Potted histories
Oct 28 2008 by Tamzin Lewis, The Journal
Artist Grayson Perry has curated Unpopular Culture, an exhibition which salutes an era of restraint and austerity. Tamzin Lewis asks why he is drawn to nostalgic, unfashionable British art.
For the shortest of attention spans, Grayson Perry is a ‘tranny potter from Essex’. He is indeed a transvestite. His alter ego Claire scandalised the art world by accepting the Turner Prize in 2003 wearing a lilac frock.
He is also famed as a maker of satirical and subversive, yet classically-shaped pots, and yes, he is from Chelmsford in Essex.
Labels aside, Grayson is a thoughtful artist, full of contradictions and near impossible to categorise.
He is a reasonably rugged 48-year-old married father who loves motorbikes. But he is also a cross-dresser, who having grown out of party frocks, makes a stylish, slightly conservative early-60s woman (he is pictured as Claire opposite).
Grayson was asked to curate an exhibition chosen from the vast Arts Council Collection and the result is a very personal review of British art from around 1940 to 1980.
Taking time out from designing his latest work, a giant tapestry, he says: “I describe the exhibition as taking place between two bombardments,” he says. “The bombardment of the Nazis and the bombardment of turbo-capitalism under Thatcher.”
Grayson trawled through catalogues illustrating around 7,500 works in the collection before choosing work which fell into three groups – figurative post war paintings, bronze sculpture (which he calls ‘lumps’) and documentary photography. He says: “I was presented with a pile of catalogues, some of which date from the 1970s with black and white postage-stamp size illustrations of art in the collection.
“It was quite hard to get an idea of what the works are really like and I was surprised when I saw how big, small, dull or colourful they were compared with the pictures.”
The resulting exhibition, Unpopular Culture, is a celebration of the ‘hushed romanticism’ found in work by Paul Nash, Victor Pasmore, John Piper, Alan Reynolds and Elinor Bellingham-Smith. Grayson applauds the non-media friendly qualities of humility, modesty, and elegance which remind him of a “more innocent Britain of clubs and hobbies”.
He says: “The show is about Englishness: reticent, understated, reflective, poetic and sensitive; sensibilities that we don’t see in contemporary art these days as it is so shouty and theme park-orientated.”
It’s no coincidence that Grayson excluded the Young British Artists of the 1990s with his cut-off point of 1980. Despite being a contemporary of Damien Hirst, Grayson considers himself as more at the tail-end of the ‘Alan Bennett generation’, more interested in the austerity of the kitchen sink realism than the excesses of a diamond-encrusted skull.
He says: “The exhibition choices are as much about what is happening in contemporary art now as my enjoyment of the work in the show.
“People go into a big contemporary art gallery and expect to be surprised, amused, thrilled and shocked.
“They don’t necessarily expect to enjoy a work in a quiet visual way. This is to the detriment of the art which panders to the theme park.
“This exhibition is a counterblast to that. My choices were partly a reaction to the kind of art I don’t like.
“A lot of art looks like advertising and I think that much of the froth of the art world will be blown away by the present economic slowdown which is not a bad thing in my book.”
He adds: “Maybe Unpopular Culture was prescient: austerity nouveau is upon us.”
Unpopular Culture is at the DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery from November 29 to January 4, 2009. Tickets £3.25, contact: (0191) 384-2214.
