A cultural cul-de-sac:Phyllida Barlow @ the RA.

"Today I knocked upon their door and said that I was passing and Charlie launched a scathing attack. When I asked him what I'd done, he said 'You stupid bastard! We live in a cul-de-sac!'". - The Best Things in Life, Half Man Half Biscuit.

Phyllida Barlow's cul-de-sac exhibition at the Royal Academy was a waste of money. I'm not saying it was bad or even that it cost me much money. I'm just saying it was a waste of money and I'll outline the reasons below. But I won't spend too long doing so - because I didn't spend too long inside the exhibition - and because, according to the artist, I was one of the components of the art. So I feel like I've put in a shift already. Perhaps she could come round and write the blog. Fair's fair.

I wasn't as angry I'm pretending to be for comic effect here and I didn't feel particularly short-changed. What with it being a gorgeous sunny day I was actually quite glad to be able to go and sunbathe in the park instead of peruse further galleries. But, considering Barlow herself deems the visitor, me, to be "of critical importance" to her work and that my "sensory response" and memory of the art is integral to what the art is then why should I pay? She's made me, against my will, part of her media. Though, to be fair, she is now, against her will, part of mine.

So it goes. All of the works are untitled, they're all made either this year or last (so no need for titles), and they're all perfectly pleasant to walk around and look at. There's just three rooms (and a few outliers on the stairs and corridor that take you to the main exhibition) and once you've been in all of them you have to walk back through them as the exit and entrance is the same door. This, I presume, is the reason the show is called 'cul-de-sac'.

Either that or because it's something of an artistic dead end! Barlow's story is that she began her career inspired by the modernist sculpture of the fifties and sixties but soon took against "its weighty formalism and monumentalism, sensing an imposed morality, and gravitated towards Arte Povera in Europe and concurrent sculptural developments in the United States". 

It's true these works don't seem to offer up any gravitas or message and, indeed, they're more open and inviting than some. I saw people touching them without getting ticked off by invigilators, photos were completely allowed, and you could pass through and under many of the sculptures. If you could climb on them, which I'm assuming you could not, it would be like a playground for adults.

Except less fun. Unfortunately. For all the talk of energy, instability, and incongruity it looked to me just like a load of big stuff painted, occasionally, in bright colours. I didn't care that it had no meaning, or at least not that much, but how long was I supposed to look at it all? I was neither discombobulated nor disorientated but I was a little disappointed.

When the materials used are not the memories of exhibition visitors they are pretty 'mixed'. Cement, paint, plywood, steel, timber, polystyrene, sand, plastic, polyurethane foam, wire mesh, and a whole load of Hessian scrim. Whatever that is.

These are put together in ways that are sometimes aesthetically pleasing, sometimes not. That doesn't seem the purpose of her art and nor does the size. The trouble is it's hard to work out what the purpose of it all is. You're given a booklet on entering the show, full of the usual alphabet soup, that serves only to obfuscate matters further.

We learn that "her ability to effectively translate and communicate, to her team, the abstract notions she develops as the work evolves, is of fundamental importance to the process" and that "the perception of the object within the space it occupies is extremely important to" her. Which just goes to prove the truism in the zinger me and my friend Bugsy came up with when addled at a festival over twenty years ago:- "anybody can talk perfect sense. It's backing it up with hours of total bullshit that counts".

I'm not saying Barlow's art is bullshit, or any other kind of shit for that matter. Just that her reason for making it is probably not the reason she's giving for making it. I paid £6 to go in because I have an Art Card. If I didn't it'd have been £14 (£12 without donation) which to put it bluntly is a complete fucking rip off. These sculptures should be outside in the garden, free for all, so kids could clamber all over them. Not only then would it be more fun and more fair but the art would work much better as well. Shutting them away in a back room of the ever expanding, seemingly exponentially, Royal Academy as if they were holy and important relics didn't do them, Phyllida Barlow, or this visitor (a vital part of the art, remember) any favours at all. It's a no from me.