All posts tagged RA

Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change @ the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.

But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.

Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition

So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:

‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’

A theme of our times

These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:

‘no world’ from ‘An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters’ by Kara Walker, Hon RA (2010) British Museum, London © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

Mixing ancient and modern

Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.

Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (around 1770) The Menil Collection, Houston Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston

So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.

Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by showing Yinka Shonibare (2023) Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Exhibition premise

The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.

So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:

  • portray rich slave owners and their plantations
  • portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
  • more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation

These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.

As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:

But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.

I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.

Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author

The videos

What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:

In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.

This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.

The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.

So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.

Responses

This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.

But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.

It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.

If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.

To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.

So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).

Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:

The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.

It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.

One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.

It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.

1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.

2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:

Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.

3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.

4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.

5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.

6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.

All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.

Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.

I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.

To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.

But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of  both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.

7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.

The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:

But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.

After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.

Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author

Labels or works?

As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.

Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.

Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.

Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.

Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.

And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)

And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.

The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.

The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.

All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.

Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.

Installation view of ‘Naming the Money’ by Lubaina Himid RA (2004) © Lubaina Himid. Photo by the author.

Warning

As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.

Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.

Tate did it in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:

This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.

Accompanied by warnings at the entrances to individual rooms that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.

P.S.

I got chatting to Lee, one half of the gay couple who live opposite, just as I was heading off to the Summer Exhibition, which prompted him to tell me that he has cancelled his friendship of the Royal Academy because he’s so fed up up of being lectured and harangued about race. As he said half a dozen times, ‘OK, I get it, yes, I get it, I get it, slavery was bad, I get it’. When he goes to an exhibition he wants to see good works and be given enough useful context to enjoy them, not be presented with rooms of mediocre or bad art whose sole purpose is to hit the visitor over the head with the same points about the British Empire and the slave trade.

Interesting. He’s young. He’s gay. Part of the ‘diverse and inclusive’ audience the RA and other galleries loudly claim to be attracting. Yet he was so turned off by the incessant lecturing about race that he cancelled his membership. So it’s not just middle-aged straight men like me then.

Related links

Related reviews

Other posts about slavery and racism

Origins

The Islamic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade

The American civil war and slavery

Slave accounts

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by Simon on March 16, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/entangled-pasts-1768-to-now-art-colonialism-and-change-royal-academy/

Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Moses and Monotheism’ was Freud’s last published work, written when he was wracked by painful cancer of the jaw, and anxiety about the Nazis who had taken over his native Austria in March 1938. This relatively short pamphlet (just 50 pages in the Pelican Freud Library edition) is characterised by much hesitancy, repetition and apologies, most unlike Freud and unlike the ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940)’ written at the same time, which is a masterpiece of confidence and brevity.

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

The Bible tells us Moses was born the son of poor Israelites in bondage in Egypt who abandoned him in a basket and let him drift down the river where he was found by a princess of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by Pharaoh. Freud says Moses was an Egyptian for two reasons:

1) his name takes the same form as the Egyptian suffix for child, ‘mosis’, frequently added to parental forms, thus Tuth-Mosis or Ra-Mosis (Rameses) mean child of Tut and Ra.

2) The second reason is longer. Otto Rank, Freud’s faithful amanuensis, in 1909 wrote ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’ which shows a surprising similarity between ancient myths of heroes. Sargon, Cyrus, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Gilgamesh – according to Rank, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand up to his father. Almost always the hero is made the child of an aristocratic couple – then oracles or prohibitions lead the father to decide to abandon him – he is found and reared by a lowly family (or even animal, in Romulus’s case) – and returns in glory to take revenge on his father and become the leader of the people.

Rank/Freud psychoanalyse all these stories as fictional reworkings of every child’s prehistory. The child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his parents – they are the king and queen of fairy tale. Later, disappointed by their banality and weakness, the child figures himself the real son of an aristocratic family who have for some reason abandoned him to these two losers. This pattern of fantasy, repeated by all children, Freud names the Family Romance. Thus the two families of myth are one. (Freud doesn’t mention it but also this myth helps ratify the power of whichever strong leader arises to rule the tribe by linking him in a subterranean way with the established royal line.)

Fine. But the Moses myth actually stands out from this pattern because the process is reversed: his first family are lowly Israelites, his second family, from which he must rebel, royal. Freud says the other way of considering this myth is to realise that the first family (i.e. the long-lost aristocratic family which the angry child constructs for itself in the Family Romance) is always a figment. Why not apply this to the Moses myth? Thus, the lowly Israelite family is a figment added by later chroniclers, to explain the embarrassing fact that their national leader was in fact an Egyptian aristocrat.

2. If Moses Was An Egyptian… (40 pages)

According to Freud, Moses was a follower of the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaten. As a result of the military exploits of the great pharaoh Tuthmosis III, hero of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt ruled a vast empire stretching from Sudan in the south as far as Syria and Mesopotamia in the East. Around 1375 BC, towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the young Pharaoh Amenophis IV came to power. The Empire was dominated by a complicated theology involving hundreds of local gods – some of the most important of which were Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Amon, god of life. Maybe no religion in history has been so obsessed with the afterlife and ensuring the safe passage of its leaders to Elysium (witness the Pyramids).

Amanhotep IV came to power and set about replacing the polytheism of his people with belief in one god, Aten. He changed his name to incorporate the new deity – Akhenaten. This is commonly held to be the first monotheistic religion in the world. But, as Freud dryly remarks, barely did you have monotheism before you had persecution. Akhenaten supervised the destruction of existing gods’ statues and struck the names of earlier gods off stelae.

The new emperor, obsessed with his religious reforms, ignored the state of the Empire which began to suffer from enemy incursions. The affronted priests, the frustrated generals and the common people angry at the loss of their traditional gods rose up and overthrew Akhenaten, whose end is obscure. He died in 1358 BC. Briefly his son-in-law ruled, a boy called Tutankhaten who was forced to change his name to remove the offending Aten-suffix and replace it with the name of the traditional god, Amun: Tutankhamen. The old gods returned and there was a time of civil war. Around 1350 BC the Eighteenth Dynasty ended. This much is historical fact. (cf Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten).

What we know of Akenhaten and his new religion is found at the ruins of the new capital he tried to establish around the new worship; after his fall this was sacked and plundered. But enough remains to give an indication of what his religion was like. Akhenaten’s was the first attempt at monotheism recorded anywhere in the world. It preached one sole god, creator of the universe. It proscribed magic and ritual; no visual imagery has been found of Aten. Lastly there is no mention of the dead, of an afterlife, of the all-powerful death god Osiris who dominates orthodox Egyptian worship. Suspiciously like what came to be called Judaism, eh?

In the Bible Moses is described as being a great Egyptian general before he discovers the truth about his Jewish lineage; surely it is clear, says Freud, that he was a great Egyptian general fighting for the new Pharoah, and that the chaos caused by the overthrow gave him the opportunity to take away a whole people and subject them to Akhenaten’s monotheism, now overthrown in the land of its birth. A clue is given by circumcision, a common Egyptian practice which Moses imposed on his new people.

But Moses’ beliefs never really caught on except among the narrow circle of his Egyptian soldiery. After years of tyrannical rule the Jews rose up and killed their leader, Moses (cf Freud’s fantasies about early human societies in ‘Totem and Taboo’, the Oedipus myth and the passion of Christ).

According to the historians Freud refers to, soon afterwards another part of the Jewish people, meeting at Kadesh near the Midianite kingdom, adopted belief in Yahweh, a volcano god from the Saudi peninsula.

(Freud observes the interesting correlation between Yahweh and Jove, ‘the thunderer’. A cult of the volcano god may have derived from the cataclysm which swept away ‘Atlantis’ i.e. the Minoan civilisation about 1300BC i.e. a generation or two after Akhenaten. Freud speculates that the cataclysm may also have swept away the prevailing matriarchies in favour of a powerful masculine thunder god.)

Some Jews, then, adopted the new religion of Yahweh; the others clung to the memory of their Egyptian exile and the great leader. At a further stage the two parts of the tribe became reunited. After negotiations it was decided to coalesce the two histories: the national liberator became a servant of Yahweh. This coalition explains discrepancies in the story, one Moses being violent and impatient (as you’d expect a great general to be) the other, the founder of the Yahweh cult, gentle and mild. Soon afterwards the Jews were ready to invade Canaan and set up a nation state.

The historical record is thus: The events of the Exodus c 1300 BC. Of the first four books of the Pentateuch the oldest part was written by J (since he refers to God as Yahweh or Jehovah) around 1000 BC; sometime later bits were added by E (so-called because he refers to God as Elohim). After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC a Jewish priest combined J and E and added some of his own material. In the seventh century the fifth book, Deuteronomy, is added. In the period after the destruction of the Temple, 586 BC, the revision known as the Priestly Code was made. The Jewish character and religion was finalised by the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.

It is during this process that the teachings of Judaism are formulated, that Moses and his monotheism are given an honourable prequel in the lives of the Patriarchs, all of whom are given initial contacts with Yahweh and the special covenant devised. That retrospective fabrication parallels the prospective history as the Prophets call the people of Israel back to the pure monotheism of Moses and that tradition becomes more central.

(Freud then rehearses his earlier theory: the human family, i.e. early communities, underwent a similar history to individual families: early trauma, repression, latency, puberty and return of the repressed. Thus some early trauma occurred in prehistory and its resultant neurosis is religion – ‘Totem and Taboo’, the exiled brothers band together to overthrow the father of the horde, kill him, eat him. This is the origin of law and morality; law because they realise they can’t all have what the father possessed; morality because they create a ban on incest. The tribe sets up a totem animal as a representative of the father’s authority and a guarantor of the new morality. In the course of time the animal totem is humanised into a god, maybe with animal parts or accompanied by an animal. This involves into polytheism where the gods jostle under civil constraint (as the sons do). And eventually to the return of the repressed Father as a single god of unlimited dominion.)

The uniquely monotheistic tradition of the Jews accounts for their uniquely concentrated guilt. Their idea of being the Chosen of God gave them a unique sense of coherence and high calling. And the high spirituality and concern with morality associated with Jews is connected with their Advance In Intellectuallity:

  • their prohibition of all graven images (so you can only think about God)
  • the embodiment of religion in texts which have to be guarded and interpreted by sophisticated schools of rabbis
  • their diaspora after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD which made preservation of the texts and their right interpretation essential

Finally, the repressed guilt returns in the figure of Paul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who sets out a theology around the figure of an obscure Nazarene preacher. The Good News is that the (repressed) historic guilt is atoned for, says Paul, and we have entered a new era of Love. The Son has atoned for the primal guilt all of us sons feel, having inherited the guilt of the primal crime. Christianity was able to reintroduce many elements of the old Atum religion, and incorporated elements from its time – a mother goddess, lesser gods (the angels), a dark spirit (Satan) much magic and spells, an afterlife with a heaven and hell. It represents a step back intellectually from Judaism but – in analytical terms, in terms of dealing with guilt and the unconscious – it is a step forward.

Antisemitism

Is due to specific historic reasons: 1) the Jews’ outsiderness and 2) their surprising success at intellectual activities for their numbers. Also 3) a deep resentment among their ‘host’ populations, of their supposed arrogance, of their thinking they are the ‘Chosen’ people. And also due, Freud thinks, to 4) their not having consciously acknowledged responsibility for killing the Father. The Christians can say we killed our Father-returned-as-the-Son, we acknowledge it, we live in a new era, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of all of us; but the Jews won’t face it. Paul reformed Judaism by re-enacting its repressed secret and in so doing made Judaism a fossil.

How does all this work?

Freud gives a resume of the topographical theory of the psyche: ego, id and the repressed. He then says analysis has shown that children appear to remember an archaic heritage, composed of memory traces of the childhood of the race ‘memory traces of the experiences of earlier generations!’ (volume 13, page 345)

If we assume the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic…Men have always known in this special way that they had a primal father and that they killed him.

The crucial premise is that these events are stored in the unconscious; because only unconscious forces are capable of generating the amount of irrational compulsion we see produced by religion. A rational response to clearly perceived events would lead to discussion etc. Only the unconscious can produce such forces. And after a period similar to the latency period in individuals, the Prophets mark a pubescent revival of the original fervour. Freud then goes on to explain the mechanism of pride associated with advances in intellectuality. Renouncing instinctive wishes is, in a sense, automatic for the ego. But it can bring definite affects from the superego. The superego of the Jews is the memory of Moses; with every renunciation of the life of the spirit, the Jews acquired more pride.

The superego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents who supervised his actions in the first period of his life. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the superego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt as pride. (13:364)

So, according to Freud, the Jew’s pride is based on:

  1. renunciation of primitive wishes by the adoption of monotheism and becoming the Chosen people
  2. the evident growth in ethical and intellectual superiority this led to

Both achievements, alas, only generated more resentment of the Jews in the less psychologically advanced populations they found themselves living among, whether that was first century Romans, nineteenth century Russians or twentieth century Germans.

Thoughts

Freud was right to adopt a tentative and hesitant tone in this, his last published work, because pretty much every expert in ancient history, the history of the Jews or Egyptians, regards the book as a farrago of distortions, fantasy and wild speculations. I enjoyed the judgement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who described Freud’s theories about the origins of Judaism as ‘painfully absurd’.

Freud’s speculations about early history (Totem and Taboo, Moses), and to some extent his naive and obsessive attacks on religion, demonstrate what a fool a clever thinker can make of themselves when they stray well beyond their field of expertise, especially when they start dabbling in big cultural and historical speculations. Stick to what you know.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘Moses and Monotheism’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 13 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1985.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)

More Freud reviews

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by Simon on July 10, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Psychoanalysis
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Posted by Simon on July 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/moses-and-monotheism-sigmund-freud/

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2015

The 247th Royal Academy Summer show and about the sixth one I’ve visited. Maybe familiarity is dulling the impact but nothing here really set me alight, as I’m sure it has in the past. The reverse: I am getting used to seeing the same names, styles and approaches cropping up year after year, which gives it rather the feel of a local school fete, with all the usual stalls, manned by the usual enthusiastic volunteers.

Still, with 1,131 items on display, in almost every conceivable medium, in every size and covering a vast range of subject matter, most of them for sale at prices from bargain basement to outrageous, there is plenty to like, dislike or say ‘My God, how much?’ to.

In the courtyard, an enormous metal assemblage of rusting metal girders arranged in Vorticist rectangles, cubes and geometrical shapes – The Dappled Light of The Sun by Conrad Shawcross RA (b.1977). The sun came out and did, in fact, dapple us as we walked under it.

Inside, the steps leading up from the foyer to the main galleries had been painted with crazy day-glo stripes by Jim Lambie (b.1964). Looks good from above.

Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA unveiling a new site-specific artwork by Jim Lambie for the Summer Exhibition 2015 © David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA unveiling a new site-specific artwork by Jim Lambie for the Summer Exhibition 2015 © David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

Part of the hang is, apparently, to have painted the rooms in bold colours – turquoise, magenta – which I thought were simply the kind of Farrow & Ball pastel backdrops you get at any exhibition until I read about them. Each of the rooms is allotted to a different curator to make a personal selection and all have a wall panel explaining the thinking behind the selection and layout. Though some of the rooms have a distinct feel – a few felt empty apart from a small number of large works, the sculpture room felt cluttered with objects on racks, plinths and the floor, the architecture room was filled with tables supporting utopian cityscapes – for the most part the wall panel explanations bore little relationship to the actual sensory experience.

I liked, or at least noticed, the following:

In the first room, the hexagonal Wohl Central Hall, centrally placed on a plinth is a life-size replica of a Greek statue made out of slices of coloured plastic – Captcha No.11 (Doryphoros) by Matthew Darbyshire (b.1977). Above it hung Liam Gillick’s Applied Projection Rig, the use of bright colour and plastic, in this, the statue and the painted stairs, all feeling a bit 1960s.

The Central Hall of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

The Central Hall of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

The second room was painted a shocking pink. Above the door were hung half a dozen fluorescent tubes shaped into circles with writing, as pioneered above American diners in the 1950s – Homo Bulla (Man Is A Bubble) by Michael Landy RA (b.1963). The writing was in a cursive script so neither of us could read what they said, but they were pretty.

On the left, in the photo below, you can see Untitled (Watch) by Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA (b.1941). Craig-Martin specialises in turning ordinary objects into highly stylised square-on line drawings, slightly like the precise technical drawing style of the later Tintin cartoons, filled in with bright unshaded primary colours. Later rooms featured Fragment Coffee Cup (screenprint £3,000), Fragment Briefcase (£3,000) and so on.

Gallery III of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

Gallery III of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

A small panel of arrow shapes in a rigid geometric lines and bright colours created an optical illusion. Thorns 11 (£6,000) was one of a series of related works by Tessa Jaray RA (b.1937), which also included Borromini’s Balustrade (£12,000) and Light 2 (Diptych) (£18,000). Jagged, entrancing.

My son liked a big painting of a red tree, Tree No.7 by Tony Bevan RA (b.1951), visible on the right in the pink photo above. In a later room I liked Cork Dome by David Nash OBE RA (b.1945). A few years ago an exhibition of his large wood sculptures was hosted at Kew Gardens, where they fitted right in. This one would have sat better in a large room full of similar works.

I liked A Fall of Ordinariness and Light by Jessie Brennan (b.1982) which looked like a charcoal sketch of a 1960s Brutalist council block but is in fact a treated digital print, but had then been rumpled and creased. I’m a sucker for any painting or image which has been degraded, has fraying edges, bits of newspaper, card or wood or real-world detritus stuck on it, a key characteristic of Modern Art since Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Picasso and Braque pasted newspaper fragments onto canvas, but which always excites me. As if the work is reaching out of its frame into the real world. Or is infected by the universal crappiness of the dusty, diesel-fume, swirling-litter-and-peeling-posters-on-broken-hoardings reality of the cityscapes which imprison us.

I write a blog about walks in the country on which I take photos of landscapes and buildings, generally adopting the same square-on approach, carefully framing the subject so it has equal space above and below and to either side. Which explains why I warmed to Red Roof (£345) a photo by Rachel Mallalieu. You can hear the sea and feel the cracking of the shingle as you walk across it.

Waiting for Spring (£525) a linocut by Louise Stebbing, charming prints following in the footsteps of Ravilious and a thousand others hymning the English countryside. Follow Louise Stebbing on twitter.

My son particularly liked this atmospheric oil painting of what you see in the car headlights alone at night in the middle of nowhere – the kind of scene you see in movies hundreds of times but rarely see depicted in ‘art’ – Luther Road by Donna McLean, who was also represented by Sarah Lund.

Round the corner, in the relatively small Gallery I, hung an enormous tapestry by everyone’s favourite cross-dresser, Grayson Perry CBE RA (b.1960). Julie and Rob is a large cartoon, is it not, a deliberate reduction of line and colour to an almost Simpsons-like level of simplicity. A snip at £69,600, but then – it is enormous!

Julie and Rob (2013) Grayson Perry CBE RA Courtesy the artist, Paragon/Contemporary Editions and Victoria Miro, London

Julie and Rob (2013) by Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist, Paragon/Contemporary Editions and Victoria Miro, London

Hanging on the wall next to the tapestry, my son really liked Window With Screen No.2 (£10,000) by David Tindle RA (b.1932). He thought it was nice and relaxing. Near it was a watercolour of the small figure of a man walking across burning fields, Fire Burnt The Land Like A Language (£5,000) by David Firmstone MBE. I like Modernist angularity in paintings and sculptures, and a certain amount of dirty realism ie showing the world as it actually is, and I liked the poignancy of the smallness of the human figure.

In the same spirit I liked Forsaken in acrylic and pen (£1,000) by Deborah Batt. It has the squareness I like and the realism of a graffiti-covered world but transmuted into something clearer and simpler, on the way towards the style of a graphic comic, maybe.

Liking objets trouvés and applied to the surface of a work, I liked Periscope Dazzle (£450) by Stuart Newman, a round hollow metal cog used to frame the image of a battleship as seen from a U-boat periscope. I liked the tarnished rust effect round the outside of the cog.

The Architecture room

There’s always a room devoted to architecture which I humorously think of as the Room of Shame, where high-minded fantasists create utopian cityscapes made of perfect loops and shapes, completely ignoring the reality of the dirty, polluted, congested cityscapes they have so far managed to create for us lowly proles to actually inhabit.

For example, Silicon Roundabout is the title of a shiny photograph by Grant Smith of the Old Street roundabout in London, centre of a lot of hype about London becoming a hub of digital/internet technology as important as Silicon Valley in California. I commute via this tube station twice a day and walk along the side of the hoarding in the centre of the photo which has the words ‘White Collar Factory’ printed on it, and the experience is one of jostling overcrowding, diesel pollution from the endless buses, and grit, sand and dust filling eyes, nose and hair from the permanent building sites surrounding the roundabout. This photo makes it look stylish and modern but it is a horrible, anti-human space. How many of the other shiny photos, architects designs and ‘artists’ sketches’ in this room conceal similarly degraded realities.

On the walls and liberally displayed on angular tables were the usual science fiction fantasies of vast air terminals or futuristic cities (some of which have actually been built in China or some such far-off places). In addition, this year, the walls were lined with the wise sayings of various architects and critics. Far more than artists, architects fancy themselves as gurus, as designers of life, as creators of whole ideal environments for people to live in (strangely heedless of the traffic-dominated, windswept, plastic-shopping-centre nightmares most English towns have become under their guidance).

‘Where people meet, ideas collide and inventions begin,’ was the contribution from Richard George Rogers, Baron Rogers of Riverside, CH, Kt, FRIBA, FCSD, HonFREng (b.1933). Next to it these words from Piers Gough (b.1946): ‘Of course, architecture is really inventive land escape.’ The ‘of course’ says everything, everything you need to know about the lofty, de haut en bas, guru-to-his-disciples spirit in which World Architecture and its superstars operate. The play on words in ‘land escape’, well…

The funniest thing about the Room of Shame was the way these engineers of the human soul, these people who claim to understand human nature intimately and deeply enough to create entire city and townscapes catering to our every need, had designed tables holding their fantastical designs which featured gaps between the models at about bum height…

Since this was the fifth or six room in the show, quite obviously a number of visitors had done the entirely natural thing and leant or even perched on these empty bits of table. With the result that big signs had had to be fixed to the tables in every possible perching space shouting DO NOT SIT – beautifully epitomising the failure of groovy modern design to understand the most basic of human needs, the need for a bit of a sit-down and a rest. Reminding me of the NO BALL GAMES, NO PLAYING signs on the green spaces of a thousand council blocks I’ve seen over the decades. ‘We have designed these masterpieces of philosophical architecture,’ the signs say: ‘Now don’t you dare mess them up by actually living in them’.

My son – who is studying Biology – really liked the Urban Flora Propagation Field Box (£4,000) by Laurence Pinn, Ben Kirk and Andrew Diggle, and was genuinely upset by the strident DO NOT TOUCH sign next to it. God forbid children should get interested in science or try out, test and play with a bit of scientific equipment. Our work is to admire, not to use.

In the same spirit we both liked the chess set where the pieces were miniature versions of famous buildings and – we realised – black represented modern buildings (the Shard, the Gherkin, the Mobile Phone) and white represented old (Tower Bridge, St Paul’s). Franklin’s Morals of Chess (Jade) (£1,960) by Karl Singporewala, a nifty reworking of the perennial theme of the Battle of Ancient and Moderns. But which, inevitably, had a big sign next to it saying DO NOT TOUCH. God forbid people should actually play a game with it…

Explore more images from the architecture room

Back to art

Oddly for a room of architecture designs, on one wall hung 40 etchings of the Galapagos islands in the distinctive black-and-white and easily enjoyable style of Norman Ackroyd CBE RA (b.1938). Birds wheeling, guano-covered cliffs, crashing waves. His etchings appear every year but are usually seascapes of the Orkney and Shetland islands and, sure enough, in another room are works with titles like Whitby, Gannets on Flannen, Thirsk Hall in winter, Morning Sunlight Bempton. Priced from £500 to £1,000 these would be lovely objects to own.

In the next room was an example of the instantly recognisable style of Cathy de Monchaux (b.1960) – Asylum (£28,000) – a kind of shallow vitrine containing a miniature scene constructed from copper wire, medical plasters, pigment, feathers and silk, the delicacy and medieval fantasy subject matter – apparently some unicorns in a wood – contrasting vividly? poignantly? strikingly? with the metallic modern-ness of the materials.

My son liked what looked like two big boards or sides of wooden crates, onto whose visible grain small images had been painted – Noon Fishing and Dawn Fishing by Mick Moon RA (b.1937). So did I for the reasons outlined above about enjoying the involvement of rough or raw materials in art.

Michael Craig-Martin (b.1941) who I mentioned earlier, has always seemed to me the artistic father of cool Young British Artist Julian Opie (b.1958); whereas C-M applies a hard-outlined brightly-coloured approach to objects, Opie creates large bright cartoon-style images of people, most famously in his cover art for the Best of Blur album back in 2000. This year he is represented by Tourist with Beard (screenprint with hand painting) (£8,600) and Walking in the Rain, Seoul (£23,500).

Julian Opie Walking in the rain, Seoul From Walking in the rain (2015)

Julian Opie – Walking in the rain, Seoul from Walking in the rain (2015)

Allen Jones RA (b.1937), recently the beneficiary of a major retrospective at the RA, featured with some of the yellow, cartoon-like, soft porn paintings he does nowadays – Second Thoughts and Salome. Writing ‘cartoon’ reminds me of the Craig-Martin and Opie and, indeed, the Grayson Perry. Is it a trend to treat objects and the human figure as if they were idealised shop window mannekins?

Anthony Green RA always appears in the show, with six of his quirky, cartoony (that word again) portrayals of domestic life (often his own) – a kind of ruder, hairier, male version of Beryl Cook. The Birds: A Second Marriage and The Bureau: Afternoon Sun give you the flavour of his comic realism, often with the canvas or surface itself cut out around the shape of an object in the image, like the artist’s face or glasses. Maybe there is no trend. Maybe I’m just realising that I like cartoons. Cartoons and photographs.

Professor David Mach RA (b.1956)’s enormous sculpture of a gorilla made from coathangers was the outstanding work of the 2010 show. This year he was represented by six works of which I only noticed Sunimi and a golden Buddha, both a tad pricey at £29,500. (Article about Mach)

Because I like novelty, sculpture and harsh subject matter, I immediately liked Margaret Proudfoot’s War Work (Ypres), a three-yard-square map of the field boundaries of a patch of the Ypres battlefield made entirely of barbed wire (£3,500), striking, original, entirely fitting, horrible to contemplate (or touch) yet totally fragile, the photo doesn’t do its scale or its delicacy justice.

In front of it was an over-lifesize dominating sculpture by Michael Sandle RA (b.1936) – As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap: An Allegory (Acknowledgements to Holman Hunt) – a parody or spoof of Holman Hunt’s famous 1853 pre-Raphaelite painting, The Light of The World, in which the figure of Jesus has been dressed in modern fighter pilot outfit and helmet, clutching the decapitated heads of the innocent children he’s bombed to death, and with Hunt’s illuminating lantern converted into some kind of death ray machine. It’s almost as if the artist is telling us that War is Bad.

On the wall, to the left of the pilot’s head, you can see I Just Want To Be Held, a c-type print by Deborah Brown (£700) a photo of the torso of a (lean shapely) young woman with what appeared to be the hairs or shoots of cactus buds emerging from her smooth skin. My son liked the title, I liked the smooth contours, we both liked the ‘conceit’ or ‘concept’ or ‘gag’. In the past I’ve complained to my companions about the prevalence of boring old painted nudes at the show: mention of this example prompts me to comment there were surprisingly few, if any, full female nudes this year.

My son liked two photos of ruined buildings with incongruous objects in them – Chaise in Morning Room (£495) by Sara Qualter & Bill Baillie, and Thicket by Susanne Moxhay (£795). I know what he meant, but they were a little too stagey for me. Room IX might have been my favourite, with the barbed wire, the cactus nude, and a whole load of striking photos, including two by Robin Friend – Gaewern Slate Mine (Abandoned 1970) (£8,500) and Exit Test (£5,500).

Back in room II, the guide highlighted (among many other works all hung close together) three portraits – of Simon Cowell, Damian Hirst and Grayson Perry (see below). I thought they were all dire, and indicative of the very wide range of ability, success and failure, which is always on display here. You pays your money and you really does take your choice.

Works on display in Gallery II of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

Works on display in Gallery II of the Summer Exhibition 2015 (c) David Parry, Royal Academy of Arts

The final gallery (X) is entirely dedicated to a work by Tom Phillips titled A Humument: he has spent thirty years systematically decorating, defacing and redesigning the pages of an obscure second-hand book, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. We are invited a) to understand this, and then b) to examine 40 or 50 of the the fairly small (6 inches by 4 inches?) pages thus artified. According to the website linked to above, he has completed some 367 pages so far, and still hasn’t finished. This is how they were hung.

And after this, the Exit and the brightly-lit Shop, full of all sorts of attractive merchandise.

The Summer Exhibition Explorer

For the first time the RA has made all 1,131 items available to view via the Summer Exhibition Online Explorer, which you can explore by gallery or by artist, where you can take tours or sample selections. This allows a completely new relationship with the art because you could, for example, surf every single piece before you go, and seek out ‘in real life’ what you fancied as a 2-inch-square photo. Or, after visiting, you can check back on something you thought you liked to see if you still do. You could just surf the images and decide you’d ‘done’ the show but this would be a mistake, as works of art a) are (obviously) all much bigger than depicted on a little computer screen b) have an impact in real life, to do with size and texture and presence and feel, which can only be felt in their presence.

What surfing it did for me, after returning from the show, was made me realise just how many pieces I hadn’t really seen or engaged with because, in any one visit, you can only notice so much, be engaged with so many works. Made me realise I should probably go back, in a different mood, at a different time of day, and I would probably enjoy a completely different selection of the vast array of art on show.

Related links

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on June 22, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 22, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2015/