Showing posts with label 2006. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2006. Show all posts

13/03/2014

Royal Hibernian Academy's Annual Exhibition 2006



At the start of July, I went with Carol to see the Royal Hibernian Academy's 176th Annual Exhibition. The Annual Academy Exhibition was the Irish equivalent to The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London except the quality of work was a tenth of that in London. I went to see the exhibition with excitement and an open mind. As I grew older, I came to respect craft and skill more and more and thought slightly less of innovation and originality. Rather than endorsing my growing conservatism, the exhibition only served to throw me back to my old youthful contempt for the Academic and Sunday painter.


What was astonishing to see through nearly 550 works - was just how many different ways there was to make truly god-awful art! There was not one single artist in the show that proclaimed a sign of genius, not one single artist who proclaimed an oceanic depth of feeling and there was not one single artist who actually displayed consummate breathtaking technical genius. In fact the whole show was about different kinds of inadequacy, different kinds of incomplete personalities and different ways in which boring, stupid people try to pull the wool over the eyes of the viewer, with the tricks of realism, theft, pastiche, and borrowed emotion. 


There were quite a few artists who had strong (not great) representational skills, but invariably this skill was not married to any sophisticated artistic 'persona', individuality, originality, sensitivity to paint, any sense of emotion or any aesthetic vision. It was as dead and cold as photography and without even the slightest ambition to transform the way people see the world. The list of artists pastiched, or ripped off by these incompetents would be long and boring, but the oeuvres of truly great artist cast its shadow over all these offerings. There was a complete absence of drawing in the paintings - by which I mean the use of drawing to analyze the structure of the world. Instead there was tracing and squaring up from photographs without any underlying analysis or expressive interpretation. At the other extreme, there were lots of garishly coloured 'expressive' paintings drawn incompetently, of stock expressive imagery and full of loud expressive feeling - but without the subtler tones of feeling needed to create truly moving images. 


John Bellany the Scottish Expressionist (an artist I had admired at times in the past) was represented by a particularly awful mess of a painting of flowers, so badly drawn, so shoddily painted and so incompetent one could only presume he was utterly paralytic with drink while painting it. There were stiff plastic portraits by James Hanley which proved conclusively to me that he could not paint at all - everything, from skin to cloth to sky looked as stiff and wooden as everything else and treated with the same schematic brushstrokes. Le Brocquy was represent by yet another timid, spiritless, spotty portrait of his wife Anne Madden that was notable only for it’s signature. Amy O'Riordan was represented with a glamour type photo portrait of a woman on the toilet in her underwear, only the fact that she was a woman and an 'artist' and the bullshit of 'irony' made stupid people thought that her work was in any way an improvement on or telling comment on soft porn images of women. John Long ARHA was utterly shocking in his complete and total robbery of the style of the English painter Euan Uglow. Longs work was so completely the product of theft I was left gob smacked. 


So much of this work was the product of illustration not art. 90% of the work was so twee, kitsch and bourgeois one wondered that these people could call themselves artists at all. Even artists who I had admired in the past in solo exhibitions, like Richard Gorman, came out of the show looking utter rubbish. Part of this was because they were not represented by their best work. But partly because group shows like these in their semi-democratic nature reduce everything to shoddy crap. This worked two ways, first by surrounding good works by rubbish - the good works were diminished. Secondly, by robbing pretensions work of the mythology, piety and bullshit of a solo exhibition, it was shown up as just paint on canvas and products in the market place - like everything else. 


After an hour in the exhibition, I had a violent fit and told Carol I had to leave. My head was splitting, my eyes dazed and my mind scrambled. I felt fit to puke and give up art altogether. Where as a great exhibition could inspire me and send me home to paint, a rotten show like this left me despairing at art.