London Calling

It's been a non-stop rainy week in London, the kind where you might as well run for cover into the galleries and museums. So for the last four days that's what I've been doing. I got to spend a solid hour again with the Elgin Marbles, deciphering that bumper-to-bumper Panathenaic procession, the world's longest traffic jam until that one in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. And I did a long morning at the National Gallery, making an inventory of the different kinds of wood the Italian Renassance collection was painted on. Fewer than I thought. Mostly poplar, with some oak and limewood.

And yesterday, dodging puddles all the while, I made it over to the Royal Academy of the Arts on Picadilly and their always daft looking annual Summer Exhibition, the 240th. (You do the math.) It's a kind of Picadilly circus where art by old and new and honorary and not actually quite in the door yet Academy members is displayed cheek by jowl and all over the walls and floors. (There are roughly 1200 works, but who's counting?) The galleries are organized, if that's the word for it, by Academicians including well known British artists like the sculptor Tony Cragg. Let the record show that the one Cragg supervised was a relatively clear and lucid space, with a good, almost sacramental Gavin Turk bronze, Ash, that replicates a conical pile of just that, and a wonderful trompe l'oeil by Kim Meredew, Yellow Folding Table, in granite, composite sandstone and limestone, complete with trompe l'oeil coffee cup stain.

As an introduction to the Summer Exhibition there was also a small memorial show for R.B. Kitaj, who died last year, including his canvas The Jewish Rider, a mordant post-Holocaust take-off on Rembrandt's Polish Rider. (Since demoted to "School of Rembrandt".) Those tribute galleries were cluttered with lesser stuff but still a reminder of the power of Kitaj's sustained revitalization of history painting.

The Jewish Rider, Kitaj, 1985

And there was a gallery curated by the open wound (and recently elected Academician) Tracy Emin. Her's, naturally, is the one with the sign that warns: “There are works in this gallery that are shocking. Over 18s only”. And if you're shocked by videos of nude women spinning in hula hoops, by all means run away. I was almost shocked by Emin's admission on a wall card that Julian Schnabel “does my favorite paintings in the whole world” — what, not the whole wide world? — until I remembered her lame offerings at the British pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale.

The Schnabel aside, her gallery offers a good untitled Louise Bourgeois, one of Bourgeois's creepy, biomorphic hanging sculptures in bronze, this one painted to resemble biomorphic blobs of a pale waxy substance. And then there's the Tim Noble and Sue Webster sculpture of an orgiastic mingling of hands and penises in pink silicone rubber, Pink Narcissus (Version 1). They all combine into a writhing globe mounted just above floor level. But the piece is only “completed” by a spotlight that casts its shadow on a nearby wall, where the whole wild ball somehow assumes the perfectly composed silhouette of two faces in profile looking in opposite directions. As a commentary on the seething realities behind placid human surfaces, it's very funny. It's also beyond doubt the last word in shadow puppets.