Regal Trollop

Exit the tube at Piccadilly and the sun seems to be in a beneficent mood as it smiles sweetly down on the parading pates below.  There’s a bright azure blue sky flecked with a few fluffy white clouds above and a pleasant light breeze is helping to waft me along the road.  The climatical ambience is decidedly summery, and a quick consultation with my meteorological almanac confirms that the seasons have indeed clicked through another quarterly turn confirming the appropriateness of my decision to head down to the Royal Academy to make an inspection of this year’s recently opened Summer Show.  As has become customary in recent years, the Neo-Palladian piazza at the entrance to Burlington House has been given over to a single eminent sculptor to present a special monumental work and so provide the sort of spectacular, whizz-bang party-opener designed to engender a carnivalesque mood amongst the crowds of sightseers who have come to enjoy the annual artistic charivari.  This year’s presentation is, however, a bit of a dampish squibish and Anish Kapoor, an artist not unused to working on the grand scale and, frankly, one I’d have thought could have been relied upon to create some clever optical illusory effect both pretty and intriguing, seems to have run out of ideas or just got a bit bored and couldn’t be bothered to put in much of an effort.  Consequently, while his erection may be impressive dimensionally, it is flaccid in every other regard.  Basically, it’s little more than a very large red disc which looks a bit like a satellite dish but is perhaps making some sort of oblique symbolical reference to those pretty little dots that traditionally get stuck next to artworks to signify their having been sold.  Surrounding the plinth onto which the grand spot has been hoist are massive lumps of roughly hewn rock but, for all their obvious chunky solidity, these hefty stones add little artistic weight to this flimsiest of conceptual structures.

After that disappointing start I decide to defer the gratification of plunging straight into the multi-room installation of the main show and instead take a sort of aesthetic run-up by first visiting The Great Spectacle which is the Academy’s review of the history and development of the Summer Show over the past 250 years of its existence.  And there’s a wonderful start to the displays with William Powell Frith’s Royal Academy Private View, 1881, one of those fascinating multi-portrait paintings that shows some of the celebrities who attended that year’s opening.  Centre stage is the debonair President of the Academy Lord Leighton but he’s modestly turning away entirely upstaged by a dandyish Oscar Wilde, complete with top hat, lily buttonhole and small crowd of awestruck admirers.  Elsewhere amongst all the bewhiskered gentlemen and bustled ladies is the pallid politician Gladstone, the jovial novelist Trollope, the regal trollop Lillie Langtree and the Pre-Raphaelitic painter Millais, the only one of the aforementioned who is actually looking at any of the pictures on display.  Well, to paraphrase Wilde’s remarks in Dorian Gray, sometimes people go to these events more to be seen than to see.  Also in this first room is Rowlandson’s rather more scurrilous cartoon scene of an RA opening taking place a century earlier, when the Academy was still sited in Somerset House. All the former formality is beautifully disrupted as guests tumble indecorously down one of the vertiginous staircases (of what is now the Courtauld Gallery) with bloomers and bottoms revealed for the ogling amusement of the inquisitive onlookers.

As for the rest of the exhibition, well, it’s not a very deep analytical study or examination of the artistic phenomenon that is, apparently, the world’s longest continually-running open-entry exhibition of artworks but, nevertheless, it’s quite an interesting and entertaining chronological jaunt through the highs and lows of the past semi-demi-millennium’s worth of displays.  And it gives a reasonable excuse to show off some rather nice Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits; to contrast a couple of gossamer light Turner landscapes with a contemporaneous Constable of rather more leaden consistency; and to show Millais’ Isabella, the Summer Show debut of which heralded the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  From more modern times there’s Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Henry James, which was shockingly vandalised by a suffragette; Wyndham Lewis’ wonderful portrait of TS Eliot, that was shamefully rejected by the selection committee; and Winston Churchill’s inept and bizarrely awful landscape that was nonetheless, perhaps less surprisingly, accepted.  Bringing things more up-to-date, there’s a general selection of modernish items including a rather nice Frink sculpture of a Running Man; a Uglow nude; Ron Kitaj’s splenetic Killer-Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even and a chair covered in the crude embroideries of Tracey Emin.

Aside from myself and Tim Marlow, the boyishly handsome and chirpily loquacious Artistic Director of the Academy, who happened to be giving a personal tour to a couple of well-dressed patron types when I was there, most of the rooms were gloriously empty.  By unhappy contrast, when I finally get in to see the actual Summer Show, all of the rooms are absolutely chocker and I’m tempted to try to create and updated version of Rowlandson’s 18th century fiasco by giving the person in front of me a sharp push which I reckon would cause a chain reaction throughout the entire exhibition area flooring several dozen gallery-goers.  Sanity prevails, however, and I manage to resist the temptation but it’s not just the scrum of people that make touring round the Show such an unhappy struggle.  This year the hang seems to be even more randomly cramped and haphazard than usual, on top of which there seem to be a surfeit of works that might best be described as quirky or comic or amateurish.  I suppose in most years the exhibition reflects in some sense the general aesthetic tastes of the Academician (or Academicians) given the honour of stewarding the show and taking responsibility for everything from the final selection of entries through to the co-ordination of the curation.  But this time round that task has fallen to the ubiquitous showman and self-publicist Grayson Perry who, I feel, has perhaps a little too enthusiastically grasped the opportunity to stamp the whole show with his very distinctive sense of social subversiveness and naughty-boy humour.  The designs that decorate his own pots, prints and tapestries tend to be an undifferentiated collection of slogans and logos, quotes and caricatures, jokes and jests thrown together in fairly simplistic fashion in what I’ve always assumed to be an attempt to reflect back a generalised portrait of our messy mixed up society of competing narratives, babbling prejudices and inane chatter.  Sadly, the Summer Show seems to have provided him with an even greater canvas than usual to echo this chaotic collagistic vision of our brave new world.

To take but one small example from the opening room, Avi Lehrer’s crudely painted picture entitled In the Pub, is a composition in which Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis are down the local having a drink with Vincent Van Gogh – presumably a riff on the old joke about the monarch, the pontif and the Post-Impressionist who go to a bar and…well, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how that one ends.  Anyway, it’s easy to imagine the gleam in his eyes as Perry alighted on this particular work.  The heavy-handed humour and hint of radical lese-majeste in the choice of subject matter alongside the lack of technical facility revealed in its construction is, I think, for Perry the confirmation of a kind of rough demotic authenticity that he evidently finds utterly beguiling and irresistible.  And the thought of displaying such a work in the hallowed halls of the Academy where, only a few short weeks ago, the walls were bedecked with masterpieces by the likes of Rubens, Van Dyck and Mantegna must make him shriek with laughter and squeal with delight at the sheer transgressive sinfulness of what he perhaps perceives to be a particularly daringly stunning stunt – something even more wildly wicked than his penchant for dressing up as Shirley Temple and posing as a look-a-like.

Except, I think that he’s chosen rather too many works that are either poorly executed or exhibit dubious comedic value and, when scattered so liberally amongst the other already over-eclectic mish-mash of style and subjects, can’t but help to devalue what is already something of a stupendously soupy mess.  Works by Tony Bevan, Joe Tilson, Shanti Panchal, Nigel O’Neil, Anthony Green, Michael Craig Martin, the late great Gillian Ayres, and a host of other Academicians and other equally talented professionals which, under other circumstances, would warrant serious consideration are simply overwhelmed here and sadly degraded.

Incidentally, for those who fancy a look at the Show but are understandably reluctant to pay out the full £18 entrance fee, it’s possible to get a free taster by entering the Academy via the backdoor in Burlington Gardens and popping into the McAulay Gallery.  Here you’ll find Michael Landy’s hugely irritating talking shopping trolley emitting a non-stop barrage of market stall banter about buying artworks; David Shrigley’s wall of newspaper fliers with dreary slogans; Gavin Turk’s box of tulips and a whole bunch of portraits of Perry – some of which are better than others – my favourite being Susan Hurman’s whimsical textile sculpture.  Although I kind of think that the egotistical Perry would probably be less interested in the quality than the quantity.

Hopefully whoever gets to run the Summer Show next year will learn from this clunker and try a bit harder to give a sense of coherence and decorum to what, if it’s done right, really could be a Great Spectacle.