Abandon'Arte: A Casa Retro

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Three sculptural highlights from the Summer Exhibition 2014 at the Royal Academy

'Twinkle' by Cathie Pilkington, by Cathie Pilkington, 

via www.royalacademy.org.uk

There would be lots to say about the salon model and its applicability to the current situation in the arts. A deep immersive experience, it can go from just bearable to absolutely annoying, if your lenses have been utterly formatted by the white cube mode of display. Yet there is a lot to save here, including the fact this is per se, the perpetuation of the legacy of a great institution, a formidable institutional act that has never ceased since its creation, in 1769.

However the most interesting virtue is perhaps the most obvious one – to render democratic a prestigious stage, in a time in which aesthetics often overlaps and confounds itself with processes of recognition and reputation. But the show lives not only through unknown artists and precisely one of the appeals to the mass of artists who submit work each year is to exhibit side by side with artists like Anselm Kiefer, whose oeuvre can be appreciated soon in the same space, from 27th September.

Not occupying exactly the same axial position as the German artist, but also widely known, there are the three artists I believe you have to observe closer, as you make your way through the show, where normally painting takes primacy, all of them newly elected RA (in this 2014 show there is an unprecedented emphasis on new Academicians).

'Fertility Figure' by Tim Shaw, via 

@TimShawSculptor

Cathie Pilkington’s (born 1968) work often makes use of unsuspected combinations of materials and includes ready-made parts, in a peculiar reinvention of the craft. Her sculptures often dwell close to toys, in their shapes and in their evocative motives and evocations. They form a visionary universe of fable, and prove the strength of the uncanny. Her characters seem to inhabit a magical state of flux – as indeed do her methods. “Thinking and making is the same thing,” as she stated (see http://issuu.com/whosjack/docs/wj47/77).

'Cake Man (II)' by Yinka Shonibare, 

picture: Matt Writtle, 

via www.world-arts.com

Tim Shaw RA (born 1964) presents a series of hooded figurines and a life size sculpture that references magical rituals, and is also a result of his reflection on history and politics, often directly inspired by current events. He has created a singular language that by poetically transporting us to a mythic time speaks to us about the necessity of recreating our life as planetary species. On another register, Cake Man II by Yinka Shonibare, (born 1962) suggests the transience and contradiction of a facet of our world, less and less taken for granted. His stagings evolve around several aspects of globalization, usually with an emphasis on post-colonial and African identities. His work has an eminent political meaning, disruptive and hopefully ethical. In fact, unlike Cathie Pilkington’s “cautionary tales” his visual allegories seem to appeal in both their structure and content, to a moral re-reading of the social – conveying a message, in the classic assumption.

Even though not far apart generationally the three artists offer a spectrum from a situation where poetics is an imperative, to the reification of politics. As long as you do not feel overloaded by the excess of visual information provoked by twelve hundred works, selected from ten times more, climbing the walls and filling every space available, it can be a very enjoyable experience, and above all diverse in its core.