Charles Saatchi shows that he has lost little of his sharpness in the Royal Academy's show of new American art
Royal Academy
Charles Saatchi has appeared to switch allegiances back and forth so quickly over the past decade or so, from British art to German to American, that one is inclined to view the arrival of this new survey of contemporary American art with some jaded lack of interest. But one is also inclined to forget with what authority Saatchi stands as a judge of American trends: when he opened his Boundary Road gallery in 1985 he began with a show of Americans, and he has shown them six times since.
Critics may whine churlishly about his conservatism (while championing exactly the same artists) and they may complain — with more justice — of the silly razzmatazz of his now defunct County Hall gallery, but we should remember how much good art this man has shown us.
When you walk into the entrance foyer of the galleries and find Terence Koh’s neon rooster, Big White Cock, one suspects he’s right on the button again. Having said that, the prevailing accent in recent surveys of American art has consistently been one of anxiety and self-laceration (summed up in the title of the Serpentine’s concurrent show, Uncertain States of America), and the most compelling accents in US art of the past half-century have been dark and often violent.
But one has to look very hard to find pointed references here to America’s recent troubles, either 9/11 or the Middle East. However, politics in art is not a dish that is good when served to order. Better are the artworks that come to it obliquely, even though one might question their conclusions: Matthew Day Jackson’s tableau of altered found images, Dance of Destruction, touches on patriotism and hysterical religiosity but seems to put down the whole violent tumult of America’s problems to an ancient and enduring death drive.
Other surprising and powerful ensembles also deliver stern indictments: Erick Swenson’s Untitled installation is a paved and frozen wilderness that has claimed a young white deer; opposite is the bloody red abstraction of Barnaby Furnas’s Flood (Red Sea); and in between is Furnas’s Hamburger Hill, in which troops-cum-gangsters arrive over the hill in a charge of gunfire.
There is more of this elsewhere, with canvases by the reliable Kelley Walker including Black Star Press, in which silkscreened images of civil rights protests meet with dirty plumes of thrown paint; and Jon Pylypchuk’s arrangement of tiny stuffed dolls, Hopefully, I will live through this with a little bit of dignity, a wish that seems unlikely to be fulfilled amid its crowds of injured black troops.
The whole horrible parade comes to a spectacular conclusion with Banks Violette’s Untitled installation, in which an empty coffin lies before a rock-concert stage set that has turned into salt, just as Lot’s wife was when she looked back on the destruction of Sodom.
At times one feels that revelling in squalor is a substitute for dealing with more substantive issues: Dash Snow’s F*** the Police, an arrangement of press clippings sprayed with his semen, does not deserve its wall-space. At other times one feels that the artists are hopelessly striving to equal those brilliant, never-bettered State of the Union paintings, Jasper Johns’s Flag series. Many attempt that here, so many fail: Jules Balincourt attempts commentary with goofy maps of the US, Rodney McMillian does the same with his floppily hanging depiction of the Supreme Court; and Gerald Davis takes a different tack with weak paintings of cartoonish figures. The most powerful image in this vein is one of the simplest: Josephine Meckseper’s Pyromaniac 2, which shows an American beauty sucking, not on a cigarette, but on a burning match.
Amanda Sharp, the director of the Frieze Art Fair, recently told me that she thought American art had had a bad decade — indeed, that Europe was ahead. But, while one might look in vain for a stand-out prodigy of the calibre of Matthew Barney ten years ago, there is much here that is full-blooded, articulate and eloquently angry enough to persuade you that she’s wrong.
USA Today is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (0870 848 8484), from Friday to Nov 4, £2.80-£10 (www.royalacademy.org.uk)
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