Random works miss their mark

VISUAL ART: Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk. Until November 14. Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Woollahra Council Chambers, Sydney. Until November 7.

Wayfarer by Patrick Oppliger in the 2010 Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Sydney's Tamarama. Picture: Charlie Brewer

VISUAL ART: Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk. Until November 14. Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Woollahra Council Chambers, Sydney. Until November 7.

AN artist friend of mine has a harsh but effective test for judging dubious works of art: would you pick it up off the footpath if you saw it among the junk of a council clean-up? Many works shown in commercial galleries or advertised in the pages of glossy art magazines would be left behind in the gutter if assessed on this no-nonsense basis.

A somewhat less dramatic test is the old-fashioned one of whether you would want to own it or, more precisely, live with it. This question has renewed relevance in an age when so much contemporary art is experienced as a passing sensation, typically looked at for a matter of seconds, acknowledged as cool, then expunged from short-term memory.

But what if you have a slightly longer attention span and more demanding expectations of art than a momentary micro-stimulus of interest and surprise? What if you think of good art as something that continues to attract your attention, stir your imagination and disturb your sensibility in some deep way, but never allows itself to be unwound into a simple slogan or what is loosely known in artspeak as a concept?

If that is the sort of art you are seeking, you don't really need to make a special effort to see the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize before it closes on Sunday.

The expression that comes to mind in this show is random, both in the normal and in the teenage sense of the word. The most arresting works are those of the winner, Archie Moore, which is really origami, and Julia de Ville's rabbit, which is almost jewellery.

What makes good sculpture is at once simple and complex. There has to be an idea or subject, but not one that can be explained in conceptual terms; that is superficial and sterile.

There has to be a material into which the idea or subject can be embodied. The material must undergo transformation; and it must have its own distinct and even stubborn character, so that the transformation is a kind of metamorphosis.

That is why it is a waste of time to make sculptures out of bits and pieces or to use materials that have no resistance, such as industrial resins and plastics.

It is also pointless to make models of things that are already human artefacts and thus finite in form.

The real idea or subject has to be non-finite and complex; the process of representing it has to involve invention and imagination, not simply copying and scaling up.

There are quite a few notable examples of bad sculpture at this year's Sculpture by the Sea as well: a giant pair of sunglasses on the beach at Tamarama, for example.

It is impossible for a human artefact such as this to become more interesting simply by increasing its size and casting it in metal.

Another appalling piece is a giant paint tube, with colour pouring out.

Such pop gestures belong in the world of the advertising agency or the design of shop fit-outs.

The crisis of contemporary sculpture is, if anything, even more apparent than last year: its sheer lack of anything to say, or more precisely of the transformative power I have mentioned.

We are time and again confronted by the alternation between abstraction and literalism; what is lacking is the power to animate matter and give it life.

The Balnaves Prize was awarded to a work with a cute idea but no real sculptural presence.

One of the only works that has this singular quality is Linda Bowden's Into the Trees II, a cluster of forms made of rusted steel, which seem to be growing together with a paradoxical but profound sense of organic movement, like a group of tree trunks.

As with all good sculpture, this work is not just a visual object but involves the viewer in a physical, sympathetic and kinaesthetic manner, like dance.

Most of the welded metal work is dull and repetitive: can we really be seeing yet another linear form inserted in a circle, or one object going through another, or more demonstrations of geometric patterns? The stainless steel pieces in particular all look as though they have escaped from corporate foyers. Dave Horton, as before, stands out with a sense of form and rhythm, last time inspired by a Greek pediment and this time by the music of Keith Jarrett.

And above the whole show, gazing enigmatically at the work of his successors, stands a work by one of the most influential modernist sculptors, Anthony Caro: a head composed from an anchor and sheet metal, an unexpected homage to Arcimboldo, the mannerist painter who made faces out of fruit and vegetables.