A couple of weeks ago I managed to catch Grayson Perry's show at Manchester City Art Gallery, The Vanity of Small differences the day before it closed. I realised that I knew very little about his work; it struck me me just how much work had dominated life over the past 25 years, and the extent to which contemporary cultural life had simply passed me by. There is an element of personal choice here too, I like the art of the past, I have written and read quite a bit of poetry, I have travelled en famille, and photographed places - particularly around the Mediterranean, seen some stunning places and eaten great food overlooking the Med from Spain to Greece. I suppose the latest Coen brothers movie, who's won the Turner and Booker prizes - what heartfelt novel is exciting the cocktail bars of Islington, I treated with a bit of bourgeiose, boorish disdain. What I'm saying, I guess, is have I missed out?
Grayson Perry's work is very direct and engaging. He explains the ideas behind The Vanity of Small differences on the Channel Four web-site more succunctly than I could ever hope to.
The exhibition was interesting for three reasons. Firstly, from a personal standpoint, his 'Rake's Progress updated', charts the diaspora hidden behind upward social mobility in a way that is immediately recognisable to me.
There is humour, but also pathos. The figures of Tom Rakewell, 'nouveau riche computer whizz-kid' and his middle class bride, are taken from Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,(1426/7) in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. That upward mobility may involve loss, as well as gain is signalled by the way the female figure clutches a copy of Paradise Lost. Wry humour perhaps, but anyone who has crossed class and cultural boundaries will recognise the sense that one imperfect world is being swapped for another, and in a sense you belong to neither.
This was captured the other week by Professor Robert Hudson in his session on cultural identity. He handed out an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff's The Broken Path, (1988):
This century has made migration, expatriation and exile the norm, rootedness the exception....
If we add social mobility as well as cultural mobility to the mix, then indeed migration is the norm. Is the whole 'Voceti' project an attempt to re-capture a sense of englishness that I feel I have lost, or even to search to see if such a notion has any meaning now at all?
The second aspect of Perry's work which interests me is his return to tradition, form and representation. Much of the art of the past half century has been either conceptual - piles of brick; or dada inspired art occurrences - happenings, flash mobs, psychogeographical/situationalst space invasions, objet trouve; or self-referential explorations of materials. It is refreshing to engage with pictures that tell stories using the tricks dreamed up since the the Renaissance, pictures that challenge people to think about how they live and the kind of society we are creating. Serious arrt with mass appeal using tapestry! Bravo Mr Perry!
The final point I suppose, is well, I would say that wouldn't I - mixing received form with contemporary social situations; using modern idioms within a traditional genre...that's what I'm trying to do surely. Look at Trio, for instance - doomed couple trapped by circumstance.... a melange of poetic forms woven together to emulate beat free verse, but adhering to metrical patterns, pop culture and 'street talk' referenced all the time, the whole thing framed by 24/7 connectivity. It can be done, and I think, like Perry's work, it can engage a broader readership.
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