In his 1992 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition he carpeted the downstairs space with

In his 1992 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, he carpeted the downstairs space with Astroturf and painted the ceiling sky-blue. Blue Skies might almost be the name of a travel agent or tour operator.How sincere or serious can a cow look in post-Damien Hirst art? Especially such two-dimensional specimens as these? Mere slices of board, off-cuts. He compromises the purity of the cathedral-like vault, imposing uncertainty. The installation seems to combine the reassuring with the threatening. The barn-like effect of the building enhances the rural romance of cows in the byre. This installation is enticingly called Blue Skies, and since Head has often worked with projected light, I came in the expectation of some magical visual event that would transform the old dockyard, extending and amplifying its innate majesty.What Head in fact achieves is to distract from the existing beauty of the building, with its arching of silvery ships' timbers.

Head is famous for saying a lot with limited means, for provoking a psychological reaction in his audience, for his method of disorienting in order to re-orient. The visitor can enjoy the longer view from the crash barriers at the far end, but it would have been more involving to walk among the daisies.The actual components of the installation are deliberately deadpan - the defunct boat-building machinery round about looks infinitely more interesting. They rotate back-to-back like the tamed and slowed-down blooms of a kaleidoscope. They are floating idly, as if turning on a gentle millrace, or like astronauts no longer susceptible to gravity.

The artist's original intention was for the daisy field to extend the entire length of the mezzanine, but safety regulations require an emergency exit and the daisies are cordoned off. Perhaps this is a deliberate irony; if so, Tim Head's point is in danger of being obscured by the subtlety of its demonstration.The plank floor is covered with identical five-petalled white daisies with black centres, arranged in what are very nearly daisy chains Above, the two black cows rotate at different speeds. The husband kept trying to find new angles of viewpoint on the cows, as if the mystery would thus be solved and their meaning rendered clear - perhaps written in flashing fluorescent type upon their hides. This contrast is supposed to prompt the viewer to question technological progress and, as the artist himself puts it, to "imagine alternative perspectives".The main problem is that there is so little late-20th-century digital technology evident in the installation. One couple, who frankly admitted their lack of appreciation of modern art, lingered in the dwindling hope that something might happen.