Grayson Perry, Claire and Alan Measles take over Sydney gallery

Grayson Perry, My Pretty Little Art Career
Sydney International Art Series
Museum of Contemporary Art
Sydney
Until May 1

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is showing the first major survey exhibition in the southern hemisphere of the internationally renowned artist and Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry, as part of the Sydney International Art Series, which also featured “The Greats,” a show of works from the Scottish National Galleries.

Grayson Perry is one of the best-known British artists of his generation, acclaimed for his ceramics, sculptures, drawings, prints and tapestries. With a keen eye for detail and a love of the popular and vernacular, Perry infuses his artworks with a sly humour and reflection on society past and present.

The artist’s highly decorated pots, in particular, reveal a host of imagery ranging from the highly personal to the political, their subjects including his own family, the art world, Biblical stories, the royal family and images of warfare and sexual fantasy.

Perry’s transvestitism and feminine alter ego or other persona, ‘Claire’ emerges through his practice as a recurring visual motif. She is something of an audience member and observer to his creative work.

A contemporary of the YBA (Young British Artists) generation, he has forged a distinctive career that sits apart from the more theoretical approach of some of his peers, favouring a more flamboyant aesthetic that blurs the division between high art and popular culture.

This has meant  his work is more accessible to the general public and seen him criticising the art world for its overly pretentious approaches. Two years ago he became the first practicing artist to deliver the Reith lectures on the BBC.

The first room of the gallery features the two elements of his public face, Grayson Perry the artist and Claire in the form of an embroidered monk's habit, emphasising the notion of the artist as a lone contemplative enquirer after truth. On the other side of the room is one of Claire’s dresses, which looks at first like a milkmaid's embroidered dress but coming closer reveals that the embroidered designs are not traditional – the butterflies have the bodies of naked women and each of the cute bows features an entwined penis.

Included in the display of more than two dozen pots is “Precious Boys,” which was inspired by a Japanese ceramic vase. The original design depicted a shoal of carp swimming around the central part of the vase. Above decorative lily pads wrapped around the lip of the vase with roots trailing into thin water.  In “Precious Boys” he has replaced the carp with tiny incised bombers and the lily pads are replaced by a group of young men dressed in women’s clothing based on images he has taken from transvestite magazines.

This creates a both a tension around the conflict between the masculine and feminine sides of the male while also providing a sense of whimsy and the comic.

The artist describes the vase as being a loose self-portrait in reference to his own transvestitism which has been a driving force in his work. He has also celebrated Victorian transvestites in two plates, “Mr Ernest Boulton” and “Mr Frederick Park”

Perry said of the work “Referencing exquisite works from the past instantly gives me a resonant framework in which to make my own pots."

This appropriation of other artistic forms can be seen in most of the artist’s work where he provides his own contemporary reworking of either the subject matter or the process.

Several of his large tapestries, which are up to five metres long, are based on other works of art, notably “The Vanity of Small Difference” in which he examines the social issues of contemporary Britain. The work is his reworking of William Hogarth’s” A Rake's Progress.” In Perry’s version, the anti-hero Tom Rakewell ends his life with his car wrapped around a lamppost.

In his “The Walthamstow Tapestry,” Perry combines elements of his personal life along with wider aesthetic and social concerns. Walthamstow was the location of his studio for many years but also the birthplace of textile designer William Morris, who is associated with the rebirth of the Arts and Crafts Movement (which led to Perry’s own craft works)

The tapestry is a journey through life featuring the Shakespearian seven ages of man but the imagery he uses is of contemporary brand names and playful imagined scenarios.

The exhibition also has a number of the artist’s large maps, which refer back to ancient attempts at codifying the world. These maps, however, are not geographic locations but rather attempts to outline the social structures and divisions which make up society. “A Map of Days” is like a child’s board game while “Map of an Englishman” is an island where the various locations have weird English place names along with names which highlight the driving forces behind people’s actions such as “sex” and “dreams” and a large central area titles “consciousness.”

The exhibition includes several of the artist’s sculptural works including the large cast iron work, “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman,” which is based on an amalgam of early historical works from the British Museum as well as drawing inspiration from The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. The works combines notions of journeys and the voyage across the River Styx with the boat decorated with images of objects created by craftsman from Africa, Asia, Persia and Europe. The artist notes that “all this is the collective cargo that the unknown craftsman might carry into the afterlife.”

The artist’s childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles, makes a number of appearances throughout his work. The bear's eye features as a god-like presence in the tapestry “Map of truths and beliefs “while he is also the inspiration for the small gold Willendorf Venus shapes “Prehistoric Gold Pubic Aslan Dogu.” Inflatable Alan Measles teddy bears are also available from the gift shop at $19.95.

John Daly-Peoples travelled to Sydney with the assistance of Destination New South Wales

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