- Venue
- Royal Academy of Arts
- Location
- London
Included in the entry fee to visit the Royal Academy’s latest blockbuster show you get a small booklet containing images from each of the thirty-five exhibiting artists alongside a few sentences about their work. All to often in this group show of disparate concerns the clunky texts seem to try and shoe-horn the work into the specific dogma of the curatorial theme, rather than invite a questioning spirit that might be a more a more helpful route into the work. Anyway, if the texts were there to ‘interpret’ the show and make it more accessible to a non-specialist audience I’m sure they served their purpose – and that they could have done so just as well if they had been displayed only within the printed book, and not plastered loudly across the walls as they were, interrupting the flow of what I thought was overall a good presentation.
Hobbyhorses aside, there is a mix of the great, the good and the ‘just OK’ in the show. It is organised into small sub-themes as well as a main introductory section with frankly forgettable outdoor works by United Visual Artists and duo Marcos Lutyens and Alessandro Marianantoni as well as installations by Antony Gormley and Clare Twomey and sculpture by Spencer Finch and Ackroyd & Harvey. Two video projections also come under the main themed banner of ‘Art for a changing world’ including Semiconductor’s immersive Black Rain (2009), made using raw visual data recorded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and Yael Bartana’s Kings of the Hill (2003), a fun video depicting what seemed to be a LandRover assault course that could have been shown to better advantage in a smaller space. The introductory section also contains the best work of the exhibition – the one piece that really seemed to fit the whole eco-warming-concept and the work that featured on all of the shows’ publicity. Mona Hatoum’s Hot Spot (2006), a large steel globular cage onto which outlines of the worlds land-masses have been rendered in red neon buzzed loudly, giving the work a sense of urgency and unrest that was often lacking in the other pieces.
‘Perceived Reality’ is the umbrella term under which the curators have placed the next section of works. Featuring 2D pieces with some wall-mounted moving image this quiet curation seems more about the artist as documenter rather than an investigator of ‘progress’ as the organisers would have it. Gary Hume’s The Industrialist (2008) sees the artist confidently swap drippy gloss paint for the permanence and glamour of highly polished marble. I found Edward Burtynsky’s landscape photography of the natural environment ruined by mans’ industrial processes rather too beautiful to be disturbing, though I enjoyed his chicken factory picture, an image of the workplace that initially appears digitally manipulated due to the scale and uniformity of the operation. Finnish artist Antti Laitinen provided the highlight here with It’s My Island (2007), a series of photographs and videos documenting the artists’ attempts to build his own off-shore island using his own bare hands and the most basic of materials. An ongoing project that has been re-enacted around the world, Laitinen’s visceral transformation of his performance practice into consumable art objects does justice to his project in a way rarely seen in the interface between live art and the gallery.
The next section grouped works under the heading ‘The Artist as Explorer’ and included some of the more self-indulgent pieces in the show. Obviously this was where the curators chose to place the work of Sophie Calle. As if we don’t already know enough about her life we are invited to study a rather uninspiring selection of images and texts covering her travels to the North Pole to bury artefacts belonging to her deceased mother. An homage to her life and the fact that she never got to visit personally. I don’t mean to be unkind but most people would love to tourist to the Poles – strangely it seems that privilege is mainly reserved for scientists and preachy artists who romanticise and condone (yes Calle, Orta, et al, I mean you!) Finally I was thankful for the interpretive text when I came to view Adriane Colburn’s wall-based relief in mixed media including paper, aluminium, video and mirrors. Graphic tree-like shapes were composed with abstracts and colours’, apparently reflecting the artists travels to the Arctic (again!) and the Amazon, as two of the remaining natural frontiers currently being exploited for their resources. If it hadn’t have said I would never have known. It may have looked edgy but how does this stand as issue-based art? In contrast Shiro Takatani’s video Ice Core (2005), in which a section on a 2,503-metre ice-core is animated moving up the screen alongside a descending numerical marker charting the age of the moving section, was a subtle and restrained reflection on the age of the planet and on sciences’ exploration of it. Lemn Sissay’s piece deserves a special mention. A plasma-mounted three-minute video it presented a musical poem that directly addressed the issue of climate change and the responsibility of humanity. I liked it principally because I found its frankness and rhythm unexpected and fresh amongst a show of too many unsurprising and predictable artworks.
Cornelia Parker was the first artist in the selection themed ‘Destruction’. Her Heart of Darkness (2004) comprised of pieces of charcoal gathered from a ‘fierce forest fire’ suspended from the ceiling in blown apart Parker-style. Enjoyable but it didn’t make me stand and stare. Doomed (2007) by Tracey Moffatt was a fast-paced video collage of spliced together action scenes from disaster movies. Such a nice idea that I’m sure I’ve seen similar a few times before. I thought Kris Martin’s piece 100 Years (2004) was very good – a simple gold-coloured sphere containing an internal mechanism that means the object will explode in 100 years time. I wonder whether he was telling the truth or not? I don’t think it matters, unless perhaps to the collector who buy’s it: it’s a piece I would love to see at an art fair. Darren Almond’s bank of 567 digital wall clocks was another strong work, arresting in its simplicity the clocks simply counted the time in unison.
The final section of the exhibition was called ‘Re-reality’. Featuring a new commission by Tracey Emin as well as works by Thomas Ruff, Keith Tyson and Mariele Neudecker, the focus was on Romanticism and the landscape. The artists here were concerned with the sublime and depictions of natural beauty, albeit through the lens of non-traditional media including pixelated jpegs and chemical reactions. Here I think would have been a good place to include some older works alongside, some Turner’s perhaps or a Lowry to lengthen our perspective, but it wasn’t to be. Normally I’m a fan of Emin’s work, but the new pieces she made for this show seemed emblematic to me of the problems within this exhibition as a whole. Emin made a neon and some embroidered pieces depicting texts along the lines of “I loved you like the sky”. It was as if she had taken her artistic concerns and tried to apply the same winning formula to the serious issue of climate change. As if politicising a practice was as simple as running a calculation (plus reference to nature, minus rock n’ roll mayhem) and bang there’s your artwork. Like watching a film when you already know the ending, I felt that there wasn’t enough space left for surprise, or questions, or arguments in this exhibition. Having said that there was a lot of work I enjoyed in the show. I just think that I would have liked it better – and the work would have been more poignant, more powerful – had I encountered it elsewhere.
