|
|
 |
| |
Silly not shocking, Academy Summer Show leaves a chill
IT'S 240 years old and the biggest open show of its kind in the world. So, inevitably, the Royal Academy is tired. And not only tired but dying, dysfunctional, debauched and decadent. That’s why they give it a commercial boost each year to bring in the crowds.
This year’s coup is a room with warning labels declaring: “There are works in this gallery that are shocking.” What do you expect when Tracey Emin was invited to pick the pieces – and the publicity – from, for example, a zebra having sex with a big blonde entitled The Old Fashioned Way, red pubic hair on a plinth and a pink rubber sculpture of penises?
It’s not so much shocking as silly and, in our environmental age, degradable thus, fortunately, unlikely to last for centuries to come.
Tracey explains: “I wanted to bring something to the Royal Academy which would encourage people who wouldn’t normally enter to enter, younger people and also a different audience.”
It’s such a shame, the more so when my expectations every year remain optimistic for the Summer Show, this one giving space to almost 60 artists, including architectural practices, from Camden and Islington alone.
And it was boosted as I entered the RA courtyard to discover it dominated by two local artists – Hampstead’s Sir Anthony Caro, once a student of Henry Moore and now considered Britain’s foremost sculptor, and Islington’s Professor Michael Sandle. Sandle’s fibreglass St George’s Horse (pictured), which roars towards you head-on and makes immediate visual contact, is a brilliant brute. But then you realise that these two sculptors – Sir Anthony, now 84, and Professor Sandle, 72 – come from different roots to Emin’s tawdry people and represent a respect for the art of past centuries.
Bizarre conceptual pictures fill so much space in the big galleries while the craft of the artist, watercolours, etchings, drawings, are slung together mainly in the small Weston galleries.
Alas, the sole local artist to enjoy any accolade is Melissa Scott-Miller, from Lonsdale Square, Islington, with two topographical oils. One called Islington Street, which depicts a terrace of elegant Georgian houses; the other, Autumn View, in Islington, shows an almost exotic view of back gardens.
This may seem a throw-back to conventional art, but it happens to be art that is easily understood, and presents us with an artist who enjoys her neighbourhood and knows how to present it.
The Summer Show is also a showcase for Britain’s best architects and, for me, is often the most inspired part of the exhibition since what is on view in intricate models, drawings and paintings will, in a majority of cases, come to fruition somewhere in the world. And with so many architects living/working in Camden you can become part of changing the horizon.
Yet the architects are crammed into too small a space – they need to have their work reassessed and even a separate exhibition considered as a future challenge. But who is going to have the courage to make the Summer Show worthy of a new century, not a hotch-potch that fails to satisfy?
Gerald Isaaman
|
|
|
|
|
|
