The theme of the Royal Academy summer show this year is, apparently, Interconnectedness. Ryan Gander, co-ordinator of the show, declared at the press view that any work would have something in common with those to the right and left of it. Unfortunately, at that very moment, I was looking at the wall opposite, on which a big waxed inkjet print (Isaac Julien’s Giants — After the Fall) of a diva against a Renaissance depiction of the fall of the Titans was flanked by a sort of metal rail in striking colours on one side and an abstract artwork in black and fluorescent pink on the other. They had nothing in common, not a thing. Yet these opposites were meant to be interconnected, as well as a striking study of two rich colour tones by Frank Bowling on the adjoining wall.
But then no one probably really thought that the word meant anything; it’s one of those concepts into which you can shoehorn the unmanageable number of works in the show — 1,851 — which combine the portentous and the trite and the talented (and for the portentous and trite, look no further than the opening image in the courtyard of a giant rainbow, The Song is You by Ugo Rondinone). And I challenge anyone to find the commonality between Gander’s own contribution to the central hall that he curated — a series of mirrors half swathed in a sheet (“providing an enthralling sense of drama” according to the catalogue) — and anything else in there.
