A Review: Grayson Perry Smash Hits at the National Gallery, Edinburgh

A new exhibition "Grayson Perry | Smash Hits" has opened at the National (Royal Scottish Academy) in Edinburgh - and this post contains my FIRST EVER GUEST REVIEW on this blog!

This summer, come and see the biggest ever exhibition of Sir Grayson Perry's work, covering his 40-year career. Perry has gone from taking pottery evening classes to winning the Turner Prize, presenting television programmes on Channel 4 and writing acclaimed books. Pottery allowed him the opportunity to indulge his fascination with sex, Punk, and counterculture, amongst other things, in the most unlikely and polite of artforms. Today he is one of Britain's most celebrated artists and cultural figures.

Last week I posted a link to Jonathan Jones's review of the exhibition to my Making A Mark facebook Page - which got a LOT of comments as I invited people to look at the review and decided whether they agreed with Jonathan or me or had another view.

This is because his review was titled Grayson Perry: Smash Hits review – English self-mockery without insight or depth

Of course, none of the people commenting had actually seen the exhibition. Mostly we were commenting from a perspective of what we have seen previously.

So when one of my followers announced she was going to see the exhibition at the weekend I was absolutely agog to see what she found and hear about what she thought and made her promise to report back with photos!

This she did yesterday! (see below) Note in particular that neither of the visitors had read the Guardian Review.

Many thanks to Helen Newall for being such a good sport and delivering both a FABULOUS review and AMAZING pics. I think I should ask her to report back from more exhibitions! Maybe the Liverpool Biennial next? Or the John Moores Painting Prize - of which more tomorrow!

A Review: Grayson Perry, National Gallery, Edinburgh - by Helen Newall

This is reproduced from Helen's post on Facebook after she visited the exhibition at the weekend. Helen lives in Liverpool and travelled up to Edinburgh by train to see it.

Go to Helen's post on Facebook ( link is above) to see some really excellent pics of the exhibition!

The viewers: an English woman, outsider artist, with a Grayson Perry crush.

 
A Scottish woman, musician, who had never heard of Grayson Perry prior to this, and who wouldn’t usually visit an art gallery.

 
We purposefully didn’t read the Guardian review before seeing this.

We arrived at ten minutes to ten for our 10am pre-booked entry and there was already a substantial queue waiting at the locked front doors. This was the Saturday before the Festivals get going, and the city is packed, and we speculated, that this exhibition is going to be massively popular when the Festival and Fringe really gets going.

 
Doors opened promptly, and we were in! But already, the first room of the exhibition was jam-packed - there is so much detail to take in of each print or object, that the crowds linger and this small room acts as a bottle neck: a gallery guide suggested we move through into the next rooms and come back to this one, because, she said, rooms are themed rather than in a specific or chronological order. (A pottery iron-age motorbike helmet, for example, which he made while at art school, appears close to the motorbike Perry designed and had made later in his career when his success meant that he could do such things). The works - pots, sculptures, prints and tapestries - are displayed over seven spaces of varying sizes. We pushed through to room 2 and found ourselves in a spacious white hall, its walls hung with immense tapestries, and its floor punctuated with white plinths on which Perry’s coil pots were displayed within glass cubes. It was a riot of huge colour: impressive with woven narratives and glittering with shimmering pot glazes. This is a beautifully presented and well lit exhibition. I think we might have gasped: my Scottish companion, with no great love of galleries, was enthralled. We soon drifted apart, contemplating each piece in our own time and way, mainly because we were using the audio commentary. This commentary, I think, is what made an already visually spectacular exhibition really sing: Perry’s no-nonsense approach is evident: he speaks freely, without pretension and plenty of humour about selected works from each room as if he’s there with me, talking about his thinking and creative investigations: at one point he laughs raucously - it’s glorious! The longer we stood before each piece, listening and looking, the more the detail and humour and biting satire in each print or pot or tapestry came alive and the more there was to see.

 
While it’s joyous and critical in its observations of social mobility, the class system, the art elite, it’s also painfully sad at times: we were affected by the works set in the Digmoor estate, Skelmersdale, an area of social deprivation not far from where we have both lived and worked: the sculpture, The King of Nowhere, a cast iron figure pierced with knives, remains especially poignant, as news reaches us of a stabbing death in Ormskirk, not far from Skem. Another remarkable piece is The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, originally part of an exhibition at the British Meseum and which acts as ‘a monument to all the unknown craftsmen and craftswomen who have made all the wonders of civilisations around the world’, because, as Perry notes, much of the art we view in museums is not by named artists. This is a body of work that often champions the underdog, the working class, the left behind, the outsider artists; it pokes sharp things at middle and upper class pretensions and the inability of society - and the art world - to see those whose invisible labour keeps the (art) world turning.
If, like me, you’re a postmodern magpie with a love of the shiny glazes of gilded pots and the glossy satin of Claire’s Coming Out Dress, you’ll love this exhibition. My only niggle was that it was sometimes hard to find the works narrated in the audio guide, but gallery assistants were assiduous in their directions. This also seemed to be an exhibition in which viewers talked to complete strangers: I’ve never had so many different people talk to me as we viewed. Perhaps there was something about the growing crowdedness which meant we could not pretend we were alone. A woman next to me when viewing ‘A Map of an Englishman’ noted when when my companion and I found in it ‘the Bad Review’ and she asked if we’d seen the Guardian and said of Jones’s review: ‘Pfffft! A load of tosh’. A man snd his wife stood and discussed ‘Slave Ship’ with us. The demographic was wide: this seems to have attracted people of all ages. Later, we overheard in the gift shop (through which you must exit), that ‘that was probably one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen.’

So in short: we loved it. Navigating it through the audio-guide was illuminating and also frustrating, but I forgive that, because moving from room to room and searching became part of the odyssey. It grew increasingly crowded. But it was exhilarating.

 
After the exhibition we went to a café and read the review. The vitriol was shocking! Was Jonathan Jones at the same exhibition we had just seen? Firstly; the Englishness thing. Edinburgh is an international city, and even more so during the weeks of the festivals. It’s very patronising, therefore, to suggest that Perry’s focus on English identity is problematic in a Scottish city: I’d go so far as to say that this parochialises and patronises Edinburgh in suggesting this. In any case, because rooms are themed, until you encounter the ‘English room’, it’s not particularly overly evident. But it’s who he is and identity is what his art explores, so how would a retrospective exhibition work by not including it?

 
My Scottish companion was not in the least perturbed by the Englishness represented here. She was also particularly moved by the St George’s flag stitched with embroidery depicting plans of slave ships. Here was colonialism portrayed in red and white computer stitched silk. The Englishness is critiqued with the sharp wit of a Viz comic, but there is also a fondness for its working class-ness, its multiculturalness, its ordinariness celebrated not just in the pots and prints but also in found objects imbued with value via memory, nostalgia and personal significance detailed in the additional notes in this section. Which brings me to the exhibition labels. Those not using the audio guides had recourse to written commentary beside each work for explanation and context. Jones found these ‘lengthy’ and there is a sniff of the pejorative in this, but these labels were no longer than the ones I’ve seen at Liverpool Tate, or any other gallery or museum. For the works not featured in the audio commentary, they were contextual and informative, and certainly not the essays that Jones implies.

 
I found the ‘clutter’ that so annoys Jones, to be riotously joyous. But then, I like postmodern eclectic chaos, although I found this to be an elegant presentation of a body of work. (And ‘clutter’ or detail is not just Perry’s domain: Bruegel anyone? Hogarth? Hieronymous Bosch?) If Perry had the ‘clarity’ that Jones demands, and if the works didn’t have the humorous voice that Jones finds so flippant, they would be completely different; Perry would be an utterly different artist. He wouldn’t be Grayson Perry. The only superficial thing I find here is the gaze of the critic.

Ultimately, it’s totally ok not to like Grayson Perry’s art, he won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s not ok to patronise and insult it and thereby insult Edinburgh also! I get the impression Jones couldn’t wait to get to this exhibition to hate it. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.