THESE lyrics, taken from the 1979 Talking Heads song, 'Life During Wartime', are the source for the title of a group show at the Rubicon Gallery, This Ain't No Fooling Around, in which six artists have created work that engages specifically with the war in Iraq. By taking this song as a starting point, the curator, Joseph R Wolin, has highlighted ways in which artists deal with the stark reality of war and its repercussions.

Considering the omnipresence of the war in Iraq in the media and public consciousness, it was inevitable that artists would use it as subject matter. Stephen Andrews (Canada), Marc Handelman (US), Josephine Meckseper (Germany), Tom Molloy (Ireland), Steve Mumford (US) and Barbara Pollack (US) all incorporate images relating to war, either directly observed or via the media. What links these artists is their explicit focus on the ongoing war in Iraq. Taken together, the exhibition seems to ask how artists should deal with war, how they can represent it and whether art can possibly have any sort of effect.

One of the first artworks you encounter at the exhibition is Tom Molloy's ?Raw Material' - a roll of camouflaged material propped up against a wall. On closer inspection, however, you realise that the patches of colour are in fact in the silhouetted shape of an Abu Ghraib prisoner.

Barbara Pollack also takes Abu Ghraib as a starting point for her three-screen video installation, ?War Dance'. The central screen depicts a looped video of several young men forming a human pyramid in a prison-like space. One of the youths poses for the camera, grinning manically and giving the thumbs up - an undisguised reference to Lynndie England. The youth is Pollack's son, who is the same age as England, and in this way Pollack draws an unsettling connection between England's acts and American youth culture in general, emphasised by the two videos on either side of the screen, which show teenagers moshing.

The most visually disturbing works are by Stephen Andrews. He searches the internet for images of war, bypassing the mainstream media. But while he uses the photographs he finds as a starting point, he painstakingly recreates the images as coloured crayon rubbings.

This transforms the clarity of a photograph into highly pixellated, undulating dots of colour, from which a soft-focus image emerges gradually.

In an animation entitled 'The Quick and the Dead', a series of crayon images recreates footage of a soldier extinguishing a burning wreckage. A sense of shock occurs, however, as the viewer realises that the soldier is callously ignoring a body lying on the ground - stepping over him gingerly, as if he weren't even there.

Rather than sourcing images from the internet, Steve Mumford actually went to Iraq and was embedded with the US army. During this time, he built up a visual diary of watercolour and ink sketches. The images are solely from a US army perspective, depicting soldiers hunkering down in narrow streets, driving a tank through a field, or taking aim on a rooftop.

However, his sketches achieve nothing more than a photograph would have, and they are let down by their variable quality.

Marc Handelman, in his abstract painting 'Trademark', uses blood-red colours and bands of white to evoke a burning furnace, or the 'shock and awe' tactics of an aerial bombing campaign. The title, however, references brand identity and commercialisation, a theme that also suffuses the work of Josephine Meckseper. She focuses, not on the war itself, but on anti-war protests. Her documentary approach has a neutral journalistic quality. And by using juxtaposition rather than overt commentary, she suggests parallels and dissonances without making explicit statements.

In a grainy film, she documents an anti-war march that took place in Washington on 24 September 2005. The footage is haphazard and chaotic, echoing the day itself; by the end of the march, all that is left is rubbish and a discarded sign urging the impeachment of Bush.

This image of the sign, with the Washington Monument in the distance, is used in a wallpaper installation in which a pattern is formed through the repetition of the image, the design of a kaffiyeh scarf and a red star logo. By linking these images, Meckseper makes a connection between the politics of protest, commodity culture and the aspirations of US society.

These artists, by directly engaging with contemporary events, have attempted to deal with what it means to create art during wartime, especially in an image-saturated 21st century context. The lyrics of the Talking Heads song underpin the seriousness of each artist's agenda - considering what is happening in the world around them, they cannot justify creating art in an apolitical ivory tower. That, for them, would just be time spent fooling around.

?This ain't no fooling around' continues at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until 6 May. A Critical Voices panel discussion on artists' depiction of war will take place at 5.30pm on 25 April at the Royal Hibernian Academy. To book call 01-6612558, ext 105