For this year's Banquet Exhibition the RHA has come up with something which goes well beyond novelty value: it has asked five critics (Bruce Arnold, Dorothy Walker, Aidan Dunne, Gerald Davis and Medb Ruane) to nominate their respective choice of artists for a kind of ideal Academy. (My own role is restricted to contributing an essay in the catalogue; I have had no say in selecting the works on view). There is also, in accordance with recent tradition, a large and rather heterogeneous selection of works by the academicians themselves, which on the whole is rather a so-so affair and is hung, for my taste, rather densely and not very advantageously. This exhibition, though worth seeing in itself, must take second place to the critics' choice. Medb Ruane, who is given ample space on the ground floor, opts for a selection heavily tilted towards installation, conceptual and video pieces, which on the whole look rather out of place in this particular context. Alanna O'Kelly, Andrew Kearney and Paul O'Neill are among those included, but the work I liked best was Daphne Wright's Still Life: Greenhouse, which has some similarities with the work of Rachel Whiteread, though stressing "open" volumes rather than mass. Made of plaster and wire, it is effectively placed and more or less holds the whole rather random-seeming area together.
Aidan Dunne's choice is, on the whole, middle of the road without being dully eclectic; he goes predominantly for painters, who include Barrie Cooke, Charles Tyrrell, Mick Cullen and Sean McSweeney. Janet Mullarney is virtually the only sculptor included. Perhaps this is the kind of area towards which the RHA ought to be tending - some would say that it already is, over the last few years - since it stresses "quality" and painterliness rather than complex questions of style.
Gerald Davis, too, aims at a roughly similar area of taste, even if his selection is rather more idiosyncratic and contains slightly fewer established names - though John Kindness, John Shinnors, Brian Bourke, Graham Gingles, Charles Cullen and (again) Sean McSweeney are all solid choices with whom few unbiassed judges could disagree. Dorothy Walker boldly includes three architects - Shelley McNamara, John Meagher and Valerie Mulvin - an angle which I applaud, since architecture is a key area for academies; she also lays more stress on abstract art through Felim Egan, Eilis O'Connell and Michael Warren. As will be seen from this, her choice is also strong on sculpture, which offsets the general tendency to rely heavily on painters, and Margaret Fitzgibbon's The Ten Foolish and Wise Virgins, two facing rows of female heads in wax, is a witty and effective idea.
The choice by Bruce Arnold lays a welcome stress on young or younger artists - Oliver Comerford (an excellent painting on aluminium, in three parts), James Hanley, Tom Molloy, Sharon O'Malley - and he does not shirk from choosing some unfamiliar names. The most memorable work in this section, I thought, was the big, intricate painting Legacy by Sharon O'Malley, who looks more and more to be a genuine original with an imagination and imagery of her own, even if at times it does take on a dangerously literary tinge.
So, are these various views and ranges of taste compatible with each other? With due respect to Medb Ruane's generally live choice of exhibits, I would rule out conceptual and installation works from the RHA exhibitions; that is not where they belong, and besides, such works tend to throw things out of joint and out of focus. Many or most of the other critics' choices are sound, well-proven artists with a good track record, some are chosen more on promise than performance, some seem frankly lightweight and a certain number strike me as simply odd and arbitrary - but everybody to his, or her, taste!
If the RHA were to head simultaneously along the lines proposed by them all - that is, if such a consensus should prove to be at all practical, and assuming also that most of the artists involved would consent to become RAs or ARHAs, or even PRHAs - it would become rather an eclectic, middle-of-the-road institution, broadly based and neither reactionary nor consciously avant-garde. It would also, possibly, become rather characterless overall; but then, is it particularly characterful at present?
Such a policy would, however, undoubtedly raise its present standard, which after all has been its chief problem for years - the simple issue of getting enough talent on the walls each year has been the great issue. And after all it is talent, in the long run, through which exhibitions survive and succeed; the type of "manifesto" group show which aims to show new, challenging talent and break new ground is a different sort of animal altogether, and not what is wanted or needed in this particular area. In the end, some accommodation must be found with tradition, in the nourishing and not the inhibiting sense. Meanwhile, this exhibition represents a substantial step by the RHA towards putting its house into better order, something which obviously it has been striving to do over the past decade.
Until November 1st.
