By James Westcott

Check out this defaced Damien Hirst/Saatchi Gallery T-shirt by Dan Shaw-Town, at the Goldsmiths MFA degree show:



It's an appropriate diss (as well as a crucial component in Shaw-Town's very poised and encouragingly confusing sculptural installation). The media's obsession – a saga indeed – with Charles Saatchi's annual shopping sprees at the Goldsmiths and Royal College degree shows is a lazy sycophantic fixation that should be jettisoned wholeheartedly, though no doubt the stories will start rolling in next week. Tactical and transient financial anointment by Saatchi is much less than these very bright young artists deserve or need. Thankfully few of them seem concerned with the market, and there isn't much at Goldsmiths that Saatchi will like anyway: it's a cerebral show very short on sensationalism, and the beauty, when it comes, is mostly darkside, conceptual, politically-tinged, delicate or aggressively muted rather than blazing or bombastic.

Christl Mudrak apparently had to stump up a lot of money (or at least bluff it) in order to knock this hole through the floor of the Goldsmiths studio building, which used to be swimming baths, to reveal the empty tub of the old pool below.



This wound in the exhibition space sits comfortably, maybe too comfortably, in the tradition of institutional critique, and has recent, more phenomenological, forebears in Urs Fischer's You (2007), for which he dug a huge hole in Gavin Brown's gallery space in New York, and in Cerith Wyn Evans' gracefully violent removal of the gallery walls at the ICA in 2006 to reveal the usually hidden windows facing the Mall. Taken as institutional critique though, isn't Mudrak (who usually produces more maximal installations) tilting at windmills a bit here in Goldsmiths? The piece resonates more if we take it as an audacious gesture of nothingness, and a good reminder that art is there to point out and enrich things that are better than it (like swimming).

Another audacious gesture of nothingness is Bona Park's two-part installation, where the artist's (purported) project is absent altogether. There's a long wall text explaining how the artist wasn't ready to show their work because they were still diligently making it: it apparently involves shaving a huge cardboard box down and then reconstituting the dust, using glue, into 13,000 tiny boxes – an ironically exaggerated project that, within the satire anyway, attempts to make an astute comment on capitalism. It's also a conceptually-correct project that submits happily to the current trend for obsessive and repetitive artistic labour. Look through the binoculars, the wall text tells us, and you'll see the artist up in her studio in the building opposite, still hard at work.



When you go up there though you find nothing but more binoculars and the same text about boxes, this time asking you to look down at the artist's studio opposite. The one-line joke is on us. But the anxiety of expectation over a degree show and current conceptual orthodoxies (which, you get the feeling, get discussed endlessly at Goldsmiths) is clearly hanging heavy over Park.

Many graduating students are less burdened, and have such brilliant careers already on the go outside Goldsmiths that you wonder how they manage to fit their study in around it (and why they bother). Monica Ursina Jäger, who won the Swiss Art Award in Basel last year and shows with Marc de Puechredon gallery, showed a Roxy Paine-meets-Banks Violette spiky and spindly black tree, surrounded by TV screens painstakingly etched with apocalyptic scenes, and detailed ink drawings of the much the same.



Ellen Nolan is a successful fashion photographer; here she shows bleached out-beautiful and desolate portraits taken in a nursing home (despite the use of a very knowing cable release, the empathy and sadness in the photos endures).



Though there's very little political work in the show, when it does appear it really shines – conceptualised, sublimated, rugged, dystopian, energizing, elegiac. Conrad Ventur (another Goldsmiths overachiever, who edits the uber-hip Useless magazine in his spare time) shows a video of Marlene Dietrich performing Pete Seeger's anti-war song Where Have all the Flowers Gone in 1972, projected onto a spinning glitter-ball.



In each of the hundreds of reflected pools of light sliding across the room, you can make out the tiny video of Dietrich singing (but you can't see them in this image; they're pretty much unphotographable). It was a pointed moment both in Deitrich's career and in the Vietnam war (and it is again now, with Iraq), and she sings aggressively, angrily at times, and it's almost unbearably poignant. The mirror-ball projection is a dazzling technique that multiplies exponentially the already formidable power of Dietrich's performance, but it's done with (apparently) minimal effort and cost – like a burning bush that doesn't consume its fuel. The very opposite of legible labour. (See variations on Ventur's technique here.)

Yeon-Yong Kim shows brooding photocopied, doubled images of desolate electronics factories in the north of England that were victims of fluctuations in the global economy in the late 1990s.



Two good things about this work: it reminds us that we aren't insulated from the real on this sceptred isle, even if we complain that we are, and the photocopying liberates photography from the burdens of value and objecthood (though the technique of photocopying and doubling is very close to Clunie Reid's practice).

Charlie Tweed diagnoses (or forecasts) the political mood in art and in the world – vaguely and terribly threatening yet somehow primed with possibility – in his three stunning and disturbing short manifesto videos, which feel like terrorist training guides – pixellated, fanatical, illicit, anonymous, you could be watching them on YouTube pre-their removal, or on some dodgy backwoods website, and the feds could be about to bust down your door. The videos, made primarily with found footage, are paranoiac calls to arms from bizarre political cults, made in blank, earnest computerized voices, for an apparently imminent revolution or action, like the release of a flood when a secret signal is given. In Where We Are Now a voice pushes on us its massive suspicion of mere birds and says 'we need to do more' to round them up and 'store them securely in places where they can operate freely'. Watch excerpts from Tweed's videos here, right now.