A walk round the Royal Academy’s 250th Summer Exhibition with the artist, who is coordinating this year’s landmark show
hat fun it is to walk around the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with Grayson Perry. It’s a few days before it opens, and the galleries are in chaos, like the house in The Cat in the Hat before the Cat clears up. Paintings are stacked against walls, sculptures huddle in mismatched families. Trapdoors gape open and elevators bring up works; people with clipboards point at walls; there’s the constant buzz of a drill.
Still, you can just about see how things will look. Perry is this year’s coordinator of the Summer Exhibition, and in the rooms where he’s chosen the work, much of the space has already been filled. Other galleries are coming together too: Conrad Shawcross’s room is looking fairly finished, as is Phyllida Barlow’s. Still, everywhere we go we have to pick our way through paintings laid out on the floor (ooh, there’s a Sean Scully!), hop over wires and pulleys, scoot round random sculptures of a leopard, a strange spotted gnome, a very realistic donkey…
“That donkey’s been passed around a bit,” says Perry. “I think he’s going to end up in this room, peering into the Bruce Nauman video installation.”
Perry has been a member of the Royal Academy since 2011. There are only 80 members at any one time, all practising artists. (Becoming one is an honour bestowed by one of the Academy’s many arcane procedures, this one being a ballot of existing members.) Anyway, although he’s meant to be representing the Academy to me, Perry is his usual self, meaning uproarious and, if not bitchy, decidedly caustic about some of the inbuilt difficulties in curating and hanging this venerable annual event. “It can be hard fitting everything in,” he says. “The members’ work has to be dealt with first. That work is like a fatberg, blocking everything. You have to negotiate your way round it.”
For those unfamiliar with the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, this is how it goes. The show, which has been held every year since 1769, is made up of three types of art. Work from established artists who are members, also known as Academicians or RAs. Next, works from established artists who aren’t members, but have been invited to show. And finally, work from unknowns, who submit their artwork to a committee to see if it’s deemed suitable.
Colour and fun, colour and fun. I’m trying to get everything to zing off each other
The members’ work – the fatberg – must be shown, as must that of the invited artists. All the rest is selected by the 12 RAs who make up the hanging committee, this year including Shawcross, Barlow, Cornelia Parker, Humphrey Ocean and Piers Gough, as well as head honcho Perry. They looked at more than 20,000 submissions, first digitally, then in real life. “If just one of us likes a work, it goes in,” says Grayson. “Doesn’t matter if everyone else hates it.” This year, there will be exactly 1,351 works on display.
Once all the work is actually physically inside the building, there’s a tussle between the committee’s members. They each get a room to hang, by themselves or with another committee member, and some of the work is wanted by more than one person. Some pieces are bagsied; some pieces are fought over; some get passed around, like the donkey. (Perry shows me a piece called Red Bear: a bear emerging from a carpet. It’s in Barlow’s room, “but we all wanted that one!”) And some rejected pieces come back into the fold: while Perry was hanging the main gallery, he realised he had more space than he’d first thought, so he went back down to the basement and picked out some that were on the “No” list.
The USP of the Summer Exhibition is this mix of “professional” and “amateur” art. An unknown’s work is accorded the same status as work by famous artists. They knock frames. And there is status in being shown: anyone with a work on display get to go to an exclusive preview and swank about; plus all the works are for sale, and most of them are snapped up. And for the visitor? Well, the show is a riot, a mad democracy. It can be fabulous, or it can be like a dreadful art jumble sale – “hung with the usual motley abandon”, as art critic Alastair Sooke noted last year.
Anyway, this year’s Summer Exhibition is significant as it falls in the Royal Academy’s 250th birthday year. There has been a lot of celebration. Most significantly, the Academy recently opened its redevelopment and extension, designed by David Chipperfield. This joins its Piccadilly building, Burlington House, to the one behind, 6 Burlington Gardens, formerly the Museum of Mankind, which the Academy bought in 1991. Now there is 70% more public gallery space.
Among all this competing birthday hoo-ha, the Summer Exhibition really has to be a good one. Perry does feel the pressure a bit, but, as he says: “It’s a luxury problem, isn’t it?
“I remember walking into the courtyard thinking, ‘In three months’ time we have to have a whole show up, and I haven’t seen a single piece of work’,” he says. “So there is pressure. But I’ve been enjoying myself, all the collaboration with the other artists, working with the art handlers and curators. Really, I’ve been having one of the best times of my life.”
Usually the Summer Exhibition takes over the whole of the RA’s first floor, but this year, because of the new extension and the birthday celebrations, the show has been chopped up and spread out all over. In three of the usual galleries there will be a different RA show, called The Great Spectacle. This aims to tell the story of the Summer Exhibition by featuring highlights of its last 249 years: works by Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, right up to Tracey Emin, Gary Hume and David Hockney. It sounds lovely, but it means that Perry has fewer spaces to work with. “They kept nibbling into my space,” he says cheerfully.
The actual Summer Exhibition will be in eight of the main galleries, plus the print room, the foyer, the courtyard and Perry’s Room of Fun, a sort of corridor-cum-gallery, which is, like the print room, in the new building. It’s all quite confusing, to be honest, even with a map.
Ah, well. The Summer Exhibition will be the first thing you see if you arrive at the Piccadilly entrance: an Anish Kapoor sculpture in the courtyard, and, as you walk up the stairs, a beautiful piece by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos hanging in the foyer. At the moment this is not yet installed, so Perry shows me a picture. The piece is enormous: balloon-like shapes covered in intricate carpet. Perry is very pleased with it; he wanted colour, he loves textiles. “It’s a showstopper!” he crows.
We pick our way to the main room, the big gallery to the left of the foyer, the one where David Hockney’s enormous tree hung in 2007. Perry has had the room painted bright yellow – one of the workers tells me she was worried about this but now thinks it looks terrific – and the walls are absolutely packed with work, a higgledy-piggledy kaleidoscope of colour. Colour and fun are what Perry has had at the top of his mind during his coordination.
“Yes. Colour and fun, colour and fun. I’m trying to get everything to zing off each other,” he says. “I want this room to be a celebration of the rough and tumble that is the summer show. The RAs have got to fight it out with Joe Bloggs, and that’s what’s great about it. Sometimes Joe Bloggs comes off better. ”
Near the door you can spot a Chantal Joffe, a Barbara Rae, a Mali Morris. They’re bright and upbeat and hang among other works of neon oranges, pinks and lilacs. The palette changes along the gallery walls, darkening through greens, greys, beiges as you approach the big wall at the end. Here, the content darkens too. I hear someone from the BBC calling this wall “the Brexit wall”, and it certainly feels more political. There are a couple of pictures of the Grenfell Tower fire, a big painting of Mosley’s blackshirts, a Banksy EU referendum piece, Vote to Love (he’s asking £350m for it, which must mean he doesn’t want to sell).
Perry says he started this wall by putting up a lovely piece by Tony Bevan, a tree silhouette, “the biggest painting in the room”, and then found the picture of Mosley’s blackshirts and hung it, deliberately, next to a gorgeous painting of a black woman, “probably the most beautiful portrait in the room”. He’s enjoyed juxtaposing works, putting a medal with Separation Wall and Arab and Israeli script engraved on it near to the Banksy, as well as a photo of a cup of tea that has “Send Them Back” on it. “Everything starts to read politically,” he says, and points at a painting that says, simply, “Rich People Smell Funny”. He honks with laughter.
During the judging, Perry got rid of quite a lot of overtly political works: what he calls ‘the angry, gammon-y stuff’
There’s an unsettling painting near the Banksy. It shows a group of Muslim women in niqabs, fronted by a western woman showing off her watch and jewellery with an ambiguous expression on her face. Is she screaming or laughing?
“It’s odd, isn’t it? I didn’t quite know what to think of it at first,” he says. “I thought it was borderline offensive, but when you put it next to the Banksy, it talks about a diversity of voices and of political opinions. You can’t just put up work you agree with.
“I think we have a problem with diversity in this country, particularly the left wing. The left wing wants everyone to think the same, whereas the right wing wants everyone to look the same. I read that somewhere, and there’s something true about it.”
Still, during the judging process, Perry got rid of quite a lot of overtly political works: what he calls “the angry, gammon-y stuff”. “The ones where it’s like: ‘Why aren’t I famous? Why? Why? What’s up with you? Here’s my cock!’ God, why would anyone want to look at that?”
He likes to make fun of obvious politicking. He has a large piece of his own work in the print room – Selfie With Political Causes – that shows him riding a motorbike, with right-on slogans fluttering around him. “It’s a reaction to the way that politics has become very fashionable in art. I often want to go: ‘Wow, yes! I really agree with you, thanks for telling us about global warming, I’d never have guessed!’”
If you’re looking for themes other than politics, there are quite a few pieces that deal with transgender issues, and, actually, a lot of the sent-in works featured Perry himself, usually dressed in his cross-dressing alter ego, Claire (she only comes out at parties, so he’s in his civvies today). I hung around for a few hours on the day the sculptures arrived and saw at least three Claires come in. (Also Alan Measles, Perry’s teddy, features more than once. There’s one painting that depicts poor Alan lying on the floor, shot in the head.)
“Yes, even outside the show, I get sent a portrait of me every three or four months,” says Perry. “It started about five years ago. I’ve got a little collection now. It’s being on the telly, I think. And being a cartoon character in my dress.”
Anyway, because there were so many Claires and Graysons sent in, Perry decided that the better ones should have their own wall; which they do, a small one in his Room of Fun. Here, opposite the Claires, are a series of Martin Parr photographs of Indian people taking selfies. There’s also a wall of David Shrigley local newspaper-style headlines (“Bath Room Light Left On Again”, “Fancy Cloth Felt Nice”, “Celebrities Gather In Large Tent”), a Michael Landy art shopping trolley, and a light that says Brexit instead of Exit.
It’s a nice room, the Room of Fun, says Perry, but he’s had to be careful what he says about work displayed in it. “Artists don’t like it if you say their work is funny,” he says. “Because people go: ‘Well, it doesn’t make me laugh’. So I say: ‘Oh, it’s silly’, instead. ‘It’s a sophisticated take on really bad jokes.’ Like how you might snicker in some art film. I understand this joke! I understand the reference, by the way! Go me!”
As we walk through the galleries, I play the usual Summer Exhibition game of spotting works by famous artists: ooh, there’s an enormous Hockney painting of his studio, with portraits dotted about. Ooh, and another behind it! Anthony Gormley has a piece; so does Tony Cragg.
I also spot works made by the non-famous, pieces I saw on the day of submission for sculptures, when I loitered around the back of the Academy, watching them all arrive. One is a small, beautifully made religious figure, holding a lantern. It’s a cross between Jesus and Venus de Milo: the figure is bearded, but he has breasts and his leg pokes through his robe. The sculptor told me that his wife had modelled for the piece. It took him months of work.
Another piece I saw was made on the spot. Two cool art-school types turned up with a couple of bags of modelling clay. One stuck pipes into the bags, put a jolly knitted face over the pipes, et voila! The sculpture was born.
That’s here too, as is a big head of the Queen, accurate in every aspect except for its perspective. It’s as though the Queen has been squished: she’s too low and wide. Artist John Humphreys made this one – “The hair took ages,” he told me – and he was very chatty. From Salford originally, he went to the RA art school in the 70s, working in theatres to earn money, living round the corner. He tells me he made one of the enormous Damien Hirst sculptures of foetuses in wombs in Qatar. “He just signed it.”
The standard of work this year seems pretty high. Everything about the Summer Exhibition is better than I remember, to be honest, and this is in no small part due to the efforts of curator Edith Devaney, the head of the Summer Exhibition, and an unsung heroine of the RA.
She came to the Academy 20 years ago, when the Summer Exhibition was moribund – an embarrassing, half-arsed affair. Fewer than 5,000 works by unknown artists were submitted; no contemporary artist would show work in the exhibition, not even honorary Academicians. It was just a show for complacent members to sell their work. They were happy, so what was wrong with it?
Pre-Devaney, the Summer Exhibition was pretty much run by the Academy office. The hanging committee personnel were rotated without much thought: if it was Buggins’s turn, then Buggins was in. The coordinator was the oldest painter on the committee, and he (it was almost always a he) only started working on the show on the first day of hanging the works. Devaney set about wooing cool galleries such as White Cube and Gagosian, asking their non-Academicians to submit work. In 2001 she fixed it so that the exhibition coordinator was Peter Blake, and together they worked hard to get better work into the show. Gary Hume, Tracey Emin and Michael Craig-Martin were persuaded to put pieces in that year, as were honorary Academicians Antoni Tàpies and Ed Ruscha. (The Telegraph headline: “It’s a miracle! A tasteful Summer Exhibition.”)
Gradually, the show started changing, though it was still pretty bad for a few years. In 2015, Michael Craig-Martin was the coordinator and, according to Perry, “he gave the exhibition a kick up the arse”: he also had the walls painted in bright colours.
Devaney would agree. “Michael rebooted it,” she tells me. “Made it more radical.” She thinks that now that the standard of invited work received from artists is so high, the Academicians try harder too: “It makes them raise their game,” she says. “Their work has to shout to work.”
It’s a measure of Devaney’s success that when she started, only around 120,000 visitors came to the exhibition; now it’s often more than 200,000 in the nine weeks that it’s open.
The more I look into the Summer Exhibition, the odder it seems. It’s such an anomaly within the art world: not really an art fair, not quite a curated show, constrained by ancient rules and habits, a mish-mash result of artists collaborating and arguing and ego-jostling and imposing their taste.
But then, the Royal Academy itself is an anomaly. Established in 1768 by George III as one of the first ever institutions dedicated to displaying work from a variety of artists, it has always been a combination of exhibitions and education. All around the courtyard are studios for RA students, and the Academy prides itself on being the longest-established art school in the country: it offers the UK’s only free three-year postgraduate course to 17 students. (It has also recently established a sort of speciality degree, an executive master’s in cultural leadership, that costs a not-free £34,000.)
Unlike the Tate, the RA has no government grant, no remit to serve the nation. Instead, it is royal: this means that the president and secretary have to meet with the Queen to get projects signed off, and, significantly, that Burlington House is rented from the Crown for a teeny amount of money.
Other than that, the Academy survives by raising money itself. Like most major galleries, it gets corporate sponsors for its exhibitions; it takes 30% of anything sold at the Summer Exhibition; it chats up rich people. Perry tells me that when he’s been in for board meetings, what they mostly talked about was how to get money. This is standard for any arts organisation (I’m on the board of a few), but the RA needed a lot, to fund the new extension.
The RA’s chief executive, Charles Saumarez-Smith, speaking at the unveiling of the extension, said the Academy had initially hoped to get donations from oligarchs, but when Brexit made London less attractive to some of those oligarchs, the National Lottery was persuaded to give £12.7m. A public appeal also brought in £3m at the end of the development, and the rest came from private individuals.
“Oh, this place wouldn’t survive without generous benefactors,” says Perry cheerfully. “All the friends and patrons. There’s got to be a mutual benefit. I often say to rich people, ‘What could be better than sponsoring art? You can socialise, drink and look at art all at the same time! Theatre, you’re stuck in the dark without a drink for fucking hours! Plus, with art you might buy yourself a nice lump of asset. It’s got it all going for it, art.”
I leave him to continue hanging the works and wander around on my own, looking at what’s up already. Has this exhibition “got it all going for it”?
Perhaps it has. It is quite irrepressibly upbeat this year, despite the Brexit wall. Somehow, Perry’s hang has jollied up works by established creatives, has made witty the art by people who don’t make a living from their work, who just potter or sell the odd piece. This festive funfair feel overrides the strange layout of the exhibition, the silly pomposity of the Academy.
And, God, there really must be something for everyone. You could even buy yourself a cheap “lump of asset”. Only the sourest of pusses could complain this year…
“Oh, some Academicians will definitely complain,” says Perry cheerfully, when I express this. “Usually that I’ve put their painting right near the top. I don’t care. I’m thinking of getting a badge for the launch that says ‘Zero Fucks’.”
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