Melencolia of The Self-Pitying Critic

www.thepanicartist.com - Yesterday, I went to see the 177th Annual
Exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy on Ely Place in Dublin 2.
The RHA annual exhibition is a smaller and less star-studded
exhibition than its counterpart in London - The Royal Academy Summer
Exhibition. It also lacks the media attention the English standard of
the summer season possesses. The art press in London usually
ruthlessly pans the RA Summer Exhibition - but if they think that is
bad - they should see the RHA! What they both have in common of
course is the large preponderance of very minor artists - small
personalities, small talents and small intellects addressed to small
and parochial subjects. There is also just as many upper middle class,
old aged pensioners amongst its audience. Like the RA - the RHA annual
show hangs the hundreds of works - floor to ceiling. This is both its
joy and its nightmare. The democratic nature of the hang - can destroy
the prestige of a living master and heighten the efforts of the crass
amateur. The jumble sale quality of the show -is disorientating and
mind numbing.
I went to cruelly criticize - and praise only when struck by
excellence. But I found the whole experience so depressing that I was
plunged into introverted self-analysis. Of course the fiercest critics
of artists - are other artists - and I am no different. As I looked
around the exhibition - my heart felt utterly broken. Canvas after
canvas on wall after wall - leered, laughed and cackled at me! I saw
hundreds of drawings and paintings I would have been embarrassed to
have painted never mind signed and exhibited. I felt mocked and run
over by an army of mediocrity! My mind was battered by uncertainty and
unanswerable questions. How mad was I really? Just how bad was my
egotism, persecution manic, and Messiah complex? Why did I (in the
full midst of my abject failure as an artist, man and Dublin
intellectual) still think I was one of the top three artists in Irish
art history! LMAO! Why did I still believe this when I had been so
comprehensively rejected by virtually everyone in the Irish art
world? But then what kind of value did their opinion have when this
RHA stuff was the kind of **** they produced? Looking around the
sprawling spaces of the RHA I wondered if this was the best living
Irish artists could come up with? Was this the competition that was
holding me back?
I know art is not a science - it is not even a sport. There are no
objective criteria one can use to 'prove' that someone is a great
artist. - though there are quite a lot of ones that can tell you an
artist is not. There are a few guides to greatness; Degrees and
Masters, art prizes, influence on other artists, the number and
prominence of exhibitions, art magazine covers, sales, reproduction
rights, and society column inches (by which guide I am a virtual zero
and these RHA's are somebodies - at least in Ireland). But all these
will tell you is who is flavor of the month - it will not tell you if
an artist has any real long-term importance.
What that means I knew is that apart from a few dozen fashionable
artists - universally praised and admired (at least in the short term)
- there are over two million artists world wide whose work will always
be in a state of flux - neither admired nor condemned - merely filling
up living room walls or gallery floors. I know that no one sets out
to be mediocre - but that is what virtually everyone ends up being -
no matter how long they train - in no matter what art college, under
whatever art tutor, supported by no matter what major art gallery and
praised by no matter what art critic.
Snapping out of my self-pity I hunted for works that could inspire
something in me - anything. There were some real gems in the RHA show
- including some very strong charcoal drawings, some beautiful
landscapes and some telling portraits. Overall I thought it is a
stronger year than the previous one. I loved Joe Dunne's 'Portrait of
Cara.' In which he perfectly captured the shy awkwardness of a young
girl and although it is clearly a contemporary portrait - it still
possessed a classical restraint and subtlety utterly lacking in the
other more gaudy and incompetent portraits in the exhibition. I also
admired a small canvas by Hughie O'Donoughue - in which he had
collaged an old black and white photograph and page from a book -
which he had then over painted with a thin amberish stain and smear of
luscious amber paint. It had an inner glow to it that is magical. This
work confirmed O'Donoughue again in my mind as one of the very best
manipulators of oil paint in the UK. John Bellany CBE, RA, HRSA was
represented by a far more ambitious and well-executed canvas than last
year. But again - as with last year it seemed drunkenly unfinished and
unpolished.
Stephen McKenna PRHA, Mick O'Dee RHA, Michael Cullen ARHA and Richard
Gormon RHA were all big disappointments - their work seems to get
worse year by year. Thomas Ryan PPRHA is as God awful as ever - I
seriously think he should have got an eye operation years ago - he
certainly should not be allowed to drive a car! He claims to be an
upholder of the realist tradition - but his realism is that of the
cataract suffer! I saw for the first time drawings by James Hanley RHA
- which proved conclusively what I had always thought about his work -
namely that it is schematic, rigid and devoid of any real human
feeling or sensitivity.
Nick Miller RHA, was another disappointment - since I am a big fan of
his work. But I found his 'Portrait of Kevin Volans' repulsive, slimy
and about twenty-five years out of fashion (it is all very Neo-
Expressionism alla 1982). Minor artists I have known personally in the
past like Oisin Roche, Mary Canty and Katy Simpson all looked
permanently tenth rate.
Yet again I was unimpressed with the crass photo-realism of Martin
Gale RHA. But when I looked again at one of his works in the catalogue
I was shocked at how good it looked in reproduction. Then I pulled out
a Robert Ballagh catalogue from the year before and found the same
thing true. Of course it all made perfect sense - art based on
photography - looks like **** as painting - but seen in reproduction
it seems far more technically accomplished.
In 1936, Walter Benjamin the great Marxist critic stated (in his
famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')
- that reproduction would eliminate the 'aura' of the art object. In
actual fact he is completely wrong. The exact opposite has happened.
Because we live in a work filled with reproductions -art lovers crave
the reality of the art object as seen in person - and this is
strangely as true with conceptual art and modern sculpture as it is
with oil paintings. I firmly believe that a great art work has an
'aura' to it - something that grabs and holds your attention in a room
full of hundreds of other posturing canvases and sculptures. Counter-
wise I believe that all bad art has an anti-aura - something that
screams - this is fake and soulless! I saw only a handful of works in
the RHA that had an aura of greatness- but I saw hundreds with an anti-
aura.
Yet again the sculpture struck me as the utter pits of the
exhibition. The vast majority of the sculptural work was twee, kitsch,
trivial, childish, commercial brick-a-brack. But I also sensed
something more unsettling (an anti-aura) about the work of sculptors
like Eilis O'Connell ARHA and Alan Counihan and a few others I can't
remember. Their brand spanking new 'clever -clever' pastiches of
contemporary sculpture were utterly soulless and devoid of even a
sliver of originality. These were the 'high-art' sculptural
equivalents of fake IPods.
I have never sent any of my work in to the RHA and I doubt I ever
will. I hate their pompous titles and smug self-satisfaction. But I do
respect it as one of the last bastions of traditional skills in
drawing, painting and sculpture. But the problem is - even at their
very best these RHA members are nothing better than tenth rate. What
is worse is that many of them are teachers! How can artists who
struggle so clearly to master their mediums - hope to teach young
artists with even less knowledge? It is all a sad case of the blind
leading the blind!


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