Grayson Perry picks David Hepher's Arrangement in Turquoise and Cream (above) as one of his favourite works from Unpopular Culture. Picture: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, © the artist (2008)
Exhibition: Grayson Perry – Unpopular Culture and Nostalgia for the Bad Times, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, until October 25 2009
"My real childhood doesn't elicit nostalgia in me," admits Grayson Perry, reflecting on the full title of Unpopular Culture. "Nostalgia is a terribly English affliction – a kind of homesickness for cosy, communal hardship when things were somehow better."
Picture © Grayson Perry (2008)
When everyone's favourite potter in a dress opened this show at Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion earlier this year, it seemed more like a churlish raspberry in the face of 20th century British art than a celebration of the Arts Council collection he has delved into for it.
Gazing across the period between the mid 1940s and the 1980s, Perry's selection policy rewrote a supposedly glittering history. "If it made you want to slit your wrists, it was in," suggested one reviewer in The Times, calling it "proof that British art in default mode lacks spirit, charm, grace, joy and fire."
Carel Weight, The World We Live In (1970-73). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Picture © the artist (1973)
The 2003 Turner Prize winner has done little to dispel the accusation. Wishing for gloomy weather as his stampede of multi-disciplinary alt-works reach Yorkshire, he's discarded the "shouty advertisements" of the modern age in favour of "subtle, sensitive, lyrical and quiet" contrasts.
There are 1920s funfairs, bygone adverts for English tea and wartime propaganda in tiny villages – his own sense of nostalgia, Perry says, favours "a fetishized, imaginary past made up of fantasies of bonnets and plough horses and empty roads."
Tony Ray-Jones, Brighton Beach. Picture © National Media Museum, Science and Society Picture Library
"I could be the boy on the breakwater in Tony Ray Jones' photograph of Brighton Beach," he muses, surveying the solitary child strutting behind a gang of weary pensioners on the pebbles.
He'd also "happily take home" Jack Smith's After the Meal, a grim, monochrome painting of an abandoned dinner scene, and Arrangement in Turquoise and Green – the colours of the decaying block of flats which take centre stage in David Hepher's 1978 picture.
"Many of the works in this show come from that span of British cultural history when the working class voice was beginning to be heard in film, photography, literature, drama and art because of post-war socialism, grammar schools and grants. This show is about Britishness, and therefore a lot of it is about class."
George Rodger, An East End family in shelter during raid (1940). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Picture © George Rodger
He toys with the idea of the regional split in Britain, calling the "brooding atmosphere" of the North a key part of "the idea of Englishness."
"I think regions of Britain are easily caricatured, and those caricatures are often kept going by the people themselves," he says, peeling the layers to expose a self-fulfilling illusion.
"Serious cultured people from anywhere have more in common with each other than they do with their geographical neighbours. I have more in common with a curator from Middlesbrough than a brickie from Islington."
Tish Murtha, Untitled, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Picture © the artist (2008)
The films in the display come from British Film Institute archives. "I have always liked old British documentaries like those of Humphrey Jennings," says Perry. "The BFI looked at the catalogue and essays and chose a longlist of maybe 20 films, and I whittled it down to an hour's worth.
"I leapt at the chance to include these films, but I am also aware of how tricky watching them in a gallery can be. So I insisted on comfy chairs and short films."
The results are what he defines as "my reaction to contemporary art." "A curmudgeonly part of me wanted to make a show which whispered a poem of dissent to the thrills and puzzles of contemporary art," he postulates.
"The modern mediated world favours the brash one-liner that is easy to sell and write about. I would like people to feel a warm glow of recognition of a part of themselves which is not celebrated very often.
"I hope people take away a sense of the visual style of Britishness in a slower time, before the media and the one-click attitude to culture. And also a catalogue and a scarf."
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