The Human Factor review – hell is other people's sculptures

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/the-human-factor-review-sculpture-hayward

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If hell is other people, sculpted people occupy a kind of purgatory. What life they have is in the realm of the imaginary, the stories we tell ourselves in their presence. Presence is the thing: difficult to achieve, and easy to destroy by bad placement or blindness to detail, difference and sense of space. Sculptors are as concerned with space as they are with the objects that inhabit it.

Dramatic, discordant and at times infuriating, the Human Factor could have been a great show about contemporary figurative sculpture. It isn't, even though there are some marvellous things here. Somehow this makes my disappointment worse.

It is bad enough having barriers around many exhibits, cordoning them off and neutering their intensity, which must infuriate the curatorial team (I doubt the artists are happy about it either). Worse are the often vulgar juxtapositions between works by different artists, which corral them into stories and narratives the artists never intended nor foresaw.

The Human Factor often feels like that cantina in one of the Star Wars films, where aliens of entirely different species hang out, as though their differences were nothing more than the fancy dress and rubbery body suits they all wear. This isn't the case with sculpture.

Here, the differences are more profound and more significant than the mere fact of the materials used in their creation, matters of style, or ways of rendering the human form. The real problem here is one of installation, and the ways entirely different figures occupy the same space.

Now that the figure has, to use a cliche, come down off the plinth, it occupies the same space we do. Ryan Gander makes playful use of this, having one of his Degas-inspired ballerinas crouch beside her plinth, smoking. Another has wandered off, to stare out of the window at a sporty John Miller sculpture of some fit but vacuous young guy standing in a kid's paddling pool on one of the sculpture courts.

Mark Wallinger's life-sized Ecce Homo is one of the only sculptures here that belongs, properly, on a plinth. It made perfect sense on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, but presented on a low dias in the gallery it has always seemed incomplete. It was intended for a specific place, and its best place now is as a memory, not among a group of sculptures by other artists gathered together in a spurious thematic grouping about life and death: Urs Fischer's skeleton mouldering on a park bench, and his melting wax candle-woman, and Katharina Fritsch's blown-up religious kitsch black Madonna standing in front of a photographic wall of ivy. Disconcertingly, the impenetrably black, enlarged religious souvenir looks at a distance more like a woman in a full chador. Around the corner, and in an otherwise empty, enclosed space, is Maurizio Cattelan's Him. A small boy is on his knees in prayer. We approach from a distance, noting first his knickerbocker suit, his raven hair, the soles of his little boots. Somehow you don't want to interupt him. Except he's Hitler.

Ugo Rondinone, Cathy Wilkes, Paul McCarthy and Pierre Huyghe are also given spaces where their works can talk to us. Huyghe's figure, from his marvellous installation at the last Documenta, is a cast of a reclining, conventional nude sculpture whose head Huyghe has fashioned into a living beehive. Great and startling though this is, its real mystery could only be appreciated in the larger installation he constructed, in an area of overgrown parkland in Kassel. There, it was truly magical.

So many other artists here deserve spaces of their own. Having Martin Honert's English Teacher face Fritsch's all-yellow Cook, in a chef's hat and proffering a tray of food, diminishes both works. So does, in the same space, having Honert's miserable-looking 1993 self-portrait sculpture as a small boy seated at a table stare across at Jeff Koons's Bear and Policeman. Both sculptures become a fiction purely of the curator's imagination. I dislike this very much. If the artists want to use sculpture as a kind of fiction, all well and good, but it should be their fiction, their ideas about confrontation and storytelling that we are looking at. Putting Cattelan's sculpture of JF Kennedy in his coffin in a chamber whose only other occupant is a spooky seated figure by Huma Bhabha diminishes both.

Those artists who use shop mannequins fare better, because a mannequin is always a mannequin, and we accept them in different garbs handled in different ways. Thank God Ron Mueck isn't here. Instead, there is a room of three hyper-realist sculptures of the same young woman, by Paul McCarthy. They are utterly lifelike, down to the depilated hair on their legs. They are like life but not life, and cast by some of LA's most consummate craftspeople, who work mostly for the movie and porn industries. In a second room we watch film of the process of casting and construction. Together, it makes one work, all about artifice and naturalism. What's definitely real is the sense of confrontation. More real than real – even that is another kind of fiction.

• At Southbank Centre until 7 September