Mayola

My visits to art exhibitions are usually alone, or with a close family member, and it’s rare that I’m accompanied by a friend. On Saturday, however, such was the case at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, and I found great pleasure in discussing what we liked and disliked, what worked for us and what didn’t, comparing thoughts and observations.

Over many years I’ve attended the Summer Exhibition, not infrequently leaving with the thought “never again”. Whatever one’s views on art, whatever one’s tastes, it’s always quite an event, it’s sure to be interesting, sometimes provocative and infuriating, and likely to be fun, as it was exceptionally so last year, when curated by Grayson Perry. Though my friend is a frequent visitor to traditional art exhibitions and collections, and even at one time produced a bibliography of pop art, he finds that modern art, so-called, too often leaves him (as it does me) with a reaction of “so what ?” This was his first visit to a Summer Exhibition.

This year there was an underlying animal theme, plus everything else one has grown to expect, from crude sociopolitical propaganda right through to the yawn-inducing must-have “pile of old rubbish on the floor” exemplar of the “pile of old rubbish on the floor” school of pretentiousness, plus the usual Academicians with their increasingly tired views of splotchy skies over the Channel or the Gove-haunted squares of South Kensington, on offer at pisstakingly egotistical prices. Quite remarkably blatant were parodic updates of Bruegel and Bosch, Hopper and Hamilton, Riley and Ruscha, in a show curated by Jock McFadyen, or as the sponsor’s preface in the catalogue calls him, Jock McFayden. Whatever his McMoniker, his evident painterly USP consists of large indifferent skies separated from large indifferent foregrounds by a thin horizontal band of decayed commercialised urbanised grot. What not to like ?

One of the purposes of art, allegedly, is to challenge the status quo, but this year’s show lazily endorses the assumed left liberal metropolitan stance on current subjects of concern and controversy, Brexit included, and could have been compiled by the BBC. This year there were more paintings on display than ever, climbing crazily up the walls well out of comfortable viewing range, and there was some carelessness in what we are now supposed to call the metadata. One work by George Shaw, of a wonderfully drab suburban back-lot (Coventry, presumably), is transposed with its neighbour in the catalogue. 

“Would I want it on my living room wall ?” and “would I want to sit looking at it ?” are criteria my friend and I share. Well, I adore tigers, but … “Does it make me dead jealous that I didn’t do it myself ?” is an additional conceit of mine, and this year there was only one such qualifying work. It didn’t grab me initially, but I photographed it, and only later did I get the “wow” moment of awe and envy. The painting is called “Mayola”, and is by Salvatore Fiorello. “Mayola” is an odd word; perhaps suggestive of a kind of pandemic of paralysis and depression induced by a protracted spell of prime ministerial uselessness, or alternatively a healthy brand of unsaturated fatty acid-enriched cooking oil. What can it mean ?

“Mayola” (detail), Salvatore Fiorello

Oil on linen, on sale for £700, and featuring the backs of houses, it’s very much my kind of thing. Since the catalogue no longer lists the addresses of contributors – presumably in case enraged viewers want to get at them and do them harm – there’s no clue as to where Signor Fiorello resides or operates, and googling him elicits little. Like so many contributors to the Summer Exhibition over the years, it appears that he’s conspicuously talented but relatively unknown. My initial impression was that the subject of the painting was somewhere in London, most probably East, just possibly South, an outside chance of somewhere else. Pure guesswork, though informed by a lifetime of wandering around such locations with their characteristic domestic vernaculars and subtly unique ambiences. I took a gamble and consulted the A to Z. To my slight surprise and considerable delight the index lists a Mayola Road in Clapton, E5, not far from where my paternal grandmother spent part of her childhood. Yes, that would fit, absolutely, spot on, although, as I say, it’s only a guess. There’s no other Mayola in the capital. 

It would be great if the artist in question were to read this blog and to contact me. I’d certainly like to know more about him and see some of his other work. Once upon a time one used to read, sprayed onto walls and railway bridges, that ‘Clapton is God’, but for me, this year, and wherever it’s supposed to be, “Mayola” was the star of the show.

Painting with two fingers

In too many places around the world we see odious, corrupt, thuggish, hypocritical, criminal regimes holding on to positions of absolute power - evidently for the primary purposes of personal greed and self-preservation. Sickos and their henchpersons who want a controlled reality to stay the same for ever, regardless of the fate of millions or the wellbeing of the planet. Luckily we are relatively free from that kind of thing here. In the UK, though our politicians routinely ignore the wishes of the common people, though – if you read ‘Private Eye’ – corruption is endemic, though so often our news is a saga of incompetence, betrayal and hypocrisy, and though voting changes nothing, we are fortunate that we can – if necessary via the medium of paint – stick two fingers up to the lot of them, without fear of arrest … or worse. 

Therefore it is particularly gratifying that this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the 250th, and overseen by the wonderful Grayson Perry, includes a great deal of two-fingered content. Much of it is funny, makes a point, might even be seen as subversive. Well, I hope so. The spectrum of material ranges from visual puns and absurdities, bling poodles and carpeted bears, via parodies of famous paintings and a standard yellow ‘new development’ direction sign reading “Unaffordable Housing”, to the Korean Kims studying a Duchamp-esque urinal, and a POTUS strategically placed against a spread-legged Miss Mexico.

Protest against the freaks and monsters who run our world is always healthy, and it is good that art can be harnessed in this way – as it always has been. Art, protest, humour, propaganda, subversion, and resistance have a long, intimate, and worthy history. Art as fun, art as protest. Totalitarians and obsessives of all sorts have a phobia of fun, for that is invariably their Achilles heel, and – anatomically improbably – their blindspot too. They never see how unintentionally and absurdly funny they and their strutting little empires are. 

So far so good. There’s nothing quite like humour for getting one on side. Piss-taking can be irresistible, especially when there are brightly decorated rooms full of it. However, expressing a political opinion or being disrespectful are not the sole purpose of art, nor is being hilarious, as it so often is at this show. This exhibition is brilliant as a one-off, but I hope it doesn’t become too much of a habit. Equally I hope there won’t be a return to the years of accommodating the endless dreary fixations of elderly academicians (there’s only a handful of that sort of thing this year), views of smug studios with window views of south-west London or overpriced (and also smug) excursions to European art cities, or a return to the shock-horror of the shock-horror merchants, or to the studiedly difficult genre of the deeply meaningful daub that only clever people ‘get’, a world where any old rubbish can be said to be Angst No. 93 or Dalston Junction or made into a neon sign. Let’s have art that is enjoyable, understandable, and well made.

As ever, the Summer Exhibition this year is eclectic, and there is far more to it than I have suggested so far. Besides the humour and the schoolboy smirking, there is great painting as well. There’s imaginative and technically accomplished design, as well as the usual contingent of the dire and the WTF. I’m not even sure what Hockney is trying to achieve this time, and the Anish Kapoor contraption in the courtyard is only slightly less meaningless than his oversized red twisted paperclip thingy at Stratford East. But I bet the Japanese visitors like it.

Overall, though, I found the exhibition hugely enjoyable, as did, very evidently, others who were there at the same time, on Saturday. Most of them grinning, some laughing their heads off. More than anything, as I emerged afterwards into a blisteringly hot Piccadilly, it made me want to get out my paints again.