Royal Academy exhibition departs from usual performance

Performance art makes its debut at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition this year, with curators of Britain’s oldest open submission art show expanding the types of work to go on display.

Held every year since 1769, the summer show invites amateur as well as celebrated artists to submit work for consideration by a panel of Royal Academicians.

Visitors can buy the works in the show, with 30 per cent of the cost used to fund the RA Schools, its postgraduate fine art programme.

Among the paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures crowding the Piccadilly galleries, visitors will for the first time see three performance pieces at selected times. “Cantilever Kiss”, by India Mackie and Declan Jenkins, sees each bound into a steel A-frame that can be manipulated under “extreme physical exertion”; they will meet for a horizontal kiss.

The work of Alana Francis, a graduate of the RA Schools, is a cross between poetry and rap.

Approaching groups of visitors in the galleries — or being approached — she will speak quietly, her eyes closed, telling stories about the journey to adulthood and her sexual awakening. “Her performances are very intimate and quite rhythmic,” said Eileen Cooper, RA co-ordinator of this year’s show.

Brian Catling, a Royal Academician, will perform while wearing Cyclops-style head masks.

Writing in the RA magazine, Mr Catling said that most performance artists resisted the idea that their work was akin to theatre, regarding it instead as the extension of a painting or sculpture into “temporary, real-time action”.

“Some of its origins are contained in the meaning and function of the earliest forms of art, such as cave paintings that were made to be seen in the ritualistic, flickering torch-light of ceremony, where the viewing is never casual and the moment is heightened, but not theatrical.”

The selection panel trawled through 12,000 entries — initially submitted digitally — to reach a “shortlist” of 2,500 works before arriving at a final 1,200 pieces for display.

Prominent names represented in the galleries this year include Phyllida Barlow, Sean Scully, Gilbert & George, Isaac Julien and Mark Wallinger.

Among the works from Cornelia Parker — the UK’s official election artist as well as a Royal Academician — is “Alter Ego: Object with Unconscious”, consisting of two silver-plated coffee pots suspended from the ceiling, one flattened by a 250-ton press.

Selecting work from artists from as far afield as Chile, Pakistan and Morocco, the curators have this year aimed to feature more overseas artists.

As Britain grapples with the consequences of Brexit, Ms Cooper said access for international artists was an important theme: “Cultural exchange is everything. You can open the doors of the Academy and say ‘you’re welcome here’.”

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017, sponsored by Insight Investment, opens to the public on June 13 and runs until August 20.