ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION, 2019

 ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION, 2019 

12the of June 2019


Although politics and recent history are referenced in several works at the RA’s 2019 summer exhibition, the overwhelming thematic reference is the environment.  In fact, it seems that mention of the so-called Brexit crisis, Trump’s visit to the UK and the other controversies that we have become familiar with, have been deliberately side-lined in order to foreground a green agenda.  The more distant past is also hardly referenced in favour of floating worlds, icebergs, a near extinct species such as an installation featuring New Zealand black robins, swirling in a menacing cloud.  Another installation resembles a boa constrictor, or a python made from feathers, perhaps illustrating the transformation from reptile to bird.  There are monumental ethnographical statues too, gravitating between the tasteless and the awe-inspiring.

The formal means to convey these subjects is conservative, since artists at the RA are traditionally more concerned with their bank balances than the insights of critics.  Some of the works are purely abstract and there are probably a lot more of them than even a decade ago, but it is the seeming repetition of earlier, abstract works that do little more than re-state original political and aesthetic impulses. 

Many works employ text or fragments of text, there are also the usual scale models, a box of ghostly unicorns infest a synthetic forest, for instance.  Many works seem a bit dull, others are clear, clean, glaringly right on.  The floating icebergs are there, just like the ones that sank the Titanic, others that Scott of the Antarctic glimpsed lucidly through a watery port hole, basking in glory and irrelevance, simultaneously.  There are also whales which, like icebergs, rarely reveal themselves totally.  A scale model of a tiger is displayed in shiny chrome red and silver, displaying itself totally but possibly also longing for a copse or wood to hide behind.   It indicates a paradise lost where wild animals, albeit dangerous wild animals, intent on feeding on people, thrived and meant the jungle was palpable and inherently dangerous.  Today, with a few exceptions, such habitats are safe yet deprived of the animals that happened to make them interesting.

Paul Murphy, The Royal Academy

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