RSA: Annual Exhibition

Now 184 years old, it is unsurprising that the RSA’s annual exhibition is looking tired, weary and out-dated. What is truly disappointing however, is the Academy’s self-conscious attempt to rectify this glaring problem. The incoherent introduction of non-members, the show’s tenuous theme of ‘the expressive artist and social involvement’ and the various awards and bursaries that decorate the cornices of frames are like the unsightly scars that mark those who refuse to grow old gracefully, worsening things further.

The artwork is equally bathetic; Douglas Thompson’s argillaceous facial sculptures resemble Art Attack’stalking head whilst Joyce Cairn manages to eliminate the horror from her wartime sources, exchanging it with either mundane painterly reproduction or garish hyperbole.

Other pieces are explicitly derived from the artistic canon such as Neil MacPherson’s ‘A Man of the Men’, that looks like the love child of Picasso’s masked Demoiselle and one of Leger’s acrobats, whilst George Munro’s ‘Genealogist’ adopts the remnants of St Ives School abstraction and Henry Moore’s bronzes but, instead of sending ripples through the art world like their Modern predecessors, they stand as weak trajectories. In their contemporary context the images are irrelevant as their Salon hanging.

The most controversial piece on show is Ian McCulloch’s mural ‘Strathclyde,’ but this is as bathed in  parochialism as its counterparts. Caught up in a controversy in 1990 when McCulloch’s gaudy painting of Mary, Queen of Scots was deemed too explicit to don the conservative walls of the Glasgow Council office, it has been reproduced for public consumption once again for the exhibition. Since the original was mysteriously lost, its availability in the show is as much a political stand against censorship as an artistic gesture. However, for an exhibition comprising 286 works, supposedly oscillating around the theme of ‘social involvement,’ the show’s leading rebel is all too well behaved.

The sales desk that inconspicuously stands in the RSA’s central space eventually explains the bland and tepid nature of the work. The exhibition’s main agenda is to sell and this is why it operates like a second-rate art fair as opposed to a blockbuster show, like the Richter and Warhol exhibitions that precede it. However, it remains unfortunate and unnecessary that even in its miserly attempt to make money, the RSA has left itself artistically bankrupt.