ART / Miro's reflections of orifice politics

YOU MIGHT expect Joan Miro's sculptures to look like Alexander Calder's, given that Calder's mobiles are so often described as three-dimensional Miros. They do not. In the bronzes Miro made in the later years of his long life, the Sixties and Seventies, he didn't attempt an equivalent for his floating pictorial forms. It was his old vein of wild anatomical fantasy that he pursued into solid state, to produce what he described as a 'truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters'. The subjects of his sculpture are almost always in some relation to a human body or head. There are about 70 of these critters on display at the Royal Scottish Academy.

The finished work might be cast in bronze, but there is no disguising what the models were made of: mainly bits and pieces of junk, picked up around his home in Palma de Majorca. There are tin cans, pots, gourds, shoe-trees, logs, stools, hammers and baskets, stuck together and occasionally filled out with clay. Miro demonstrates the way almost anything can be made to represent the human figure. Just use anything, that can be a torso; add some other things that will stand for a head or hands or feet; maybe scratch a rough face on it. You might take an earthenware pot or a cardboard box, and append a few lumps of clay and a tin tray. Or you might take a tortoiseshell, and append with ludicrous literalness the hand of a fashion mannequin and the foot from some more conventional sculpture.

Miro's approach to this sort of assembly work is in deliberate defiance of good taste and cleverness. Not for him the really lucky trouve, the found object that fits so beautifully into its new role. The wit of his sculpture isn't a matter of neat matches, but the opposite - the crashingly forced equation. The squashed panier will do as a head - and then, look, its handles become wagging ears. But it's not as though, after that, you can never look at a panier in quite the same way: you certainly can, the transformation is ad hoc and provisional. Nor is there anything particularly final about the completed construct: the constituent elements might be swapped around between sculptures. Each piece looks like the invention of a moment, three-dimensional doodling.

Or perhaps graffiti: for the Miro body is oriented round the orifices, its distinguishing marks are sexual. And if it's isn't always obvious what in these creatures is meant to be what, the artist is usually very clear about the differences between men and women. It's quite simple. Women have these enormous holes in the middle of them. Men have great nozzles sticking out. A large bathroom tap on legs is one of Miro's smartest gags.

Or sexual difference may be done more laterally. Man: a square stool right way up; woman: a round stool upside down (legs in the air, presumably). Surrealist erotomania is never a very edifying spectacle, and one couldn't accuse Miro of excessive sensitivity - but he's too sheerly goofy to raise many hackles. I don't think this is a very significant body of work, but if you're after high-spirited derangement, it is the genuine article.

Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh (031-556 8921), until 20 Sept.

(Photograph omitted)