Grayson Perry, “I Know Who I Am” (2024), cotton cloth and embroidery appliqué (© Grayson Perry; courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, all different photos Anna Souter/Hyperallergic)
LONDON — The Wallace Assortment is legendary for its trove of Rococo artwork, resembling Fragonard’s pastel depiction of indulgent flirtation “The Swing” (1767–68), by which a lady with a voluminous skirt kicks a pink slipper into the air with coquettish abandon, carefully watched by two male suitors. In his solo exhibition, Grayson Perry responds to those holdings, providing a fever-dream tackle Fragonard’s portray in a tapestry entitled “Fascist Swing” (2024). Right here, pastels give method to psychedelically vivid colours, whereas the girl’s smiling expression is contorted right into a masks of horror. The laughing suitors are additionally absent — Perry’s protagonist is alone in her psychological disintegration. The work depicts a delusion of extra and grandeur very similar to Fragonard’s, however with a a lot darker, extra scary tone.
“Fascist Swing” depicts Perry’s alter ego Shirley Smith, dreamed up for this exhibition as a method to discover each the Wallace Assortment and his concepts round gender, class, and psychological sickness. Smith, Perry tells us, is a working-class Londoner whose psychological sickness pushed her into “delusions of grandeur,” because the exhibition’s title places it, resulting in a chronic psychotic breakdown by which she got here to consider she was a member of the aristocracy and the rightful inheritor to Hertford Home, the house of the Assortment. Smith relies partly on real-life so-called outsider artists who suffered from psychological well being challenges and delusions, resembling Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964) and Madge Gill (1882–61) — a few of whose fascinating works are included at the start of the exhibition.
Set up view of Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
Guests unprepared for Perry’s gesamtkunstwerk method to this exhibition could also be puzzled by this opening room, the place the boundary between fact and fiction is bafflingly however successfully blurred. Fictionalized “archival” images of and letters by Smith sit beside actual documentation of Gill’s actions on the Wallace Assortment within the Nineteen Forties, with false dates attributed to the previous however not the latter, for example. Unusually, the audio information is essential to getting into Perry/Smith’s world; tracks are alternately narrated by Perry and Smith, making for an immersive expertise — though it’s a disgrace that Smith is given a caricatured Cockney accent, which creates a lazily stereotyped picture of working-class identification.
The exhibition loosely follows Smith’s life, ending in a quasi-recreation of the bed room by which she spent her ultimate days. There are some lovely objects in right here, together with a cupboard embellished with portraits of ladies from the Wallace Assortment. There may be additionally a bit referred to as “Hospital Queen” (2024), a hand-beaded self-portrait Smith supposedly made throughout a keep in a psychological hospital. This maybe alludes to our considerably morbid fascination with such objects. However regardless that Perry has struggled with points round psychological well being, his remedy feels a bit flippant.
Equally, in “A Tree in a Landscape” (2024), Perry creates a household tree utilizing portrait miniatures from the museum’s assortment, labeling each with a special psychological well being prognosis. The caption notes, “We all exhibit some traits that could be pathologized.” Will we? Perry’s evaluation feels glib; right here, as in his remedy of Smith’s psychosis, he fails to have interaction with the realities of significant psychological sickness.
Set up views of Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
That is however one occasion of a recurring lack of nuance in a few of Perry’s engagements with complicated points. It’s evident that he thinks deeply — however not all the time about the fitting issues in the fitting locations. For example, “Man of Stories” (2024), a central piece within the exhibition, is a really (and intentionally) hideous beaded sculpture of a bard-like determine, impressed by “the expert storytellers of the Luba people in central Africa,” in accordance with Perry’s caption. It’s not defined why Perry was impressed by this explicit tradition, or whether or not the Luba individuals have any connection to things held within the Wallace Assortment. The caption continues: “One of my ongoing concerns is over-intellectualism in Western culture, so I was fascinated by the idea of a travelling bard.” Is the implication that he’s ascribing a fascinating non-intellectualism to central African tradition? This speaks to me, at finest, of a failure to permit viewers to have interaction with the determine at an mental stage, and at worst, of exoticism.
Usually, Perry is attention-grabbing as a result of as an alternative of asking obscure questions on what it means to be a human in a common sense, he queries what it means to be a human particularly residing inside the intersections of sophistication and gender in British society. After I visited on a Saturday afternoon, the exhibition was full of individuals; Perry is undoubtedly well-liked. His colourful, down-to-earth method evidently holds a widespread enchantment, and that in itself is efficacious, drawing guests into a brand new engagement with conceptions of gender and sophistication, in addition to questions of how we reply to historic collections. Nevertheless, it’s a damaging falsity to imagine the general public can’t be engaged by a extra nuanced method to those points. That is the place this exhibition — in its ugliness, brashness, and occasional moments of insensitivity — falls brief.
Set up view of Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
Set up view of Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
Set up view of Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur continues on the Wallace Assortment (Hertford Home, Manchester Sq., London) by means of October 26. The exhibition was curated by the artist.
