Summer wouldn’t feel like summer without the The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. For those not in the know, now in its 241st year, the summer exhibition consists of a huge range of works in different media including painting, photography, sculpture and architecture from both established and unknown current artists. It is this which makes the exhibition so remarkable – a priceless silver Damian Hirst sculpture of St Bartholomew might be exhibited next to a watercolour by your aunt Sally who lives in Bognor Regis – it’s all judged by the same panel.
Every room is like a magnified version of an eccentric grandmother’s house with frame upon frame upon frame cluttering the walls. Each work is labelled with a number that corresponds to a printed list of works, giving it the funny feel of a guessing game at which is the most expensive or well known in the room. As always, there is a lot of chaff among the wheat with derivative Degas-esque ballet dancer sculptures, glorified wallpaper designs and soulless commercial photo-realist paintings. However these add to the authentic feel of an art fair in which every budget and taste is accommodated with works ranging from £70 to £700,000.
There are some charming works of more obscure origins such as Tom Phillips’s A Humument: Scribe the story, (no. 121 in the large Weston room), which uses a page of a mysterious-sounding book, The Human Document, as a canvas, linking various words across the page such as ‘changes made … the book…continue’ by leaving them uncovered in natural-seeming forms. The established gems are also well worth seeing, bold architectural paintings by Tony Bevan, some humorously kitsch works by Tracy Emin including a painting of piglet entitled I want it back, that feeling again (no. 579), and some strangely beautiful cartilage-esque architectural models by Zaha Hadid.
Nevertheless, the exhibition’s 1266 works are much too much to see in one afternoon so if you are to see one thing then the room dedicated to video art is definitely worth a visit. It is the first year that such a room has been included and the 19 short works featured range from Art Attack style arial image-making to digital Pictionary. The film gallery, curated by Richard Wilson, projects each clip onto Wilson’s own installation, which he describes as ‘a wall ripped from another interior space’. This other wall, with its torn edges and slanted position has the effect of removing each film from the context of the room, enhancing the sense of dislocation and surrealism that unite this otherwise disparate collection.
Two short films by Matt Calderwood, Gloss and Strips (Vertical), show the methodical dipping of a light bulb into a pot of black paint at increasing degrees until the light is snuffed out and the systematic smashing of a row of white tube lighting until the lights are all broken and we are left in darkness. The meaning isn’t clear but the effect is eerie and cathartic. With Strips (Vertical) the light fills the frame at the start so that we see a white screen and each time a light is smashed we begin to see lines – it is only near the end that we see in three dimensions and realise what has been shown. This defamiliarisation of quotidian objects creates an unexpected beauty that is simple but poignant. It somehow distils life, the passage of time, beginning and end, much as a Beckett’s Breath does.
This contrasts with the highly polished Surprise by Ben Dodd, which depicts a woman surprising a man with a birthday cake and sparklers at which point he is so shocked he falls backwards and smashes the glass shower guard. This sequence is shown in reverse. As the film goes through the event in slow motion accompanied by dramatic classical music, the initial scene of a man lying in broken glass is explained and shown to be unexpectedly trivial. This again upturns convention by depicting a farcical moment as mysterious and scenic. Guy Oliver’s Boythorn, His Thoughts Can Kill is similarly unexpected and darkly hilarious, but I won’t give away the punch line.
The Summer Exhibition 2009 is open until Sunday the 16th August from 10am -6pm daily (last admission 5.30pm) with late night openings until 10pm on Fridays. Admission is £7 full price and £5 NUS.
