screen to find out how long the film had left to run. Not because I was bored - Coombes' vision of Victoriana has a seductive oddness - but because I wanted to know how thin to spread my attention span.

What we all think we know about the Victorians is that they were sexually repressed, and a lot of psychologically interesting cultural effort goes into figuratively lifting up their skirts. I wasn't sure if Coombes's revelations amounted to a lot more than the mildly transgressive glee of drawing a cartoon willy on a painting of a Victorian gent, but it was satisfying to see an artist taking the figurative nightmare of Victorian art seriously. That's a tradition full of literary and moral pretentions, as embarrassing as a parent, but Coombes's distortions met the past head-on.