The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016
The
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016
At the 248th Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition, the trite, traditional artwork stands side by side
with the modern and post-modern. Kitschy satires like Marie Antoinette, The Queens Hamlet by Pierre et Gilles, an image
half-way between a photograph and an oil painting, evokes a Russian mail order
bride rather than a chapter from the French Revolution. Retrospectives of a
degraded future are encapsulated in works like 2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump by Puerto Rican pairing Allora &
Calzadilla, an ossified stone petrol pump the seeming remnant of a finished
civilisation. The curators of the RA have themed the exhibition in terms of
twins, pairs of artist collaborators but beyond that the artist’s relationship
with gallery owners, critics and ultimately the public gaze. A new Gilbert and
George work Beard Aware evokes a
sense of anti-art, pop hysteria while also underlining our sense of surface
appearances being deceptive as the duo flaunt beards and pull moons amidst
images of Royals (which seem somehow misplaced but the images once again
panders to the sense of tradition and snobbery that is palpable in the work of
the duo) and, bizarrely, the contact details of security firms. Their work is
given enough space to live and breathe but other works seem almost to have been
crammed in indicating an obvious hierarchy of space.
There are many entries at
this year’s exhibition and most, but not all, seem both professional and
innovative, sometimes intriguing yet also crazed. Another duo The Kipper Kids,
who apparently have been around for some time and it shows, put on the masks
and phalluses of Greek Satyr plays. They seem to engage with some photographically
displayed “drama” but are intent on having fun even though, the masks and
phalluses aside, they are only chucking paint over each other. Energy like this
is communicated but it is not always present. Some of the exhibits are very
disappointing, banally traditional, even mere kitsch for tourists. They hardly
deserve our attention let alone a place. However, there are many exciting works
that do and I want to focus on these rather than individual works that failed
to convey the ethos of the exhibition since its impulse is more about inclusion
than anything else.
There is a range of
styles present, some innately predictable, traditional and conservative such as
a conventional nude Portrait of a Woman 4
by Ian McKeever RA and Fog Effect Venice
2015 by Ken Howard RA. The paintings
of Venice hardly conjured visions of Canaletto or Turner and their poetic
impressions but the stereotypical touristic kitsch that infest the sinking city. Traditional forms and modelling are
omnipresent but so too are a range of styles that appear to be broadly
connected to art movements such as Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism,
Abstract and Pop art. The democratic
spirit of the exhibition indicates a curatorial freshness of vision and a
clarity or approach. The British
fascination with model making redolent of childhood time spent with Airfix
kits, paint and glue is also present in the Large Weston Room decorated with
what we are told is “Hague Blue”, a gloomy deep medium blue. If the viewer failed to succumb to the
private passion of modelling as this reviewer did the overall impression would
probably be boredom. Indeed, there is
often a lack of explanation surrounding the model which makes it even harder to
comprehend. There are models of city
districts, heliports of the future, of machine parts, plan views, side views
and plans divided in half to demonstrate interlacing pseudo-parts of pseudo
engines that are partly inspired and partly crackpot. Works like Droneport Model by Lord Foster of Thames Bank RA clearly indicate a
predicted future and clean industrial vision but there is not enough of this
kind of innovation on view. A
drones-eye-view of the world is often intimated but it is always contextualised
by the natural world as if only birds can peer at endless vistas of road networks,
factories, mines and polluted cities.
It is clear that one of
the key underlying themes of the exhibition is how the natural world is being
eroded by the man made, how the boundaries between nature and culture are being
re-set and re-defined by modernity, industrialisation and its attendant
crises. Many of the works on show appear
to struggle with the division between inspiration and form. Mr and
Mrs Bowles of Ballyward (After Gainsborough) by David Hamilton inverts
Gainsborough’s painting Mr and Mrs
Andrews. Today the woman stands
holding a shotgun while the man sits pensively with his laptop but the
agricultural techniques depicted in the original remain the same as the re-boot
maintaining that the landscape is unchanged.
This is a palpable falsity, the English landscape has been damaged by
industrialisation and mass production.
Gender relations have changed but they have hardly been inverted. A neat joke but a rather limp one
underscoring the assumptions of art education and art savviness on the part of
the audience. These assumptions are
palpable throughout the exhibition. No
one appears to want to go out on a limb.
Everywhere the mock heroic approach has dented the possibility of genius
living and breathing. There is something
very British about the ubiquity of mediocrity, as if genius is a scandalised,
disgraced sub-species of artist that happens elsewhere. Visions of Tony Hancock in The Rebel, a satire of the life of Paul
Gaugin, and the underlying mid-life crisis that conceives of disillusionment
with the fruits and by-products of modernity are intimated in the
exhibition. Imaginary apocalypse or
spontaneous combustion are the hallmarks of the artist’s future.
The ultimate
pseudo-contraption and a work that made me laugh was The New Arrival by The Chapman Brothers. There is a surreal element and something
quintessentially British about inventing a ‘machine’ that supports two skinned
heads sucking on disembodied nipples.
This is a work that Heironymus Bosch might have approved of or perhaps
he would have recognised the species of plagiarism that it seems to be, feeding
off the work of Dali et al. The Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition is the strawberries and cream of summer art, delights
and marvels, darkness palpable and a delight of a currently not very sun
drenched London.
Paul Murphy, The Royal
Academy, London, June 13th 2016
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