The Saatchi Gallery - Reviews, USA Today

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USA Today

Andreas Whittam-Smith, The Independent

I went to the Royal Academy to see USA Today, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations by 40 young American artists. With its sheer energy (Kristin Baker), its elegance (Ryan McGinness and Matthew Brannon) its wit (Aleksandra Mir) and its cleverness (Wangechi Mutu), it is a thrilling spectacle.

It would be wrong, however, to take the exhibition as fully representative of the state of American contemporary art. More accurately, it is what currently interests Britain's greatest collector, Charles Saatchi. All the work on show comes from the Saatchi Gallery. Is it Mr Saatchi or American artists in general, who tend to see the world not as utopia but as dystopia, where deprivation, oppression and terror are our everyday condition?

Some artists in the show focus on the bleakness of urban life, where decisions that affect our lives are made by people we cannot reach, where social divisions are like chasms, and where people often feel like they were worker ants in a huge nest. And some are anti-consumerist, like Banks Violette, who has an installation which comprises old refrigerators and other domestic equipment, as if found abandoned in a store room after a new ice age, their owners long since disappeared, presumed dead, and everything now covered with a salty white frost, all utterly useless.

Yet even I, one of nature's optimists, more likely to imagine utopia than dystopia, thoroughly enjoyed USA Today. It isn't like an art museum, or even a normal Royal Academy exhibition, where only good stuff is on display. There is dross too. But above all, USA Today insistently asks questions. Erick Swenson's model of a dead white deer on frozen city cobbles, what was that all about? The distorted female figures in Inka Essenhigh's oil-on-linen picture Shopping, what were they telling us?

Is this art? Yes, it makes us see more clearly, feel more passionately and think more deeply. But, of course, art provides no answers.

USA TODAY

USA Today