Figures no match for the landscape

Sculpture by the Sea 2010Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk Until November 15.

Sculpture by the Sea 2010Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk Until November 15.

THE most striking and memorable work in this year's Sculpture by the Sea exhibition is the collection of coloured banners set up by Alejandro Propato from Argentina. They are the first things you see from far off, and are no less impressive from close up. Decorative and celebratory in their bright hues against the blue sky, they simultaneously make the violence of the wind tangible, or rather audible, as they flap like cracking whips above our heads.

But Propato's installation also forces us to ponder some of the problems with contemporary sculpture. The banners work because they are in this particular environment and because they are temporary. They are like the decorations brought out for a religious festival, except that they have no such specific significance. Certainly, they are more enjoyable in every way when we forget about the category of art with a capital A.

Sometimes the artist appears to be playing a kind of game with the viewer. A giant pair of eyes inset into the rock forces us to try to read the cliff as, literally, a face: an overhanging ridge makes a brow; there is no nose, but a red gash becomes an asymmetrical mouth.

Many pieces are designed for their sites in this way or have been adapted for installation in and around specific topographical features. One of the interesting results of this is to sharpen our attention to everything around us. We find ourselves looking more closely at the environment, first of all to detect and read the works we encounter along the walk, but ultimately to appreciate the extraordinary natural setting.

This is the real secret of Sculpture by the Sea: not only, as I observed before, does the beauty of the place make us indulgent to the variable standard of the work; perhaps even more importantly, the sculptures act as a stimulus to attention and detached interest that opens the eyes and the mind to appreciation of the natural setting. We are tricked into forgetting ourselves for a time and discover that the world is beautiful.

Organic life is a common theme, and several pieces look like coral or seashells nestling in the rocks. Among the more successful are Jeramie Carter's pods woven of vine and hemp, hanging from a tree or fallen and decomposing on the ground. The winner of the Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Prize, May Barrie's Time and Tide Granite Monolith II, evokes the forms carved into the hardest stone by natural forces over millions of years.

A lot of the works exhibited in the central flat area and thus less closely adapted to particular sites are rather dull and repetitious, as indeed are some of those in more appealing places. Greg Johns's elaborate piece with a space in the centre that forms either a square or a star depending on your point of view is very clever, but makes you think of a logo. Nearby, Phil Price's Morpheus, with its biomorphic forms floating and dipping in the wind, is also intriguing, but in the same sort of way as a lava lamp.

Further on towards Tamarama, there is a beautifully carved piece of basalt by Senden Blackwood. Exquisite in its way, but ultimately meaningless: this is the sort of form that would have made sense as part of an architectural volute or a floral garland. The problem becomes even clearer when we compare this piece to Marguerite Derricourt's adjacent spiral of wire rats, also engaging in its way, but this time too anecdotal. Sculpture has to be something more than either meaningless form or formless meaning.

If you have given up the quest entirely, you can settle for all sorts of vacuous sculptural products, from high-minded abstraction to cutesy conceptual. Abstraction comes in varieties that one could classify as corporate decorator, such as Keizo Ushio, or commercial, such as Bob Emser, who uses an unattractive combination of stainless steel and coloured aluminium.

Stephen King's eight female figures carved from tree trunks remind us of the power of the human figure as a subject, if not the only natural subject of sculpture.

Most of the welded metal work looks rather tired and academic. There are exceptions, such as Jan King's distinguished Abyssinia, in which slate and steel are married formally and colouristically. Suzie Bleach and Andy Townsend's Subterfuge, in contrast, is a metal sculpture that departs resolutely from abstraction: it is a Trojan Horse made of mechanical parts.

Orest Keywan's Ezra's Ounce seems to be a meditation on the predicament of his artform: at the foot of what appears to be the wreck of a classic modernist steel sculpture lies a massive face, like part of a colossal ancient statue. One thinks of T. S. Eliot's line at the end of The Waste Land: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin."