Pilgrimage to the museum
di // pubblicato il 12 Ottobre, 2011
In British contemporary art, Grayson Perry does not represent an anomaly, so much as he is exemplary of the anomaly of his scene. In a country that still has poet laureates, the role of prominent artists becomes akin to that of celebrities, with consequent media exposure, numerous and frequent interviews, and a great attention to their (often peculiar) personalities. Born in 1960, winner of the famed Turner Prize in 2003, Perry specialises in pottery and ceramics, practices reclaimed from handicraft. The surfaces of his works, commonly featuring a satirical edge, combine pictures and scribblings that require an eye for detail, and weave webs of meanings, like Greek art at once narrative and ornamental. He also has a female alter-ego, Claire, whose face he often presents to the audience.
Crowning his career, his latest exhibition Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman runs from 6 October to 19 February 2012, in possibly the most representative and renowned venue of culture in the United Kingdom: the British Museum. Being in a museum, this exhibition – two and a half years in the making – is structured in a most characteristic way. The artist, also taking up the role of curator, selected several objects from the permanent collections and displayed them alongside his own work, on a path through ten themed areas. The criteria for selection are completely arbitrary: the objects include artefacts that Perry liked, or in which he found “a bit of himself”, or that simply influenced his own work, which is itself drenched in aesthetics of the past, often cast, lacquered, or covered in moss. It all gives the impression of a conversation between archaeologies, (paradoxically) new and ancient.
There is no clear order for reading the surfaces of Perry’s pottery. Rather, the viewer is forced into a somewhat “physical”, all-round exploration and attention. Visitors are drawn in from the first object they encounter, a vase on which the public and their expectations of the exhibition are themselves represented, ranging from “there was a big buzz on it on Twitter” to “I wandered in”. The various works, and their mixed techniques, interact with each other very effectively. The artist's preoccupations are explored through the division into themes, such as childhood memories, shrines, gender and sexuality, and though many artworks “speak” for themselves, Perry's own descriptions add new layers to our understanding of the pieces. Especially interesting is Frivolous Now (2011), onto which are embossed many keywords representative of contemporary culture, all drawn from television, in no particular order. It is a critique of present times, but also a romantic and touching ABC of our world, with which the artist points out that every one of the exhibits on show has – at some point – been current. But the exhibition is extremely personal, and the works trace a colourful map of Perry's subconscious, (apparently) ruled by his teddy bear Alan Measles, which becomes a fatherly and mighty character inside it.
The exhibition culminates with the monumental Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (2011) itself, an iron-cast funeral ship that hosts the mother of all objects: a flint dating back to 250,000 years ago, carved by an unknown author, just like all the other craftsmen who “contributed” to the British Museum’s collection. And it is exactly craftsmanship, the skill of the authors, that bind the show together, and connect the original purposes of the objects and Perry's mind, who considers craftsmanship as the “dialogue of the artist with materials”. If the artefacts fed Perry's imagination, conversely – decontexualised from the museum's displays and recontextualized, without continuity, from an aesthetic perspective – they return to being art objects in their own right, restoring the emphasis on the individual (and anonymous) styles, the lines, and the very materials of these objects.
Grayson Perry's inspiration is as all-encompassing as the British Museum itself, which aims to recreate a history of humanity with artefacts coming from all over the world. In a reality where journeys have been rendered “a tired metaphor of reality TV”, the artist claims to have travelled much more by visiting the museum, and celebrates it in A Walk in Bloomsbury (2010), a ceramic vase on which are engraved icons and pictures relating to the institution. But he draws the parallel further, declaring that “the tomb of the unknown craftsman” might be “another name for the British Museum”. Indeed, many of the objects in the Museum’s collection are anonymous, and often retrieved from tombs; the pilgrimage of visitors towards the heart of the show (the tomb) mirrors that which millions of tourists and travellers make every year towards the Museum, already one of the most important destinations itself. When the attempt is not to depict a world but rather the world, every curator's selection, prudent and objective as it may be, is presented to us as a whole, not a history but rather History. As an example, in the Museum's African section it is easy to let the mind roam through fascinating ideas on the origins of humanity, the roots and the respect towards the past of tribal people, looking at the apparently raw devotional statues. A quick glance at the labels puts our Western eye into perspective, as we find out that very few works date earlier than the 19th century, and what we perceive as primitive is just another reality, another contemporaneity. At the outset of the exhibition, Perry tells us that this is an arbitrary selection, but nonetheless real because of this. In the end, the artist carries out what, with other worthy aims, the British Museum does every day: through a selected arrangement, he creates and legitimises a world.
