Hackworth says 'A brightly coloured disaster'

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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A fat summer sun hangs over this exhibition enveloping it in a warm golden glow. Outside in the courtyard three large sculptures sit in happy union. From a lofty plinth resembling a heavy artillery gun, one of Barry Flanagan's hares strikes a balletic pose and looks down upon the stream of visitors with a benevolent eye.

Inside, breezy landscapes full of light, speaking of distant vistas in Cornwall and Crete, jostle for attention with the racier work of Young British Art stars. Two pieces in particular catch the eye. Dildos sprout happily from a table in Ann Summers Party, an image by Marcus Harvey, perpetrator of the infamous Myra Hindley icon. Immediately opposite, hang two photographs of a waxwork Kylie Minogue, taken by celebrity snapper Rankin. Her luscious lips intoxicate the viewer. Imperceptibly a delicious and delicate dialogue is struck up between the lips and dildos facing each other across the room. Dildos speak to lips and lips to dildos, but in what language they speak and what they say to each other, we can only guess.

In Gallery III, the largest in the show and this year surrendered entirely to Academicians, triumph is stacked upon triumph. Rays of gentle sunlight illuminate the landscapes and large colourful abstracts that crowd the walls. Suddenly, in a moment of artistic transcendence, it seems as if every piece in the exhibition, whether abstract or figurative, whether painting or sculpture, with dildos or without, is one big happy family, a colourful cornucopia of creativity, a porky feast for the senses, a tumultuous orgasmic explosion of aesthetic pleasure.

Only joking. In truth, this exhibition is a brightly coloured disaster. The galleries are indeed full of summer sun and paintings glow with primary hues. Everything looks OK. But decay is rarely metered out in hammer blows, rather it is slow, insidious and hardly noticed as Summer Exhibition follows Exhibition.

In a desperate attempt to inject a little life into a dying body the RA has been heavily trumpeting the "radical new departure" taken by Peter Blake, Pop Art supremo and this year's senior hanger, in separating the different groups of artists from each other and thus splitting the exhibition into, effectively, four shows. Honorary Academicians, the great and the good of the international art world, occupy the first two galleries. The next is filled with artists invited by Blake and includes both the Brit Art stars and the pop stars who have taken to painting in their dotage. Academicians, meanwhile, occupy the brightest and best galleries, while those who have crawled in through the orifice of open submissions are left to fight it out among themselves in the tag end.

Once, of course, all these would have been mixed up, giving some enterprising art student or unrecognised, small-town painter the dubious privilege of sharing space with a distinguished Academician. Now even this small crumb of comfort and comparison is denied. But, by enforcing these separations, Blake may inadvertently have done the visitors a favour and forced them to focus more intently upon the successes and failures of each group. The first but defining note is struck in the gallery of the Honorary Academicians who lend their great names to the exhibition but no great works. Jasper Johns contributes two small and ugly pieces in which watches and Picasso motifs float around, the gauche style utterly unrepresentative of his work. Richard Serra, whose large minimalist sculptures have at least an undeniable aesthetic power, presents not sculpture but a drawing that resembles a heavy black charcoal sun that looks suspiciously like the carefully mounted remains of a barbecued cow.

Matta, the Chilean nonagenarian painter of mystic landscapes, has generously lent a vast oil painting in which a repulsive spider-cum-octopus crawls towards an exploded Rubik's cube. This canvas, The Ego and His Own Own, serves only to invoke pity for Matta's analyst.

The torch of serious under-performance is taken up with gusto in the gallery of Blake's invited artists. Lots of the big boys and girls are here: Gary Hume, The Chapman brothers, Hirst, Emin, Marc Quinn, the Wilson twins, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marcus Harvey and Gavin Turk. But for a collection of artists who have attracted so much attention and, at times, outrage, the room is deeply ineffective. Again few have contributed serious works, Marc Quinn and Tracey Emin being honourable exceptions, Quinn showing one his marble statues of amputees that is probably the best work on show. But the selection speaks of a desire to name-check the contemporary art world without worrying too much about what they show. There are the dildos, of course, to add a spicy frisson of danger for the Summer Show's traditional constituency.

Also among the invitees, but nestling quietly in a corner, is a coterie of rock stars who, as Blake is at pains to point out, are here on merit. Of course they were always going to be prime targets for the critics but such is the price of fame and thus, not wanting to prove an exception to the rule, it seems only fair to give them a jolly good roasting. Paul McCartney's Chocolate Sunset is, in all seriousness, a strong contender for the highly coveted accolade of worst exhibit in show, a botched mess in which triangles and amorphous abstract shapes bleed yellow paint all over the canvas. Then there's Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, who paints like a manic hamster. His gloomy offering is a very brown buffalo that utterly refuses to be milked for aesthetic enjoyment.

While Wood and McCartney can excuse themselves on account of having achieved massive success in a sexier field, the serried ranks of Academicians cannot. Across three large galleries their works are splayed, but, despite their eminence and the liberal sprinkling of professorships, the overall impression is one of a particularly well-funded degree show. The usual mix of landscapes and abstract and semi-abstract forms jostle on the walls, many competent and many inoffensive: Anthony Whishaw's delicate and almost Zen-like studies of a coppice are gently attractive; Ken Howard's figure studies full of energy. But, by and large, the works say nothing new, instead deploying empty gestures and exhausted forms.

Perhaps because I'm young I'm a firm believer in euthanasia. A man who has passed his sell-by date can preserve a little dignity by choosing the time and place of his own passing and preserve the memory of his past by aborting an ugly future. And, if this is true of individuals, it should also be true of institutions. It is clear that the Royal Academy, as an Academy, has no further shelf-life and this particular Summer Show is another piece of evidence.

The Academy was a product of the Enlightenment, established to lay down an orthodox aesthetic standard informed by reason. As faith in reason and orthodoxy faded away long ago, so too did the Academy's raison d'?tre. So, instead of trading in the standards that it once set, it trades on popularity and Blake's room of invitees is a stark admission of that fact. In the spirit of preserving the memory of the Academy the Academicians should take to heart a dictum coined by another one of their rock chums, Neil Young, who observed that "it's better to burn out than to fade away".

The Academicians should do the decent thing and burn the place down.

Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1, daily 10am-6pm (10am-10pm Fridays) until 13 August. Admission £7.

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