Grayson Perry and the `national treasure` problem

Grayson Perry and the 'national
treasure' problem
The 'national treasure' label may suit our more cuddly public
figures, but Perry is a powerful, discomfiting artist
Lisa Jardine
theguardian.com , Thursday 2 1 Nov em ber 2 01 3 1 3 .2 5 GMT
'Gray son Perry continues to raise im portant cultural issues by m eans of his art.' Photograph: Antonio
Zazueta Olm os
Following his bravura performance delivering the BBC's Reith lectures, Grayson Perry
has been transformed seamlessly from controversial artist into "national treasure".
Which seems to me a great a pity. We all know that as soon as that quintessentially
British accolade has been bestowed on anyone by the media (David Attenborough, Paul
McCartney, Clare Balding) any sting there once was has been neatly extracted from
whatever it was that brought them to public attention.
The problem I have with this is that I regard Perry as a consummate British artist, one
who came to our attention because of the way he challenged our cultural assumptions,
and who continues to raise important cultural issues by means of his art. And his art is
always edgy – a bit worrying, getting a bit under your skin.
When he won the Turner prize in 2003 – which is when I first encountered his work -
Perry was an artist who used misleadingly beautiful pots to comment quite forcefully on
disturbing flaws or cracks within society. The ceramic pots which were his artistic
trademark were disarmingly traditional in form, but their surface was covered in a kind
of psychic collage, replete with stark, expressionistic drawings, hand-written text,
stencilled lettering and photographs. Savage satirical messages were scrawled alongside
images of childish nostalgia for lost innocence.
Perry's work unsettled the contemporary art world. He said he wanted his pots to
reward and repay the viewer's attentive inspection however close they got. But the
sensation of discovery as you moved towards the work was far from reassuring. The
apparently innocent repetitions of decorative pattern quickly broke down under scrutiny
into components with more sinister associations: ejaculating penises, foetuses, jet planes,
hypodermic needles, swastikas. Perry's pots turn out to be scary.
Pots are supposed to nestle into that comfortable box called "craft". They are not
supposed to be extreme, not supposed to disturb, nor convey thought-provoking
political messages. Close-up, the viewer encountered a compilation of lurid headlines,
photographic images, family snaps, sentimental off-the-peg transfers, kitsch ornament
and an obsessive vocabulary of powerful images drawn from Perry's private fantasies.
Yet there was something banal here – the raggedy teddy bear, the visual clichés.
Somewhere along the line beauty dissolved into something more disappointing.
Although Perry has now largely moved on from pots, his commitment to conveying life's
capacity to disturb and the inevitability of disappointment continues to run through his
work. He is fascinated by the different possibilities for making art using different "craft"
media to reveal and then puncture our humdrum assumptions, and make us think a
little harder about who we are and what we want from life.
At the moment he is creating monumental-scale tapestries, exploiting the very
particular artistic possibilities of this medium in terms of materials and modes of
production (the work is no longer made by him, but drawn, Photoshopped and then
converted into tapestry-realisable form by the manufacturer). The last series – The
Vanity of Small Things – together with its accompanying television series, explored the
relationship between British class, social aspiration and "taste".
On the face of it, the anxieties and disappointments represented here might seem more
trite. Once again, however, when you get up close, when you examine the almost
obsessive detail, there is an almost unbearable emotional intensity – one that
acknowledges the inescapable liaison between desire and disappointment, the inevitable
failure of reality to fulfil our overheated consumerism-enhanced dreams.
Behind all of Perry's work lurks an anxiety at the prospect of the inevitable failure of all
that we hold dear to come up to our expectations. None of the ways in which we