ARTISTS TALKING

Sometimes you wonder whether it is a universal truth that total freedom stifles creativity rather than inspiring it. In many ways, The Henry Moore Institute could be described as possessing such freedom. It is funded from the deceased sculptor's plentiful estate with the sole purpose of studying sculpture. It can do so in whatever way it sees fit. Given such freedom, you can't help wondering whether it is a form of self-doubt that leads the institution to feel the need to periodically mount an exhibition under the banner 'what is sculpture now?' – a question that, by implication, should surely underpin their entire activity.

'The Object Sculpture' is such a public questioning. The institute's curator, Penelope Curtis, invited three artists – Tobias Rehberger, based in Frankfurt, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, based in Brussels, and Keith Wilson, based in London – to select an exhibition that addressed this premise. The artists, who met numerous times in an extended dialogue that lasted for more than a year, were in turn given total freedom over the resultant selection. Originally titled 'Triple Base', the exhibition seemed to suggest the potential to both inject the selecting artists' distinctly personal approaches into the conception of sculpture and to present the tension and dialogue between these positions to the public. In doing this, it appeared to offer a real possibility of evading the very institutional nature of the question that prefaced their invitation.

The artists – none of whom had curated an exhibition before – chose to approach the idea of sculpture from a classical perspective, taking sculpture to be objects and by extension spatial occurrences, created by artists, rather than presenting design, architecture, everyday objects, or other distractions as sculpture. Yet after this admirable decision, the curatorial structure of 'The Object Sculpture' appears to have run aground. Although the exhibition includes some seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s – such as the luminous yellow L-Column, 1966, by Paul Thek, complete with its intricately rendered flayed-flesh centre, and the worn fabric and deteriorating video that comprises Daniel Buren's Manipulation, 1973, as well as a number of lightly deployed, arresting contemporary pieces – such as Room for one colour (yellow), 1997 by Olafur Eliasson, which flooded the institute's library with yellow sodium light or Apple-Pear, 2000, by Urs Fischer – overall the exhibition is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its parts.

Perversely, the selecting artists felt obliged to excise the process of making the exhibition from the final exhibition itself. Thus, the energetic dialogue and plentiful argument that apparently characterised their discussions was slowly removed in favour of consensus. But reticent to adopt the label of 'curators', the artists present no discernible curatorial framework for this consensus, whilst simultaneously avoiding directly attributing any works to the choice of one individual. The result is that the exhibition speaks with a singular voice, but one lacking in any particular cohesion or agenda. The artists describe their selection as works they still find problematic, but the exhibition appears polite rather than infused with this spirit. Beyond the semantics of labelling – artist-selector or curator? – the fact exists that with the privilege of selection comes the responsibility of communicating connection. Without addressing this, inclusions such as a singular, historically isolated sculpture by Medardo Rosso from 1882 – made over seventy years before any other work in the exhibition – or the representation of Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque only by a label informing the viewer it will be shown in New York later this year, become the kind of affectations the artists would surely abhor in curators.

The press release for the exhibition emphatically states 'the experience (of selection) has been intense'. Unfortunately, however, the exhibition is not.