Grayson Perry: The MOST Specialest Relationship

"Claire and Alan Measles in the style of early American folk art, togged out in nineteenth century European clothes arriving in the ‘New World’ to find a piece of land and start a new life. Problematic! In fact there are a lot of problematic elements to this innocent seeming work if you want to look for them. Have I drawn those flags with enough respect? Aren’t crossdressers just perpetuating unhelpful gender stereotypes? Teddy bears are a sentimentalisation of a noble wild animal and surely using an image of a child’s toy in a work about gender and sexuality is tantamount to paedophilia? Colonial settlers were stealing land from Native Americans and they might have been slave owners. They established a Eurocentric class system that still flourishes in the US today. The very style of this artwork reinforces the conservative world view that holds back innovative young artists. How dare I mock the brave pioneers by entangling them in my tawdry perverted fetishes. Etc etc etc." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This work is again based on an early English press moulded plate showing two gents smoking and drinking in a coffee house. Crybully and Lolcow perhaps sound like characters in a restoration comedy but they are two very modern terms I gleaned from a rather brilliant YouTube channel called ContraPoints. Crybully is an elegant way of putting the psychotherapeutic phenomenon of ‘persecuting from a victim standpoint’ someone who thinks because they have had something unfortunate happen to them it gives them a free pass to be awful to other people. A Lolcow is someone on social media who is unwittingly hilarious and other users will provoke and tease the Lolcow into reacting in an unconsciously stupid, angry and unintentionally funny way, they milk them for laughs hence Lolcow." Grayson Perry (2020)

"Ever since my first visit to the USA in the 1980’s I have been aware that it is a land prone to extremes. Extremes of natural beauty and strip mall crassness, right wing fanaticism and left wing dogma, alcoholic or teetotal, religious conservatism or hedonistic abandon, the cutting edge and the deepest traditions, rural isolation and cities that never sleep. The internet seems to have turbocharged this polarisation. Sanity, I feel, lies in the middle ground, I ride my bike down the middle, between the ditches of rigidity and chaos." Grayson Perry (2020)

"Most of us want to be good people, or at least we want to appear to be good to our social media followers. We want others to see we are ‘doing the right thing’, supporting the right causes, using the right words. Performative goodness clogs our timelines. We don’t want our selfishness, our cynicism our uncaring side to show online. This vase is covered with the lexicon of the politically correct, the approved vocabulary as set out by the thousand and ten commandments of the online moral code, ‘The good old days’ (bad), ’tone policing’, ‘cisnormativity’, ‘other ways of knowing’, ‘straight passing’, ‘non consensual puberty’, ’white fragility’. On top of this are faded photographic images, the apple pie and Instagram clichés of America. On top of everything are white floral motifs containing six fundamental goods, Love, Peace, Freedom, Equality, Respect and Justice. It is all just decoration." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This large plate is based on a seventeenth century English slipware charger that I saw in a Milwaukee art museum. I adore the simple relaxed drawing on these early ceramics. The original also showed a lion with a ridiculous head of a leader probably the king. When a reporter asked Donald Trump when he was first elected if he would be phased by becoming president and boarding Airforce One he said no ‘I am a very stable genius’. This European style of slipware was something that early settlers reproduced on American soil. American collectors love early folk art so I imagined them a piece for today." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This is a map of the Culture War that rages mainly online. I was thinking of cold war propaganda maps showing the ‘Communist Threat’ in the 1950’s. The godlike figure at the top is Mark Zuckerburg CEO of Facebook, I chose him because he is the best known face of social media power. Social media is mainly financed by advertising so those in charge want users to stay online as long as possible, the algorithms make this happen by encouraging conflict and outrage. The red arrows represent this feeding of negative emotion that keeps people scrolling. All the ships, planes and other combatants are labelled with the issues that swirl around this artificially polarised struggle. In the centre of the map is the presidential plane Airforce One colliding with a Russian bomber labelled ‘Climate Change’, when I made this print I thought that was the headline issue, but now I might have made the ‘Racism’ helicopter and the ‘Black Live Matter’ jet fighter more prominent. Hurricane ‘Woke’ off the east coast still seems very topical though." Grayson Perry (2020)

"If I think of American cultural power the image that pops into my head is a huge abstract expressionist painting, a cold war symbol of a self confident ‘land of the free’. In those days New York was the white hot centre of the art world, now it is a hideously expensive liberal enclave. This tapestry is made up of layers that reflect some of the cultural and social archeology of Manhattan. The deepest layer is made up of historic textiles from the many cultures that make up the modern city, American, African, Asian and European. A virtual patchwork of quilts, rugs, blankets, flags and sacks. On top of this is splurged a Jackson Pollock style abstract painting a freewheeling gesture of macho cultural dominance. The outline map of Manhattan is on its side to fit in the landscape sweep of the AbEX painting but also to ram home how phallic it appears, the subway map forming its pulsing veins and arteries. The final layer is a series of pasted collage labels that between them lay out the economic, social and cultural forces that maintain the glass floor under the affluent liberal elite." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This piece is also based on an early English press moulded slipware plate. A lot of these would have been produced around the time of the English civil war and often depicted King Charles, sometimes up an oak tree, sometimes on horseback. The civil war raging in the USA at the moment is of course the culture war. On this plate we have Donald Trump on horseback, his hat balanced on his impossible hair surrounded by tweeting birds. The art world has a strong left wing bias and artists often make work attacking the right from a patronising highly educated standpoint. Rather than change anyone’s mind this often has the opposite effect as the US is such an individualistic society that people will do the opposite of what lefty do-gooders say just because they refuse to be told what to do by an educated elite. The anger around wearing face masks in the US is a good example of this." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This piece is also based on an early English press moulded slipware plate. A lot of these would have been produced around the time of the English civil war and often depicted King Charles, sometimes up an oak tree, sometimes on horseback. The civil war raging in the USA at the moment is of course the culture war. On this plate we have Donald Trump on horseback, his hat balanced on his impossible hair surrounded by tweeting birds. The art world has a strong left wing bias and artists often make work attacking the right from a patronising highly educated standpoint. Rather than change anyone’s mind this often has the opposite effect as the US is such an individualistic society that people will do the opposite of what lefty do-gooders say just because they refuse to be told what to do by an educated elite. The anger around wearing face masks in the US is a good example of this." Grayson Perry (2020)