Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy

Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy

04 February, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is astounded by how little he enjoys the Royal Academy's latest major exhibition.

I love the Royal Academy. But right now I'm worried. I don't like the new Oliver Peyton restaurant and I really don't like their new exhibition, Modern British Sculpture. I guess there's a fine line between maintaining the identity of an institution and becoming stale, but there are certain exhibitions the Royal Academy does really well – the recent treatments of Sargent, Van Gogh and Waterhouse all spring to mind here. Even the Anish Kapoor show was a hit – probably because, like the forthcoming David Hockney exhibition, the artist actually worked closely with the Academy to guarantee fidelity to the institution.

But things like the GSK Contemporary series are generally an unfocused mess, and the same could be said for Modern British Sculpture. Curated by Director of Tate Britain, Dr Penelope Curtis, and artist Keith Wilson, the exhibition claims to do away with the kind of straight survey show that the Royal Academy usually does rather well, and – in a big subject such as this – is often rather helpful.

Instead the curators have gone for  “a provocative set of juxtapositions that will challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions”. An appropriately worn-out set of words and phrases for an exhibition that feels by turns lethargic, idiotic, facile and utterly at odds with the ethos of the Royal Academy.

If there's any word more overused in the art world than 'juxtapose', it's dialogue, and – surprise, surprise – Modern British Sculpture is big on the 'dialogue' between works. The curators clearly thought it frightfully subversive that Alfred Gilbert's brilliantly pompous statue of Queen Victoria is confronted by both a purple blob called Ghengis Khan and the oversized manhood that's so prominent on Jacob Epstein's Adam. For me, it just feels juvenile and lacking in any depth of thought beyond the immediate and obvious.

One of the major problems with this show is the blinkered approach taken by the curators – they clearly had a 'vision' and would stop at nothing to implement it. This is why there are so many reconstructions (the Cenotaph, works by Tony Cragg, Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton) on show – which, for an exhibition costing £12 to get into, is frankly, a disgrace. Cynically, the show makes one wonder how many of the works on show come from Tate's own collections, and how much money they made from the loans.

It is this curatorial 'vision' that chooses such dull pieces, exhibits it so messily – in some rooms works are swamped by emptiness, in others cluttered up far too close together. It is this 'vision' that panders to the tedious New Labour rubbish churned out by Damien Hirst, Julian Opie et al – how can this work posit itself as “provocative” when it's so irreducibly bland? It is this 'vision' that rides rough-shod over the aesthetics of the Royal Academy. It may claim to be 'site-specific' (in what way exactly?) but nobody even bothered to touch up the battered skirting boards. And it is this 'vision' that makes one despair of the last 100 years of British art. Maybe we haven't ever done anything good – certainly, it feels like that here.

Irritatingly, this 'vision' is couched in postmodern terms as just one point of view among others; the curators aren't claiming to be definitive, apparently. But this is a lie; you only get to curate a show at the Royal Academy if your view is more informed, more informative, more rounded and authoritative than the others. Or at least that should be the case. Exhibitions at the Royal Academy should be definitive, they should be authoritative; that's what the place is here for. Leave it to the ICA to speculate, the Royal Academy should assert, with the well-earned confidence of knowledge. Let's hope they remember this, and soon.


Modern British Sculpture is at the Royal Academy until 7th April 2011.

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Image credit: Bill Woodrow. Electric Fire with Yellow Fish, 1981. Electric fire, enamel and acrylic paint.  27 x 37 x 19 cm. Waddington Galleries, London, Photo courtesy Waddington Galleries, London. Copyright Bill Woodrow

Tom Jeffreys