The RA Summer Exhibition is back – with the usual no-hopers and dearth of ideas
What do you get when you combine a bust of the late Queen made of thumb tacks, a balloon dog wrapped in Tunnocks Teacake foil, and a toy-bright painting by the reliably silly Joe Lycett, titled I drink a crisp, cold beer in a pool in Los Angeles while Gary Lineker looks on in disgust (yours for £1,354,999 – or rather the price of Lineker’s BBC gig)?
The answer, I’m sorry to report, is the return of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. It’s the usual open-to-all variation on the familiar: art world big dogs and amateur no-hopers. It’s like you never left.
There’s an unwritten rule that each edition needs a vaguely portentous themelet, emptied of enough meaning that it could apply to pretty much all art anywhere. Guess what? Exhibition coordinator David Remfry delivers with “Only Connect”, the gnomic epigraph to EM Forster’s novel Howards End, which the academician transposes into a call for human empathy.
If you squint, you might conceivably be able to make it out amid all the familiar faces: the Pollyannish platitudes of Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill – hello again to him); Richard Long’s distillation of a trek through the Cairngorms into concrete poetry; the clinical pop-obviousness of Michael Craig-Martin (he’s another unwritten rule of the Summer Exhibition).
Let’s get this out of the way: in a show of 1,613 works, there’s always going to be plenty to admire. Up close, Frank Bowling’s Where sheep may safely graze is a cauldron of gluey detritus and bubbling day-glo pigments. A few steps back, and it’s all sublime: the sun melting into a woodland glade.
Kara Walker’s ink drawing The Omicron Variations is satisfyingly spooky. Lit by the moon, a ruffed figure raises her hands over the still outlines of a kneeling child – or their effigy – as if revealing her next trick. But beneath the altar table, the drapery is hitched up just enough to reveal something disturbing: a tensed hand and foot. There’s aching drama too in Jane and Louise Wilson’s photograph of two “unwedded” rocks off the coast of Itoshima, Japan – the sacred rope connecting them (symbolic of marriage) blasted apart by a typhoon.
The architecture room is crammed with maquettes, punctuated by totemic sculptures by Phyllida Barlow. Among the smaller displays, I’m taken by Shin Egashira’s Thames Whale Study in which he’s pinned scraps of wood and bone into a biomorphic model; and Bureau de Change Architects’ glass tiles cast with crushed mussels, sand, and waste ash.
See? It’s not just what the traditionalists want, I think, as I sidestep the photo of a begging dachshund and painting of a golden Lindt teddy-bear. In Jake Garfield’s shimmering woodcut Man Wrestling an Angel made in nine vast panels, the deity’s face is ablaze in a molten halo, body melting into the foliage.
Walk further ahead, though, and you’ll hit the room with the huge fibreglass model of Donald Trump’s flattened head. And a crushing comedown.
The Trump sculpture is perched opposite a herky-jerky robotic scarecrow – a punchline I couldn’t get away from fast enough. It’s tribute to the fact that beneath all forms of cultural production lies a seam that is fundamentally average: not entirely beyond reproach (where at least it’d quicken your pulse), just bloodless. It’s art on autopilot, to remind you of all the other Summer Exhibitions.
From June 13-Aug 20; royalacademy.org.uk
