ART EXHIBITIONS / If it has to be poor, it ought to be honest: The Hayward's new show began with 'arte povera'. It should have ended there too

HENRY MEYRIC HUGHES, the new director of the Hayward Gallery, tells us that Gravity & Grace emerged from a conversation with John Thompson about the possibility of arte povera, the Italian tendency of the late 1960s. The idea grew, and Thompson wanted to include work from outside Italy. So he looked for sculpture from all over the world that had similar characteristics: informal or 'anti-form', iconoclastic, made from the most ordinary materials, transitory and deliberately banal.

Not a promising recipe, and it has made a far from enjoyable show. Perhaps the survey has been mistimed. Minor sculpture from 1965 to 1975 is bound to have a day-before-yesterday feel. And nothing dates like iconoclasm. Another problem is that the artists are so familiar. There is little to be learnt from yet another Richard Long circle. Barry Flanagan, the other British contributor, is exhibited all over the place, and I question whether his hessian sacks represent his best work of 20 years ago. After his recent appearance at the Tate we feel more interested in the Richard Serra of the present day, though his two pieces here are the best works in the show. As for the other Americans, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson: they look worse than when they first appeared. Their sculpture lacks stamina.

The exhibition might have been more interesting if it had attempted a detailed historical survey. But as far as the Italians go, this was done in a survey of modern Italian art at the Hayward 10 years ago. Here they are again, and they are no more convincing. Senior among them is Michelangelo Pistoletto (born 1933), once a photo-realist, now, as in 1983, presenting heaps of coloured rags. These are surmounted by glass sheets that become covered with condensation from electric kettles. Another of his pieces consists of a mirror in a heavy gilded frame that has been split in two and hung in a corner, the halves at right angles so that the mirror reflects a portion of itself.

Works of this sort, Thompson states, 'synthesise past, present and future in the form of an image at the surface'. We must all be weary of such assertions, yet there is a way in which this kind of writing is true to the arte povera at the Hayward. For however trivial such art actually is, it often has a hankering for the grandiose. Take Jannis Kounellis's enormous installation in three parts: four long steel troughs filled with earth and cacti; another steel structure, full of cotton; and on the wall, cackling at the sight, a live macaw. This is arte povera that pretends to rule the world.

If poor art is all you can make, then keep it poor. That way there is at least some honesty. Arte povera should not have pretensions. And yet so many of these exhibitors imagine that they can topple fine art. Giulio Paolini has a wretched caricature of a painting and a three- part plaster piece consisting of a hand, feet, and fragments of a broken classical head. Marcel Broodthaers shows a suitcase on which is the prominent label 'Sculpture'. But the half- open case contains only plaster balls.

John Thompson genuinely believes that such gestures changed the world. He protests too much. The fact is, as he admits, that this was the art that excited him when he was a student. Somewhat student-like, he tries to link the Hayward artists with political movements circa 1968. Hence the attempt to resurrect Joseph Beuys. Beuys's work simply fails to match his admirers' claims. One piece is a cello wrapped in cheap felt. Another is a telephone placed on a sheet of wood next to a lump of earth. Beuys has a more sinister air than Broodthaers, but he is just as bad an artist.

His heavy Germanic symbolism contrasts strangely with work from America. Beuys's art looks as if it smells. A heap of ashes by his follower Reiner Ruthenbeck really does smell. The Americans prefer clean technology. Now we come to the triumph of this exhibition, which is to make the spectator compare and contrast different piles of detritus. Robert Smithson puts gravel on top of a mirror and crams stones into an aluminium container. Somehow it manages to look prissy and contrived. So does Robert Morris's heap of 244 pieces of grey felt, which also exudes an air of expense.

There is one uncharacteristically jovial work in the show, by Gilberto Zorio, of whom I would like to know more. The only woman here is Eva Hesse, a German-American artist who had much fame a few years ago, and could have been given more space. Why, I wonder, was the art Thompson admires practised so little by women? Many questions are raised by this exhibition, and few answered; the catalogue says little about the artists and is full of hackneyed attacks on more genuine painting and sculpture. It is a sad business - but it does shed light on the poor and over-promoted work that has issued from Goldsmith's College in recent years, for Thompson has been in charge of its fine art department.

Hayward (071-928 3144) to 14 March.

(Photograph omitted)