Climbing the stairs to the Royal Academy’s galleries to see the Summer Exhibition, I bumped into the academy’s president, Rebecca Salter. “It’s a classic,” she told me.
And she’s right. It’s everything that the Summer Exhibition should be: works by Royal Academicians, invited guests, and artists who’ve been selected through the open submission process, jammed tightly together on the walls, sometimes as many as 10 works deep. Artist David Remfry is this year’s coordinator, and he has indeed taken a classic approach.
Called Only Connect – a title that’s vague enough to incorporate art by all comers – his show has none of the irony or conceptual framing that Grayson Perry (extremity, gaudiness) and Michael Craig-Martin (poppy, unifying colour) recently brought to it. The problem with classic Summer Exhibitions is an overwhelming sense of deja-vu.
Some take comfort in this familiarity. For me, it’s like a yearly visit to Room 101. I know we’re supposed to find it charming and comforting that so many still turn to creativity, and here they are in some of the world’s most beautiful galleries, alongside established greats. I want to see it as a great swell of human endeavour. And I’m genuinely delighted for those amateurs for whom this is the highlight of their artistic life. But it’s mostly supremely depressing.
It’s not that most of it’s bad (although wince-inducing howlers are always a feature). Rather, its deadliness is in its mediocrity. And not just the unknown artists here; there are plenty of complacently plodding Royal Academicians, too. What always strikes me is the extraordinary lack of curiosity and experimentation: tasteful abstracts, just-so still lifes and flower paintings, performative expressionism and gentle minimalism, with a lethal acceptance of methods and materials, subjects and themes. When presented as a deluge, swashing across the RA’s vast walls, it’s pernicious, almost violent.
Which is why you need to seek out the good stuff; and you do get rewards. There are tributes to several Royal Academicians who have died in the past year that reflect their visionary brilliance. Paula Rego’s Oratorio is marvellous and strange, a combination of her violent fantastical drawings and the warped sculptures that are characters in her paintings, set into a wooden structure that lends the whole scene a terrible, jarring creepiness. Tom Phillips’s pages from his magnum opus, A Humament, never cease to beguile.
Phyllida Barlow’s sculptures – a bulbous scrim-and-cement tower, a cluster of wooden rods shoved upwards into a box – disrupt the architecture room’s order and taste with typical irreverence. And then there’s Brian Catling’s video compilation, including Catcher, in which, covered in foam, he shoves a mechanical bird with flapping wings into his mouth. It’s the genuine “what the hell?” moment that the show desperately needs.
Veronica Ryan, a cluster of unrelated Walkers (Kara, Barbara and Caroline), Lorna Simpson, Ryan Gander, Sikelela Owen, Hew Locke and Rebecca Salter herself are among others whose works are beacons in the mist. Ultimately, because of artists like these, I always emerge with my faith in art intact. But, boy, does the Summer Exhibition test you.
