SCULPTURE / Making chaos out of order: James Hall reflects on 'Natural Order' at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, and unnatural selection at the Whitechapel Open

THE VISUAL arts component of the European Arts Festival is sending out conflicting signals. The Manet exhibition at the National Gallery ('The Execution of Maximilian - painting, politics and censorship') is superb, but the episode with which it is concerned will do little to allay the fears of Euro-sceptics. A JFK-style montage of paintings, photographs, documents and prints, the exhibition pulls a particularly grisly skeleton out of the French colonial cupboard. Less perfidious, perhaps, would have been a show focusing on another National Gallery masterpiece, Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Despite the inclusion of that anamorphic skull, smeared over the floor like a piece of chewing-gum, Holbein did at least give the impression that the French ambassador to London was a man with whom one could do le business.

Europhiles - those at least who are not averse to the idea of a sculpted fortress Europe - would be better off going to Liverpool. The Tate Gallery has mounted a provocative exhibition of work by 13 recent European sculptors, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Rebecca Horn, Ulrich Ruckriem and Lucio Fontana. Though the show is relatively low-key, and though it does not include a single French or Spanish artist, it comes armed with a very topical title: 'Natural Order: Recent European Sculpture from the Tate's Collection'.

In the context of a European arts festival, the phrase 'Natural Order' is highly charged. It immediately makes one think of two things: natural selection, and the new world order. Not only does it imply that recent European sculpture is the logical climax to some story of art, it also suggests that a Eurocentric ordering of contemporary sculpture is natural in a way that an Anglo-American, or an Italo-African, sculpture show is not.

The idea of Europe and European sculpture is not even aired in the catalogue's introductory essay by Penelope Curtis. The show's Eurocentricity is apparently a 'given', and does not need to be discussed. Still, everything else about the title is up for grabs - Curtis tickles it from above with inverted commas, and teases it from the side with question marks.

She introduces the show as follows: 'Our relationship to 'nature' is in question as never before. It is this that artists represented here have taken as their subject. These artists bring together natural and artificial objects and materials to reveal similarities and differences. They suggest that our idea of nature must be extended to include the man-made world'. She goes on to say that in this century science has 'vastly expanded the boundaries of Nature' - so much so that in a sense 'everything is natural, because even the most synthetic product ultimately derives from natural resources. However, this art also prompts us to ask how far we want to manipulate nature. To what extent are we prepared for nature to be affected by our culture? Do we want to re-define our 'Natural Order'?'

This is the intellectual terrain where we usually encounter the British-born, German-based sculptor Tony Cragg, and Cragg does indeed get quoted at length in the second half of the essay. By and large, the terms of 'Natural Order' have been set by this cosmopolitan New European.

On the Savannah (1988) is a massive bronze piece comprising three scientific-looking vessels arranged separately on the floor. Two of them bulge: their deformations are supposed to render them pregnant with anthropomorphic associations. Cragg's title alludes to the savannah lands of Africa which are said to be where advanced human and animal life first evolved: it seems he wants us to think about ancient and modern laboratories of the lifeforce.

Unfortunately, Cragg's piece is moribund and tame. The ideas and events to which he alludes and the questions which he asks are momentous, yet his vessels look as vacant, placid and portly as after-dinner dozers in a London club. Each form is complacently self-contained and there is no sense that their interaction could produce a chemical, physical, or any other kind of reaction. Such monoliths are not so much dinosaurs without teeth, as dinosaurs without their dentures.

Supporters of Cragg - and there are more than for any other living sculptor - may have mistaken greed for inventiveness. He rarely makes us see objects in new ways, but makes us see lots of different objects (these range from bottles and houses to wild animals) in the same desultory way. The same could be said for Anthony Gormley's futile Natural Selection (1981), which is literally a one-liner - a single line of 24 discrete objects cast in lead, arranged by size. They include a melon, bottle, glue brush, grenade, goose-egg, vibrator, pencil and pea. Gormley notes in the catalogue: 'There is an equality about objects whether they be manufactured or natural.' It is game, set and match to the magpies . . .

Richard Deacon's enigmatic This, That and the Other (1985) has a much keener sense of the interaction of natural and man-made forms. In this suggestive biomorph the imagery and media of the industrial revolution are still alive and kicking, still have a strange sting in their tail. A loop of laminated hardboard stands on the ground, its shape redolent of a reclining figure. A strip of canvas has been fastened round the edge of the loop, drooping like hair or a bib. The piece wears its fabrication on its sleeve, punkily: screw-heads stick out, wood- glue oozes.

A large, curved steel lozenge lies on the bottom lip of the loop. It could be penetrating the biomorph, like a penis, or protruding from it, like a tongue. Both speech-machine and sex- machine, it is a haunting hybrid of a Henry Moore reclining figure and Giacometti's Woman with Her Throat Cut.

The other star of the show is Ovaries (1988), a laconic floor-piece by the Italian sculptor Luciano Fabro. This consists of a pair of 50ft steel cables laid side by side. Each cable has two separate strands, and between these strands Fabro has laid a continuous line of hen-sized eggs made from white marble. It seems to be a meditation on the impossibility of heroic art or life. Fabro's marbles are laid in a kind of factory farm, but as in Keats' Grecian urn, this is cold pastoral. The development of Fabro's race of marble has been arrested for ever. The eggs will never hatch, and can never grow into figures of antique stature. Unlike Cragg or Gormley, Fabro deftly demonstrates how the mass-produced more can be less.

The Whitechapel Open has been revamped. It has sensibly been divided into two halves, the first being devoted to painting, the second to sculpture and photography. Less sensible is the decision to invite selected big names. During a recession it is hard enough for young artists to show their work, without their becoming walk-on parts in the major open event (next year there won't even be a Whitechapel Open). What is more, most of the big names - such as Woodrow, Bainbridge, Wilding and Wentworth - have either sent along second-rate work, or work which is all too familiar. Anish Kapoor's Mountain (1989-91), a mound with a slit in it, is an insult to women and rocks.

An exception is Julian Opie, who has recently been pulling out all the stops. His title is as tortuous - The average speed of a car in London is slower than that of equestrian traffic at the turn of the century - as his sculpture is attenuated. Eight feet tall and only two feet deep, it is an irregular, imploding cluster of thin vertical wooden slats. Each slat is painted in a different house paint. It is as though a colour chart, outwardly slick and state of the art, were being forcibly dragged back in time and space, made to resemble perpendicular Gothic architecture and geological strata. This is the kind of cultural remembering that can stop us in our tracks.

Other notable pieces are Adrian Scrivener's Orient, a sinisterly capacious tent-cum-wind- tunnel made from gold cigarette card, and Emily Campbell's Mat II. In the foyer of the Whitechapel - near the dramatic Art Nouveau 'mouth' of the building - Campbell has laid vinyl floor tiles on which she has printed the mouth of a bearded and moustachioed man. Hugely magnified, it is as dishevelled as the beggars who congregate just outside the gallery, and serves to remind us of the things that are walked over, and the voices that are silenced, in the effort to define our culture.

'Natural Order' continues at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool until 24 January; the Whitechapel Open continues at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, until 30 August

(Photographs omitted)