Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences: The Vanity of Small Differences (reprinted)

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Below: Grayson Perry. The Agony in the Car Park, 2012 (detail). Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

A talk by the artist (16 April 2019, 7–9pm) at Sarabande Foundation, the Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation, a non-profit organisation championing young creatives.Now open at the Hayward Gallery – Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, featuring Grayson Perry The scene is Tim’s great-grandmother’s front room. The infant Tim reaches for his mother’s smartphone – his rival for her attention. She is dressed up, ready for a night out with her four friends, who have perhaps already ‘been on the pre-lash’. Two ‘Mixed Martial Arts’ enthusiasts present icons of tribal identity to the infant: a Sunderland A.F.C. football shirt and a miner’s lamp. In the manner of early Christian painting, Tim appears a second time in the work: on the stairs, as a four-year-old, facing another evening alone in front of a screen. Although this series of images developed very organically, with little consistent method, the religious reference was here from the start: I hear the echo of paintings such as Andrea Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (c.1450). You can imply a fake past – the distressed leather sofas of the gastropub – but what if something is so bad that it is not good but simply bad, and you have made a tasteless joke?

The artist's first major solo exhibition (19 October 2018-3 February 2019) in France is divided into ten themed chapters that look at universal topics such as identity, gender, class, religion and sexuality. By straightforwardly asking all kinds of people what they like and why, Perry used TV to navigate a way through the class anxieties that plague us all. What if I don't fit in? What if I don't stand out enough? Perry teased out from his interviewees, completely without judgment, how we use taste as a way to signal the tribe we aspire to. What if objects really mean something, and that meaning is about more than materiality? Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close”, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 X 400 cm. British Council Collection.

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The story of Tim Rakewell’s life is very different, however, and has very little in common with Hogarth’s work, other than in depicting aspects of what is now deemed fashionable, and in raising moral questions. Perry’s principal subject is class and the way in which people’s possessions communicates where they want to fit into society. And related to class is the question of good or bad taste and the degree to which people care about it. ‘I think that – more than any other factor, more than age, race, religion, or sexuality – one’s social class determines one’s taste.’ The exhibition (11 November 2022–26 March 2023) includes ceramics, sculptures in wood and metal, prints, monumental tapestries and embroideries. Expulsion From Number 8 Eden Close, 2012. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London Tim Rakewell and his wife are now in their late forties and their children are grown. They stroll, like Mr and Mrs Andrews in Thomas Gainsborough’s famous portrait of the landed gentry (c. 1750), in the grounds of their mansion in the Cotswolds. They are new money; they can never become upper-class in their lifetime. In the light of the sunset, they watch the old aristocratic stag with its tattered tweed hide being hunted down by the dogs of tax, social change, upkeep and fuel bills. The old land-owning breed is dying out. Tim has his own problems; as a ‘fat cat’ he has attracted the ire of an ‘Occupy’-style protest movement, who camp outside his house. The protester silhouetted between the stag’s antlers refers to paintings of the vision of a crucifix above the head of a stag.

Grayson Perry writes in the Guardian and reveals two new works ahead of his Serpentine Galleries show Grayson Perry. Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 x 400 cm (78 3/4 x 157 1/2 in), edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. So, too, his humanity stretches to the inherited sadness of the upper classes, who cannot live in the moment ever, only in the past, as they keep their crumbling gaffes alive in cold deprivation. I was once helicoptered into a stately home (don't ask) and shown around. We were given the finest wines known to humanity, yet I was shivering with my coat on. No one remarked on my discomfort. Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden (Brancacci Chapel) is a parallel to Tim’s rejection by his family (3) overseen by Jamie Oliver, ‘the god of social mobility’, and raises the perhaps unforeseen question, ‘Is moving socially upwards a kind of fall – something from which we need saving.’ Three different paintings of the Annunciation provide elements of ‘The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal’: Crivelli (National Gallery) for the vegetables (though in his work they are symbolic) Campin (The Cloisters N.Y.) for the jug of lillies (again symbolic in Renaissance art) and Grunewald’s altarpiece (Colmar) for the face of Tim’s colleague (though she is also given angelic wings whereas in Grunewald her face is slightly similar to that of Mary). There are no religious connotations to The Upper Class at Bay (though see The Stag at Bay by Landseer and Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, and the reference described above to St Hubert).

Grayson Perry’s current exhibition at Victoria Miro features his new series of six tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, which explores notions of taste through the lens of social class

Finnbarr Webster Adoration of the Cage Fighters (left) and The Agony in the Car Park, hung beneath cathedral windows The exhibition (13 April – 2 September 2018) is produced in collaboration with La Monnaie de Paris museum, where it will be on view during autumn 2018. While Hogarth is a stated influence in this work, so also are various early Renaissance religious paintings – as Perry puts it, ‘A very middle-class thing to do as it flatters the education and cultural capital of the audience.’ And that answers the question as to Perry’s expected audience for his work! But what is the point of such references, especially as they are often very slight, to the extent of being hardly recognisable? Do they have any religious point or is this just an intellectual game? It would seem not to be a game, because in contrast to the ironic comment about his middle-class audience, Perry also says, ‘I wanted to use the audience’s familiarity with the Christian narratives depicted to lend weight to my own modern moral subject.’ Does he overestimate familiarity with Christian narrative? And how does that narrative ‘lend weight’ to his moral subject? Grayson Perry's The Vanity of Small Differences tells the story of class mobility and the influence social class has on our aesthetic taste. Inspired by William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, the six tapestries chart the 'class journey' made by young Tim Rakewell and include many of the characters, incidents and objects Grayson Perry encountered on his journeys and experiences throughout Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and The Cotswolds for the television series 'All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry', which first aired on Channel 4 in June 2012. The exhibition (14 September – 3 December 2017) tells the story of studio pottery in Britain, from the early twentieth century to the present.

Over the last decade the tapestries have been displayed in galleries, museums and stately homes. Perry was not at the cathedral for the hanging but said: “It was conceived as a public artwork and I wanted to see the tapestries shared with very wide and varied audiences. My hope remains that it not only delights the eye and engages visitors, but sparks debate about class, taste and British society.” Some of Claire’s best-known outfits are featured in this display (4 November 2017 – 4 February 2018), including the Bo Peep dress worn when Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003. Perhaps unusually for a contemporary artist, I often prioritise how my work might flourish in a domestic setting…' He is a man at the top of his game — and the queen of nimble social observation in his new London show."

Frans Hals

If identity is staked out through what we eat, how we dress, how we decorate our houses, we are all overwhelmed by choice. Choice has become oppressive. Rich people have interior designers to make choices for them. A woman featured in the second episode of Perry's programme brought a show flat, already decorated, to avoid the dilemma. I have some sympathy. The exercising of "individuality" is arduous. It has been pointed out that Jonathan Swift in his 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels described this phenomenon when writing about how two groups entered into a long and vicious war after they disagreed on which was the best end to break an egg. [6]