Can we give it a rest?

As if art alone isn't a weighty enough subject, there is a current trend among artists to plough the field of science for inspiration. It's been carrying on for some time and who knows what brought it on - perhaps it just makes artists feel less culturally irrelevant.

So it seems with Mexican artist Damian Ortega, who has made a new installation as part of Tate Modern's ongoing Untitled series of exhibitions focusing on youngish, international artists.

Aside from the science bit, apparently Ortega 'subverts' the notion of sculpture as 'solid, monumental and finished' - as if such revolutionary concepts haven't been around for, oh, the last 100 years or so. But now on to the weightier concepts.

After a chat with a physics professor about quantum mechanics and some starter pack on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - 'the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa' (perhaps useful for making atom bombs but as an artistic metaphor, so what?) - Ortega presents work that is apparently in a constant state of progress and flux.

So, in Margin Of Accident/Running Gag, we have four chairs placed in a kind of domino sequence, looking like the stages of a single chair in motion, falling to the ground. We have a modular sequence of chair frames locked together, like a Sol LeWitt sculpture.

We have a constructivist piece made up of a tower of interlocking tortillas. There's a series of shattered panes of glass hanging from the ceiling and, finally, a tapering sequence of balls and globes threaded on a string.

Really, this won't do at all. Ortega's work is trite and tired. It's definitely not good art - and it's probably very bad science. Some artists do this stuff a lot better with more wit and panache. Keith Tyson's mad, sprawling doodlings come to mind and even the pseudo-scientific, spiritualised nonsense of Antony Gormley is an awful lot better than this. Please, can we now have a moratorium on artists and science?

Until Jun 12, Tate Modern, Bankside SE1, daily 10am to 6pm, Fri and Sat to 10pm, free. Tel: 020 7887 8008. Tube: Southwark/Blackfriars