ART: Burlington (House) Arcade
The Galleries Show at the Royal Academy
Shock! A bunch of London commercial galleries are being allowed to set up their stalls in the main galleries of Burlington House. Horror! It’s all ‘cutting edge’ stuff, apparently – again. Oooh, that Norman Rosenthal – how dare he do such things to our own dear Royal Academy? Surely, this is the most dangerous and transgressive and shocking thing since – um, Apocalypse, or was it Sensation ... ?
Well, no. Not quite. After all the RA had, somehow, to fill that awkward gap between the dispersal of the Summer Exhibition and the arrival of the much-heralded Aztecs show, and upon reflection, the decision to turn it over to twenty of London’s of London most fashionable contemporary art galleries is in many ways a very reasonable one. It helps boost the RA's trendiness credentials, which frankly matters if the place is going to survive for another few hundred years. It must be fantastically cheap to organise, given that much of the work is done by someone else. And, as with the age-old Summer Exhibition, the shopping-mall feel somehow encourages a desirably critical, like-this-don't-much-like-that frame of mind. In short, whether one likes or hates the result, it provides a rather entertaining hour or so. It's much better solution than, say, giving temporary houseroom to someone's fourth-rate stash of post-Impressionist investments. Indeed, why not make it an annual event?
Not least, The Galleries Show falls well within the RA’s historic education remit. For who amongst us can easily put hand on heart and declare, no matter how many biennales and private views we’ve attended, that we really understand where contemporary art is going? Where once upon a time it was, apparently, possible to take the pulse of London’s art scene in the course of a leisurely walk from St James’s up towards Mayfair, the cultural map now changes so quickly that no one seems to be able to keep up with it. By the time we’ve all discovered where Hoxton or Shoreditch is, these exotic locales have become embarassingly passé and the centre of gravity has shifted somewhere else – to somewhere that even Sarah Kent and Frieze magazine can’t quite locate. So in a way it was thoughtful of Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram, the team that brought us Sensation and its drearier offspring, Apolocalyse, to save us the Tube fare east, or north, or wherever it is now. And not only are we being served up this menu dégustation of avant garderie in the comforting surroundings of Burlington House – it all comes ratified by fact it was selected for the slightly self-referential honour of being displayed here. It’s in the RA, for heaven’s sake, so it must be important!
As for the commercial angle – the RA’s apparent willingness to be transformed for a short duration into a souk selling cutting-edge high art – I can’t, try as I might, get worked up about it. If there is anyone left in the world who truly still believes that art is something beautiful and pure and other-worldly that should have no truck with the sordid business of buying and selling and all the unsavoury things that take place between the two, they must be feeling rather lonesome by now. Of course this show will give a boost to the lucky galleries chosen to exhibit here, and a kick in the teeth to those outside the charmed circle, but where’s the unique harm in that? In recent years we have seen some frightful R. B. Kitaj daubs hung up alongside Cezanne’s Bathers in the National Gallery; Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud have had major retrospectives, doubtless to the delight of the gallery that represents them both; Sam Taylor Wood has been given a full retrospective at the Hayward despite her lack of years or, come to that, ability. (Sam's suave Old Etonian husband has, however, distained involvement with the RA's Galleries Show – very grand.) This list of the happy few could be extended indefinitely – often, in David Lee’s Jackdaw, it seems to be. Perhaps it is still possible, somehow, to draw a clear line between a commercial gallery and a public gallery these days, but I wouldn’t know how to start to do it, and at any rate it seems bit too late to worry about it now. At worst, the RA is simply making explicit something that has long been true – that public art institutions have a part to play in the commodification of individual works of art, and that access to this sort of validation is always going to be selective and controversial. So if part of the point of this show was to generate a Sensation-voltage shock, it didn’t work for me.
As for whether The Galleries Show works – well, it depends what you mean by ‘works’. As mentioned above, it was curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram, but their role as curators was, as far as I can tell, largely restricted to selecting the galleries that were going to take part. Once the rooms were assigned, the galleries were free, apparently, to do more or less what they liked with them. The downside of this is that there is no unifying aesthetic shaping the show, as there certainly was in Sensation. At worst, the whole experience can seem jarring and episodic. But the upside is exactly this variety. If nothing else, The Galleries Show does us all a service by making it clear which galleries we might want to keep an eye on, if we are not doing so already – and, by the same token, which galleries could vanish tomorrow morning without much cause for lamentation.
Yet as one wandered through the disparate rooms, liking this and wincing at the awfulness of that, there was a feeling familiar to anyone who has ever strolled through the makeup concessions at Selfridges or Harvey Nicks – a mild and fleeting anxiety about the soundness of one’s own taste, the faint suspicion that one might be missing out on something incredibly cool and desirable – a sort of ‘is MAC still any good? is Bliss over?’ moment, transferred to the realm of art. ‘This is so exciting!’ trilled one smartly-dishevelled young woman to her willowy companion in his grimy baggy jeans and good blazer, as she looked at what struck me as an unspeakably unexciting Stephen Cornell vase on a plinth. Oh, I tried, I honestly tried to feel excited, really I did. It didn’t work, though. So if you find the rest of this review hopelessly fogeyish, at least you have some very fashionable allies on your side.
Let’s pick some winners. Victoria Miro put on a fair performace. Offered a large, rather crepuscular rectangular room with an ornately coffered ceiling, the gallery has hung it with several reasonable paintings, and one absolute marvel – Peter Doig’s stunning Grand Riviere. Executed in a faintly melancholy, blue-green, Gauguin-like palatte, this riverscape was memorable less for its dreamy stillness than for the really extraordinary effects that Doig can achieve with oils. It is hard not to expect great things from him. Inka Essenhigh’s Blue Wave, on the other hand, was too cold and calculating to make much of an impact. Adriana Varejao’s Parede com Incisao a la Fontana 3 was fine if you like arch art-historical jokes, but otherwise this evocation of a gaping wound cut into what looked like bath-tiles had a kind of ‘been there, done that’ quality. And if there’s a point to Verne Dawson’s badly-painted, faintly silly Olduvai Gorge, I wish someone would explain it to me, because I’m not making much progress on my own.
Another obvious thoroughbred was the Lisson Gallery. (Since I was not invited to their recent ‘private view’ I still find it possible to be enthusiastic about the Lisson; others may not feel the same way.) Julian Opie’s computer instalation This is Keira walking looked spare and stylish and right, as his best work does – on three screens, stylised figures, shown in profile, walked as if on a treadmill in a way that was rhythmic and pleasing. Richard Deacon’s Mammoth was one of several sculptures that seemed to fit the scale of the room and which also had a rhythmic appeal. Anish Kapoor’s Untitled, a huge vortex-like piece the colour of frosted glass, was perhaps not thrilling, but it is not Kapoor’s fault if his work is so consistently and recognisably attractive that it no longer surprises. The surprise stars of this room, though, were Jason Martin’s austere, darkly handsome minimalist paintings. Executed in oil on aluminium – black pigment across which some sort of comb had been dragged, creating a wavy pattern – these had an authority that is hard to explain, but also hard (for me, anyway) to deny. One was very like a funeral hatchment, or the black square that was hung over Kasimir Malevich’s open coffin, the great heraldic statement of modernism. This was grown-up, confident, reserved stuff and I liked it very much.
All of which leads me to the most powerful conjunction of good and bad in The Gallery Show – a conjunction that perhaps hints at a flaw in the show’s conception. The Gagosian Gallery made the interesting, probably financially shrewd decision to hang with space – the great octagonal room at the heart of the RA’s first floor – with a series of typically modestly-sized paintings by Howard Hodgkin. (Can one buy them off the wall?) Now, I am never quite sure what I think about Hodgkin. His ‘modern master’ status, let alone his blue-chip liberal elite background – he’s related on one side to the Huxleys, on the other to that Bloomsbury stalwart Roger Fry – can be offputting. His painting can look formulaic or overly sweet or both. A collector once complained to me that once bought and hung on a wall, Hodgkin’s work fails to develop and swiftly starts to bore. So I’m a sceptic, really. But here at the RA, positioned against brilliant-azure walls and visible from far-away vantage points, Hodgkin’s paintings looked better than I had ever seen them before. They seemed as rich and jewel-like as the Persian minatures Hodgkin loves and about which he is so knowledgable. Their scale conferred intensity, rather than tea-tray preciousness. People literally did enter the gallery and fall slack-jawed into stunned silence at how – to use that rather suspect word – ’beautiful’ it all was.
It would have been a magical experience, contemplative and perhaps transcendent, had it not been for what was going on in the next room. For some reason – and ultimately, surely the blame lies with Rosenthal & Wigram for letting this happen? – Vilma Gold had installed, in the space adjoining the octagon, Ben Judd’s I Miss. Well, I certainly would happily have missed it, had this been possible. I Miss is a dvd playing on a nondescript dvd player. The visuals feature grainy, inconsequential footage of some shifty-looking men hanging about at the railway station, sometimes speaking into their mobile phones. More than anything else, it looked like surveillance film of terrorist suspects, except not quite that interesting. If Judd had left it as that, fair enough. The audio component, however, involved a man with a droning voice reciting an intensely dreary litany along the lines of ‘I miss your frown. I miss your walk. I miss the way you move your thumb. I miss the way you look over your shoulder. I miss the way you drink.’ Sadly, this was so loud that it was audible in not less than seven other rooms nearby. It does not take a lot of imagination to see the sort of violence this insistent, boring, unrelenting noise did to the civilised evocation of luxe, calme et volupté which is Hodgkin at his best. Why didn’t someone put a stop to this? Hodgkin, like most painters, did not intend his work to have this audio compontent, and to force it onto his work had exactly the same impact as would have been achieved by exhibiting I Miss without its sound turned on. Why should installations be allowed to spoil the party for everyone else?
Meanwhile, Vilma Gold also exhibited Shahin Afrassiabi’s Shelf display with bleach. I have a lot of dear friends who can’t see the point of conceptual art. I wish people would not make works like Shelf display with bleach, if only because it so eloquently illustrates everything my friends had ever tried to argue about conceptual art’s sheer foolishness. Shelf display with bleach, was – well, a shelf on which had been placed a bottle of Aviva bleach. And that’s it. What, for heaven’s sake, is the point of that? Vilma Gold will not, I think, be high on my gallery-going agenda in the near future.
Over in the Sadie Coles HQ room, turned over entirely to the work of Elizabeth Peyton, there were some pleasant surprises, although the baleful influence of I Miss was also evident. Peyton seems to try to make a virtue of painting rather badly, sketching out figurative compositions with largish, wet, vigorous strokes, and the results are nothing if not various. Yet at their best, there’s more than a little charm. A couple of dog paintings were likeable and convincing, while – improbably enough – a work called The Queen Mother’s Funeral, showing the Queen Mother’s flag-draped coffin topped with the Imperial crown being carried on a gun-carriage and flanked by Household Cavalry, was fresh and vivid and concise.
On a less positive note, the Laurent Delaye Gallery failed to impress. Philippe Mayaux had created a mixed media work out of a paintbrush and something that looked like plaster, which mostly made an annoying sound. Chad McCail’s mock-didactic/mystical/whacky digital works needed to deliver more in order to carry off that amount of bombast; as it was, they just took up too much space. Modern Art had supplied an installation by Richard Woods, fully occupying a room which Woods had wood-block printed with enormous red cockatoos. In his Sixteen-part Cultural Experiement, plastic garden statuary, made in imitation of classical models, was placed in plastic tubs on top of various filing cabinets and chests of drawers; the statues had been turned into ‘water features’ and squirted jets of water from various parts of their anatomy. I suppose this was intended to be some sort of critique of classicism (how clever, has anyone done that before?); to me, however, the best thing about it was that it largely protected the Victoria Miro room from the sounds of the more irritating installations across the way.
One tendency sufficiently general to merit comment was the proliferation of mildy pornographic, bad painting by women. Over at Frith Street Gallery, Margaret Dumas is the acknowledged world leader in this field, and Miss Pompadour perhaps her classic work. It shows a nude woman bending forward, seen from behind. Why? Who can say. But in its frantic courtship both of shocked denunciation and prurient attraction, there is something more than a little unpleasant about it. Ditto Lisa Yuskavage’s oils at greengrassi, full of cartoon-like figures, adumbrated in colours that manage to be lurid and muddy at the same time, enacting scenes from porn films. More than anything, it is the sheer pointless unpleasantness of this that jars. Do people really buy this stuff? Should they?
Finally, The Gallery Show was not without its moments of rich humour, however inadvertant these might have been. The Approach is a gallery space which was created over a pub out in the wilds of E2. Part of their RA setup involved creating a real little working bar with two beer taps, presumably to evoke that pub-like ambience. This is, in itself, a cute enough idea, and indeed Tim Stoner’s Traffic – a painting of a happy family, parents with two children and a baby, walking out through a suburban landscape, but the strange bleached-out light suggesting some sort of terrible instant catastrope – would have repaid further consideration, pint in hand. But on the day I visited, the bar had not yet been installed. It stood there, forlornly, in the mostly-empty gallery, its two kegs set out on the floor beside it along with some tubing and a box full of cups; on top of the bar there had been daintily placed a set of instructions, hand-written on a sheet of cardboard, explaining how the bar was to be set up. Needless to say, several of my fellow gallery-goers ended up examining it, proclaiming to each other its merits as an intallation, and taking lots of notes about it. And indeed, there was something slightly wounded yet likeable about it; it seemed to attract a sort of protective interest. Perhaps this says something about ‘authenticity’ and its innate charms, rarely reached by actual factual art – or perhaps, on the other hand, not?
The Galleries Show, then, is something of a mixed bag. And this is surely what it ought to be. Some of the claims that the RA has made for it are simply nervous and silly. It does not, for instance, ‘show the important role that galleries play in positioning London in the international contemporary art world’, nor does it ‘explore how they encourage and support artists’. Instead, it offers a whistlestop tour of many of the big-name galleries and some smaller ones, and in doing so, offers a vantage-point onto one particular strand of contemporary British art. Inevitably, the survey is not only partial but partisan. What Rosenthal and Wigram have chosen probably includes in its catholic and apparently uncritical abundance the newest generation of what will doubtless go on to take its place as the official high art of the Arts Council, the British Council and those of our great public institutions that show an interest in contemporary art. There is, of course, a world of other art out there, much of it more ‘traditional’ and more genuinely popular – and some of it even less so. But Rosenthal & Wigram are, like it or not, avatars of official taste, and their selections carry weight. The near future is not necessarily a pretty sight, let alone a particularly memorable one, but if you want a quick preview it’s probably to be found somewhere in the RA's main galleries this autumn. I recommend it.
The Galleries Show: Contemporary Art in London, Royal Academy, 14 September – 12 October, admission £5 full price, £4 concessions. There is also an excellent website, with a great deal of information about the galleries that have been included.
Bunny Smedley, September 13, 2002 03:25 PM