Sculpture plays an important part in York's cultural life - so what a shame that open-air art in the Museum Gardens was instantly vandalised. CHARLES HUTCHINSON takes a personal look at shapes in the city.

FIRST there were five, and then there were three. No sooner had sculpture returned to the Yorkshire Museum Gardens in York for the first time since the 1970s than thieves struck within hours of the works being installed on July 14.

It was one heck of an instant reaction to an exhibition that was not even due to open until two days later, and duly did so with the damaged work removed and another withdrawn for its own safety.

Sculpture, particularly when in the open air, has the power to prompt myriad responses but the overnight theft of a bronze cast of a Land Rover tyre from Michael Sandle's Caput Mortum had Janet Barnes, the chief executive of York Museums Trust, scratching her head in disbelief.

"These objects are of no real use to anyone else. It is impossible to put a value on them," she said. "We are hugely disappointed that this initiative to make the Museum Gardens more interesting and to introduce people to sculpture has been disrupted at the first possible opportunity."

Point taken, and obviously one should disapprove of the "Screw you" attitude of the thieves who unscrewed the cast, and yet there is a part of me that says: "Hey, all publicity is good publicity".

Art struggles to find its way on to the news pages unless the shock tactics of the Young British Artists, Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin and their punk ilk are at play, or a warehouse fire destroys part of Charles Saatchi's collection (prompting amusingly sniffy comments about the artwork's cremation providing the perfect comment on its artistic merit while producing the ultimate piece of post-modern art).

The tyre theft - an act of vandalism more synonymous with Liverpool - brought unexpected column inches to the Sculpture In The Museums exhibition, but also set me thinking about sculpture in and around York and beyond.

Yesterday afternoon I ventured into the Museum Gardens, where three works borrowed from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park collection remain on show. Surprisingly, no details are attached and there are no signs to their whereabouts, although visitors to the botanical gardens can pick up a leaflet at the Yorkshire Museum to guide them around the sculpture trail.

Children have apparently been swinging from the appendage on Igor Mitoraj's 1986 marble work Heros de Lumiere (Hero of Light), adding their own commentary to the sculptor's craft.

It could be argued too that placing Lynn Chadwick's bronze Little Girl III close to the public loos, somewhat hidden away with a discarded bag of sand nearby, is not the most forceful way of putting sculpture on the map.

I love the controversy sparked by artworks brazenly on show, such as Bill Heine's Shark, crashing through the roof of his terraced house in Heddington, Oxford, and I love the way sculptures can be living entities open to change by an inventive mind. Away from York there is no greater example than Antony Gormley's rusting heap of metal, The Angel of the North.

At first dismissed as ugly and symbolic of northern decline and decay, it has not only come to symbolise the regeneration of Gateshead and Newcastle with its open-armed welcome to the North East but also has been the subject of sporting comment, first when covered by a huge Alan Shearer shirt in barcode black and white and then for a hunting protest. York director Mark Herman's film Purely Belter saw the sculpture's poetic symbolism too.

Here in York that water sculpture otherwise known as the Parliament Street fountain had its water turned a frothy claret and blue by celebrating Burnley fans when their team won promotion at York City's Bootham Crescent Ground. No harm was done by this humorous champagne moment.

Likewise the statue of the Emperor Constantine, lounging as if in need of a TV remote control in his hand to switch channels, has been subjected to bags of shopping hanging off that hand and an inevitable assortment of headgear.

Heads have been removed in the past: history records the human sculptures of severed heads stuck on Micklegate Bar, and whether true or false, the story that the stone head of George Leeman was stuck on the already carved frame of disgraced fellow railway king George Hudson has an echo of earlier political times.

The winner of the least controversial sculpture in the city goes to the figure of William Etty, York's most esteemed artistic talent, in Exhibition Square.

Right man for a tribute, right form of tribute too, and opinion will never change on that, whereas some works take time to acquire favour, or indeed never materialise at all. Remember York Civic Trust's scrapped plan for a sculpture of St Helen in St Helen's Square?

Let's cherish York's sculptures, from Etty to the ice sculptures of the Festival of Angels in The Quarter. Why not have an official sculpture map of the city and its environs, taking in the myriad artwork of the owls carved into a tree in Rowntree Park; Tom Adams's cats; Sally Arnup's bronze deer at the Hatrigg Oaks housing development in New Earswick; the Henry Moore outside York Minster; the faces of the Minster workforce cast in stone on the Minster walls; the metallic squiggle at Arabesque House, Monk's Cross; the Indian statue above Cat Gallery, in Low Petergate, put in place in the 18th century to indicate it was a tobacconist's shop?

You never know what may await around a corner. Until yesterday I had never seen the metallic fishing figure - a toad with a rod, if my eyes did not deceive me - on the cyclists' bridge at Naburn. Approached from the Bishopthorpe public footpath, there is a sign on the gate that reads No Fishing. What a joyful discovery.

And so, back to Sculpture In The Museums, a collaboration between York Museums Trust, Arts Council Yorkshire, Yorkshire Forward, the Renaissance Group and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is scheduled to run until November 2005, the three works soon to be bolstered by Michael Ayrton's Minotaur and a work by the esteemed late York sculptor Austin Wright, Mute 2.

Most heartening of all yesterday afternoon was the sight of Emma Kemp, a 16-year-old student, quietly and contentedly studying Heros de Lumiere, notepad on her knee.

She had travelled specially from Richmond to see the work - it had been removed from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at the time of a school trip - to make a head start on her faces and figures module for her A-level art course. She was drawing it, not drawing on it: the perfect riposte to any sceptical thoughts about the value of public artworks.

Updated: 09:43 Friday, July 30, 2004