Art review: RSA Annual Exhibition 2012, Royal Scottish Academy

THE RSA’s annual show maintains the high standard set by its late president, Bill Scott, by exploring the most intimate space for any artist – their place of work

RSA ANNUAL EXHIBITION 2012 ****

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

When the Scottish Academy was founded in 1826 and then a few years later became the Royal Scottish Academy, it marked a coming of age for artists in Scotland. They became professionals. Only a generation before, painting was a trade, sculptors were masons and artists mostly began as apprentices.

Professional status was more than just a step up socially, however. It was recognition that, through their work, artists and indeed architects, like other professions, contribute more widely to the welfare of society than the simple provision of a skill or service. Defining exactly how artists do this was as difficult then as now. Nevertheless, we still believe they provide something that is essential to our sense of ourselves and grant them respect accordingly.

This is the Academy’s 186th annual exhibition, but it has been overshadowed by the sudden death of its president, Bill Scott, just a few weeks ago. Following Ian McKenzie Smith, who began the process, Scott skilfully led the Academy in the business of reconstruction and adaptation to the modern world, precipitated by the loss of control of their exhibition rooms to the National Gallery some years ago.

Arthur Watson has now been elected as president to succeed Scott. He was secretary, and in that position drove many of the changes over which Scott presided, notably revision of the constitution, institution of the New Contemporaries exhibition and the organisation of the annual exhibition along radically new lines.

There is no chance, therefore, after the death of an energetic and popular president, that under Watson’s leadership the Academy will now slip back into somnolence. On the contrary, in the new president’s own words, he expects it to go from strength to strength.

Until a few years ago the annual exhibition was run along traditional lines. The Academicians - artists and architects elected by their peers - had the right to exhibit, but many exhibits, numbered in hundreds, were selected from an open submission. This was invaluable for unknown artists to find an audience, but the heterogenous collection of work that resulted could hardly make a coherent show.

The new arrangement is a curated exhibition. The opportunity offered by open submission is gone - although it is offered for small-scale work in the RSA Open later in the year. Instead there is the chance to achieve some kind of coherence in the annual exhibition. The curators choose a unifying theme and invite artists, both from within and without the Academy, to contribute. In a slightly confusing compromise with the old arrangement, however, academicians may also submit work.

The curators this year are Doug Cocker and James Castle. Both sculptors, they have chosen the artist’s studio as their theme. Following on from last year’s show with its insight into working methods, it explores the workplace itself as also offering an insight into whatever comes out of it. As you enter, a display of pictures of the very diverse studios of the 22 invited artists meets you. Some are rather ramshackle, others smart and purpose-built. More pictures are provided on the text panels with statements from the artists about their place and method of work. It is all fascinating, but I am not sure it is really more than a gloss on the work, although also an opportunity to satisfy our curiosity.

The word studio itself already claims special status. In French atelier means simply “workshop”, but studio, Italian for a study, suggests a place for thought, not labour. Perhaps the curious new habit of talking about an artist’s practice, as though they were doctors or dentists, is an extension of that pretension.

In an introductory essay Euan McArthur makes another claim. The studio, he says, is generally the focus of a special intensity of life. “The force of this can be grasped by the non-artist trying to think of any other people (excluding prisoners) who spend so much of their lives in a single space than does a dedicated artist.”

As one who spends a lot of time in a single space writing, as no doubt McArthur himself does, that does seem to me a bit of hyperbole aimed to establish, not just the proper professionalism of the artists, but something that is new, their claim to be exceptional. In contemporary art we suffer too much from the attention given the artist rather than the art. It is part of the celebrity cult, our modern religion.

In the end it is the work that counts, and here I am glad to say a lot of it is very good. The contribution of the late Bill Scott is one of the most impressive. He was one of the invited artists and was preparing his display when he died. Set out poignantly like the corner of a studio filled with work in progress, his tough, intriguing sculpture in wood is a fitting memorial.

The two curators also make a good showing. Cocker fills a wall with chunky, enigmatic wooden objects that look as though they might have a function, although it is not clear what that might be. Castle is more overtly surrealist with strange, suggestive shapes.

The new president, Arthur Watson is equally impressive, especially in a series of massive studies in the very Scottish poetry of grey. He describes his drive in his art as “an obsession with landscape and oral culture,” and he once confided to me that, just as a sideline of course, he had in his head a repertory of “about a thousand songs”. It is certainly significant for the RSA to have as its president someone who is so deeply engaged with wider Scottish culture.

There is much else notable in this show. An enormous painting, Tori Gate by Kate Whiteford, in vibrant red and blue, dominates one end of the main gallery. In the same room, Bill Crozier, a Scottish painter not seen often enough in Scotland, has a vivid group of semi-abstract landscapes. Facing him across the room, Rosalind Lawless supports the wider theme in her claim that the architectural spaces in which she works are crucial to the abstract images she creates. The results are satisfying.

One of the most impressive single works is a huge tower, like a fragile cage, by Aeneas Wilder, a freestanding but impossibly delicate structure made of innumerable small pieces of wood.

A group of blocks of optical glass by Annie Cattrell is also very striking. The glass is marvellously pure and transparent, but within it are small clouds like little puffs of smoke, transient visual events preserved forever in a solid block of glass. One of the most intriguing displays is a montage of works and projects by land artist Pat Leighton including the seven pyramids of the Saw Tooth Ramps installed by the M8. Other big projects include a cancelled plan for a massive, key-pattern earthwork on the road into Stirling.

Architecture is also part of the annual show, but here the studio theme does add real interest. Long and Kentish, for instance, have designed studios for well-known artists and they too have presented their work in a fascinating montage. If you are curious about the new V&A by Kengo Kuma in Dundee, however, or the new Glasgow School of Art building by Steven Holl, those models are here too. I do wonder, looking at the V&A’s sail-like shape, whether the architects have taken account of the winds that once destroyed the Tay Bridge, and also where they imagine displays will be mounted on all those sloping walls.

• Until 6 June