Sculpture by the Sea has both quality and kitsch

Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea shows the growing divisions in contemporary art.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 25: The Bottles by RCM Collective is displayed during the 2015 Sculptures by the Sea exhibition at Bondi on October 25, 2015 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Objects have or lack meanings that cannot be supplied or cancelled simply by adding a title or packaging them in a press release.

Most of the proposals for public sculpture announced by the Sydney City Council last year fail the test of intrinsic meaning — among others, the ridiculous ribbon intended for in front of Town Hall that is alleged to refer to freedom and to cloud computing.

But the principle is most clearly illustrated by the giant bullets that have been erected near the Anzac Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

Bullets mean war and violence and they cannot mean anything else. Yet we are meant to believe that they stand for Aboriginal soldiers fallen in war. This is implausible and merely testifies to the fog of ideology that surrounds Aboriginal issues. The bullets are grotesque in any circumstances, but particularly insulting in the vicinity of the Anzac Memorial and they should be removed.

This eyesore in Hyde Park reminds us how little the nature of sculpture is understood today — let alone the nature of a monument, which is a particular category of sculpture.

Each year Sculpture by the Sea along the coastal walk between Bondi and Tamarama beaches offers us a bewildering range of exhibits, from works of high quality to kitsch and gimmicks included for the entertainment of a mass audience that considers most of these displays as backdrops for selfies or family photographs.

The ones children can climb on or get into are particularly popular for these pur­poses. Many of these are clustered around Tamarama beach, on the sand or in the adjacent park where children — my 10-year-old daughter included — enjoy playing on them. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, except that it shows once again how the vocation of contemporary art is increasingly divided between self-conscious seriousness and bland populism; the former making a claim for intellectual and cultural credibility while the latter provides the visitor numbers that convince politicians of the relevance of art.

The gimmickry is presumably a reaction against the uninspired formalism of so much modernist sculpture, especially in the variety one may call corporate abstraction, with its mechanically fabricated and highly polished designs whose only natural home is in the foyer of a bank.

Japanese sculptors such as Haruyuki Uchida, Koichi Ishino or Mitsuo Takeuchi in stainless steel, or Ko Yamazaki and Keizo Ushio in stone are prominent exponents of this vacuous style that lacks all the spontaneity, embracing of randomness and sense of the artist’s hand that are the real virtues of the Japanese aesthetic.

The Chinese artists represented, in particular Wang Shugang, Gao Xiaowu and Chen Wenling have no connection with this formalist tradition but have evolved a style whose roots lie in a hybridisation of socialist academic realism with commercial kitsch.

They are examples of the new Chinese contemporary art that rose to prominence several years ago but whose brash and superficial novelty already seems much less convincing. It is a German artist, Joerg Plickat, who has won the major prize this year with a welded metal work, Divided Planet. This medium continues to dominate the mainstream of serious modern sculpture and Plickat’s piece, though in a style that is now almost academic, is strong and confident in its handling of powerful volumes in space.

Australian sculptors such as Linda Bowden, Luke Rogers and Samantha ­Stephenson, with their different sensibilities, also have a vigorous sense of the possibilities of welded metal while avoiding the commercial slickness of the Japanese works mentioned.

Three Australian works were awarded Helene Lempriere scholarships. It is hard to see what appealed to the judges about Samantha Small’s tank: it could have a place in an installation, especially on a smaller scale, but in this setting it has few discernible sculptural qualities. A second was awarded to Orest Keywan, a veteran sculptor with a light and whimsical essay in metal sculpture straying from abstraction into surprisingly narrative passages that suggest the play of memory.

The third was awarded to Dale Miles for a striking work carved and constructed in wood. From a certain point of view, Parallel Thinking Space seems to be a small room that one might be able to enter, with a bench for sitting and reflecting. But as we walk around it we find the space compresses before our eyes in a way that is ­intimately uncomfortable.

Miles has been inspired by the anamorphic distortions that fascinated artists in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, of which the most famous example is the skull in Hans Holbein’s double portrait The Ambassadors (1533). Miles’s piece, which presents even more complexities because it is three-dimensional, is constructed with three vanishing points: a beguiling space for thinking indeed, even if it frustrates our desire to enter it.

Sculpture by the Sea

Miles is today a colleague of mine, and so is the other sculptor whose work is outstanding, Dave Horton, a former winner of the major prize (2007). Horton is an unusually original exponent of the welded steel medium, steeped in the history of sculpture, his own abstract work often in dialogue with great figurative sculptures of antiquity or the early modern period. Here his reference has been Verrocchio’s Christ and St Thomas from Orsanmichele in Florence (1467-83). Horton’s piece is in no sense a copy but a variation on the formal idea of the interrelation of two ­figures, one inside and the other outside the space of a niche.

The vault of the niche is a powerful void unifying the two forms, which are conceived with a sense of weight and mass unlike anything else in the exhibition. The play of horizontals and verticals anchors Horton’s abstract figures in classical stability, but endlessly inventive use of found curved forms evokes the cascading of drapery, and even the base is constructed on several stepped and curved levels, emphasising the groundedness of the composition. Horton reminds us that sculpture is an art of gravity in all senses of the word.

Sculpture by the Sea continues until November 8.