The RA Schools Show 2025 is set in part of the Royal Academy where the Schools are housed. Location of this annual event varies according to the specific requirements of each year.
In this case it takes place after the 2024 refurbishment It is rewarding to contemplate one’s own journey through that supposed portal to success, in comparison to nascent contemporaries.
One of the unwritten but inevitable traps students fall into is the notion that because they are there – they’ve ‘made it’. Time will tell. If I’m still around and if they are still around thirty or forty years from now, then we can start to pass judgement.
Set against the back-drop of all time, most human activity fades. David Bowie once said: ‘Nothing really matters that much’- and he’d know. No fancy schooling for him. Just a lot of talent and hard work.
The show consists of installations, sculpture and tableaux with some painting. Not so much pictures at an exhibition. The jaunty, parochial realism of the 60s, 70s and 80s when socialising consisted of telephone calls, pubs, taxis and parties, is left in the wake of internetitis and social media.
Carel Weight’s London and Peter Greenham’s Oxford have been replaced with something less easy to label and quantify.
The RA Schools Show 2025 allowed different cohorts of ex-students to collide, with some degree of serendipity. Jamie Robinson, who studied on the undergraduate course during the 80s observed ‘all this’ is geared towards the web and ramifications thereof.
Whilst it gets away from the bourgeoise materialism of the art object – in fact the restrictions of fine art discipline can elicit greater performances than turning the lights on and off.
Imagine if that became a discipline! Apart from wearing out the electrics, it would be boring. How would you school it? What wattage would be appropriate? How would ‘creative breakthroughs’ be measured? Aww Just leave ’em on.
The old school business of everyone doing the same simple thing (life drawing) enabled collective learning through a peer group. It was schooling. The relevance of visual enquiry and expression through drawing has almost been forgotten.
The Keeper’s statement mentions memory as an aspect of practice – objective drawing coaches visual recall and the ability to fashion images in the mind as well as on paper.
Inga Bystram was a student at the RAS during the early 70s. She felt it was a waste of time. Inga does protest paintings now. Carol, a contemporary of Inga’s (approximately), enjoyed her time at the RAS and still paints. We looked at a series of small painted works by Charlotte Winifred Guerard? and felt we could appreciate them – but not the contraption in the middle of the room, which was somehow ignored.
Artificial Intelligence doesn’t seem to be on the menu (yet) but if anyone thinks they can turn a blind eye, they are kidding themselves. No doubt someone, somewhere, is twiddling digits in this respect. But not at the RAS?
Colour in the life room? Yes: however these tapestries seem to ignore the people element. The room was set up for the optics of the human eye; models were intended to be approximately eleven feet away from the first row of seating.
Banners like laundry, hog the space and are difficult to read. Even if they are deemed ‘good art’, the design could be better. Concept is all, reality – another thing altogether.
Although the present Keeper, Cathie Pilkington RA, makes a pithy statement, it would be sobering for the RAS to take stock of how effective it has been at turning out ‘professional artists’ across the years. They never taught self esteem and how to turn it into money – which in spite of any revulsion over utilitarianism, is a necessity. In previous decades it was more a case of suck it and see; hope for the best.
One of my tutors, once said: ‘Statistics show 90% of people who complete a three year course in art & design in this country, will have nothing further to do with the subject, a year after exit from their studies’. That’s probably because most people who run art schools get their incomes from running art schools, not through being successful artists.
Someone once said ‘success in fine art is the icing on the cake of capitalism’. Capitalistic society requires art to reflect extreme value, often finding expression in the form of celebrity. Every contender wants success. Everyone is trying to thread themselves through the eye of the same needle, based on the myth ‘talent will out’ and ‘they’re worth it’.
But the seething elitism characteristic of this society can only attribute stardom to a few luvvies and darlings. The rest can fuck off (or so it would seem).
Does it (the RAS) really ‘enrich communities’? If so, what do artists get in return? Attending the RAS is all very well, but it won’t get you money off your groceries or a nice flat in Kensington.
The RA Schools show 2025 bravely posits itself at the forefront of fine art practice. It still proffers the luxurious indulgence of a three year post-graduate course but: if we look dispassionately, we have a beautifully re-vamped corridor, dazzlingly lit, housing casts from antiquity – which weren’t destroyed in the post-war era. Good.
However, this cherished aesthetic seeps into nearly all the work on display. Colour isn’t manifest enough. It’s all very ‘tasteful’, (see Using Colour on Ithaca) and the light (generally) is still a bit crepuscular.
It would seem most security personel are of ethnic origin! Where did Geordie Mick and dear old Bill from London go? (no pun intended) You can’t plonk a paper cup on a plinth, let alone fart on one – if you did, you were chided and shooed by the ‘Art Rozzers’.
In Greenham’s day it wasn’t just paper cups but a coating of dust adorning the statuary. I even snogged one of the casts for a photo shoot. Lawks-a-mercy! They wouldn’t let me do that now!
However, I have it on good authority some students have recently taken up smoking! And furthermore, some are becoming partial to drink! Crikey! Whatever next? There may be life in the old girl yet.
Photos by Alan Dedman, Julian Wakeling and Christie
Where’s Willy? shirt by Alan Dedman, tailored through Mark Baker
Ian Dugdale
Bugger, I forgot it was on. Wish I’d gone – if only to bump into so of the old crowd. Hope you are well.
Ian
admin
Dear Ian, never mind. Perhaps next time. The invites were suddenly delivered and in fact we were ‘the after party’. I wrote some more regarding the life room. Best wishes
Alan D