Terry Grimley reviews exhibitions inspired by brutalist and utopian structures.

The twins Jane and Louise Wilson, born in Newcastle in 1967 and nominees for the Turner Prize in 1999, have an interest in places and structures which have outlived their eras.

Past projects have documented the Greenham Common air base, the former headquarters of the Stasi secret police in East Germany and a modernist pavilion designed by the artist Victor Pasmore for the new town of Peterlee - a symbol of post-war aesthetic aspirations which has now become a target for graffiti and various other antisocial activities.

Sealander, an exhibition first shown in Zurich and now at Walsall's New Art Gallery, consists of a series of giant black-and-white photographs and a video installation, also in black-and-white, which continues the theme by exploring the German bunkers on the Normandy coast which formed part of Hitler's so-called Atlantic Wall during the Second World War.

The style contrasts with the work of German artist Erasmus Schroeter, who has also photographed these bunkers, but chooses to take his pictures at night, with the bunkers dramatically lit with colour floodlighting.

About 24,000 bunkers were built, of which 90 per cent survive. Absurdly over-engineered for their role in protecting the 12-year Reich, these monstrous carbuncles, like Pasmore's pavilion, have also now become the target of pettier forms of vandalism.

In the photographs they look sinister and, in one or two cases, extraordinary. In Urville, for example, the bunker seems to have been ripped loose from any strategic location by some stupendous force and dumped randomly on the beach. It looks like a huge sculpture, like one of those Henry Moores which are part-figure, part-cliff.

In others, like Landes and Sea Eagle, it's impossible to miss the resemblance to works by early modernist architects like Erich Mendelssohn, raising the tricky issue of the relationship between modernism and National Socialism, which is explored in an interesting essay by J G Ballard in the catalogue.

The video projection makes use of two elaborate structures, one of which effectively makes the images kaleidoscopic. Film of the bunkers is intercut with images of a rare deep-water creature known as the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) - a bug-eyed charmer which has the distinction of having larger eyes in relation to its body surface than any other known creature.

Apart from raising the horror stakes, it wasn't clear to me what meaning I was meant to take from the juxtaposition. But the film of the bunkers, with its prowling camera and powerful ambient sound, reminded me of European art movies of the early 60s - like Antonioni's L'avventura but with no actors and even less story.

Juxtaposed with Sealander is MP.MO=MR2, another exhibition which takes a radically different approach to architectural forms.

It shows the extraordinary work done over the last 30 years by Wolverhampton-based artist John Pickering, who has used the mathematical "inversion principle" to extrapolate geometrical structures of great complexity and organic beauty.

He has constructed them as intricate models in card and plaster of Paris, but one room is devoted to a particular piece which he hopes to realise on a grand scale in a collaboration with architect George Legendre.

Pickering describes these pieces as sculptures, albeit ones he would ideally like to see constructed on an architectural scale. But even though it is often apparent that these could not be models of actual buildings, I found it irresistible to think of them as architecture.

In fact, they do sometimes recall imaginative structures by Buckminster Fuller or Future Systems. The odd sports stadium or transport interchange making use of forms like these would work wonders in lifting aspirations. 

* Sealander and MP.MO=MR2 are at the New Art Gallery, Walsall until January 27 (Tue-Sun 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-4pm; admission free). Jane & Louise Wilson are in conversation on Saturday, January 12 at 2pm.