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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
52June 2015
T
HE current Royal Hibernian
Academy president, Mick
O’Dea, highlights the Academy
as “exhibiting work that is
innovative and representative
of the broad spectrum of best practice
from here and abroad”.
The aspiration is admirable but
should you bother to inspect the present
show you will reveal it as a fiction.
Hyper-inflated self-praise is a hallmark
of RHA communication, artless as it
may be . Perhaps more artful are the
catchy titles for the artworks, a claim no
doubt, to postmodernity.
Art markets are created for finance
not excellence. O’Dea notes that
saw a “% increase in sales” and
gravely proclaims that “Ireland’s art
investment has clearly turned a corner”.
He sees the gallery as “the perfect spot-
ting ground for the aspiring and
discerning collector”. Amongst the
sponsors are the gullible buyers or deal-
ers. Better-known sponsors include
AXA Insurance, the ESB, and galleries
such as Adams, De Veres and Whytes,
with their attendant vested interests, as
well as the Ireland-US Council and the
Irish Arts Review, edited and presided
over by the elsewhere discerning John
Mulcahy.
The Academy niftily gleans a six-fig-
ure annual grant from the
Arts Council and dis-
penses in-house prize
money of €,
donated by the spon-
sors. The prizes in the
main go to members
in a comforting rota-
tion scheme.
Many RHA mem-
bers are
coincidentally also
members of Aosdána.
The Aosdána ethos of col-
lectivisation and cosy caucus
prevails at the RHA.
Members mixed up in Aosdána
include James Hanley, Veronica Bolay,
Diana Copperwhite, Gary Coyle, Michael
Cullen, Imogen Stuart (recently made a
Saoi by the Aosdána gang), Martin Gale,
Richard Gorman, Charles Harper, Gene
Lambert, Alice Maher, Stephen
McKenna, Carolyn Mulholland, Patrick
Pye, and Barbara Warren. Most of its
members receive the Arts Council
annual cnuas of €, to top up their
takings.
Underpass II by Eithne
Jordan RHA, sister of the
movie-making genius, is
probably the best of a
bad lot in the show,
with its Orson Welle-
sian bleak modernity
though the catalogue
does not record how
she weathers the com-
promises of
collectivisation among
the self-raised cream.
RHA members can, and
do, exhibit up to seven works
without any pre-selection process.
As to the rest, O’Dea is sanctimonious
about open submission for non-mem-
bers. They are permitted to present a
maximum of three works and try their
luck for inclusion at the annual exhibi-
tion. These artists totalled over ,
in . Director, Patrick T Murphy
The RHA’s
185th
Annual
Exhibition.
Review by
Kevin Kiely
Also in this section:
Obesity obeisance 54
Yeats’ poetry 56
Robert O’Byrne and the Beit
Foundation 59
CULTURE
Failing again to nd Caravaggio
Kevin Kiely
CULTURE
DIATRIBE
Exhibition 2015
June 2015 53
bestows laureates at the eight Academy
members giving five full days of their
time to inspect the open submissions
“not once but twice to select about %
of the artworks that have been submit-
ted”. As if emphasising the effort of that
second look, Murphy added “it is a rig-
orous and concentrated exercise”.
The high point according to the press
release, the exhibition catalogue, and
the newsletter comes from a third cate-
gory: invited artists. Tracey Emin’s
Wanting You – a neon fluorescent light:
basically a snow-white heart and the
text in pink. Limited edition at
€, per unit.
Emin, except for those afraid to admit
it, is a joke on the art scene, a loud Fury
purveying kitsch. But her offering to the
distinctly provincial RHA is taken seri-
ously as some sort of coup. Aidan Dunne
stated that her work “seems quite at
home” in Dublin. Does he not know you
can get neon lights to order in better
condition and a lot cheaper at any hard-
ware supplier? Behind Dunne’s tired
praise in the Irish Times is hyperbole
upon hyperbole (“probably one of the
best ever”) which does not reflect the
realities of the Royal Hibernian Acad-
emy or its dinosaurs, its council, board,
benefactors and staff.
Dunne’s lazy approach often amounts
to no more than blurb, with his praise
for Martin Gale’s Talking at Doonfeeny a
nadir: putting “people in the picture…
struggling in some way with the reality
of living in the country”. For the rest of
us what we see is actually Gale’s usual
oiled-up photorealism – a pier wall, high
tide, two windswept figures and a collie
dog. Gale’s daughter is a staffer at the
RHA.
The novelty act besides Emin’s neon is
Martin & Henri Gibbins’ ‘recycled’
Filthy Robot, looking like a Dr Who cast-
off found in a junk shop, or the Tin Man
gone wrong.
Dunne believes that in the academy:
“portrait painting has survived the
advent of the selfie”. He could not be
more wrong. Under the pervasive influ-
ence of Robert Ballagh, incidentally a
staunch Aosdána merchant himself, the
RHA purveys the ubiquitous school of
photorealism in oils. The group includes
Thomas Ryan who offers High Mass, St
Kevin’s in his perennial ‘out of focus’
oil-style. Carey Clarke is another dino-
saur following the standard
selfie-digital-portrait model. Clarke
presents Professor Lonergan of TCD in
this mode. O’Dea’s Christina and
Michael, a variation, is typical of the
crinkly-portrait school of photorealism.
The doyenne of this mode is Anita Shel-
bourne, up with a morbid collage and
acrylic of Maud Gonne.
My fantasy is that RHA members who
do portraits adopt the fraudulent Giclée
method. In other words: photographing
the subject, then resorting to the use of
inkjet printing directly onto a roll of
canvas and making reproductions of the
original two-dimensional artwork, pho-
tographs or computer-generated art.
After a little moral wrestling the result
might end up on the gallery wall as a
canvas, framed or unframed. Whether
most of the members can actually draw,
paint or sculpt to any high standard is
the great ne plus ultra of questions for
the Academy.
Landscapes predominate under the
influence of Sean McSweeney, “innate
colourist”, who is also present in the
show. His itchy and scratchy school of
art has been adopted by those who con-
stantly cruise rural Ireland for
predictable artsy stop-offs such as
Roundstone in Galway and Ballinglen in
Mayo. This explains Pat Harris’s pres-
ence with From Stonefield: a sea with a
sliver of blurred green landscape and a
big sky. Veronica Bolay, Joe Dunne,
Charles Harper, and Donald Teskey aim
the same time-honoured direction. One
could easily interchange the names and
mass-produce these landscapes for
Tesco, or Poundstore. Other RHA old-
timers present for the pretty-dead
still-life school: particularly Stephen
McKenna: Four Donegal Cloths; Hone:
Still Life; and John Long: Two Peaches.
Photography at the RHA has always
been monopolised by Amelia Stein
whose Sheep Wire is post-Warhol. How
brilliant to think of photographing yes
sheep wire for a print edition of ,
framed or unframed. Abigail O’Brien’s
Paper Trail is a print showing shelves of
dusty files which of course Dunne man-
ages to find “compelling…as evocative
of endlessly circuitous legal bureauc-
racy as Dickens’s Bleak House”. It is
easier to associate Paper Trail with the
immobilised RHA itself. Overall, the
photography hits an all time low, espe-
cially Mella Travers Stealth mawkish,
morbid, pseudo-Gothic in yet another
limited edition. Framed or unframed.
The sculpture room is alive with
pieces that look as if they were rough-
hewn using crowbars and sledge
hammers rather than anything as subtle
as even a chisel. Eileen MacDonagh is
sister sledge using limestone if you con-
sider her Archimedes Gate. Marie
Smith’s swollen bronzes are unpleasant
and their purported realism vague.
Janet Mullarney’s Giotto’s Circle of
papier-mâché and wire at the other end
of the scale is kindergarten art for the
school windowsill. John Behan peddles
his stock in trade Famine Ship with a
price tag of €,, making it an
expensive bathroom display for some-
one maudlin. Remco De Fouw’s triptych
of stone and glass is souvenir-shop
standard.
Overall, the opening exhibition
almost justified attendance to behold
the members prancing about in robes,
though tellingly wine is only available at
exorbitant prices per glass – presumably
accounting for the lack of a door policy.
Coming up to the centenary, the
RHA promises an early annual show, to
cash in, in March. It should pre-emp-
tively convene a board meeting and drop
the ‘Royal’ to The Hibernian Academy.
HA after members’ names and AHA
after associate members’ names would
give a realistic perspective.
Anyway, expect more from the Daub-
Daub, Dab-Dab and Drab-Drab schools
in the exhibition, unless original
submissions can be sneaked past the
RHA’s assessors who remain in search
of Caravaggio. •
The RHA 185th Annual Exhibition is open to
the public on 26 May -9 August. Admission
is free.
Emin, except
for those afraid
to admit it, is a
joke on the art
scene, a loud
Fury purveying
kitsch
“
far left: Tracey Emin’s
Wanting You;
Abigail
O’Brien’s
Paper Trail
