I went to London today. A bit like the last time I went to London, I felt so coldy I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't already got something arranged, but I had tickets for a couple of exhibitions at the British Museum. It seemed a pity to waste them, and as one of the shows closes fairly soon it was a case of probably not seeing it if I didn't go this week. And it seemed better than rattling around the house on my own, aware of the absence of the cat and the unworkable, frozen, still snow covered garden. (The Systems Administrator has disappeared off on a mission to explain spreadsheets to a former colleague and old friend who has recently become the treasurer of his local cricket club. Then they were going to go to the racing at Ludlow. The snow has scuppered that, but by then they'd booked a hotel so thought they might as well go to Ludlow anyway. It has a very interesting castle. Prince Arthur died there, thus leaving his younger brother Henry to marry Arthur's widow Catherine. You could call it the birthplace of the Reformation).
The first exhibition I went to was the Grayson Perry curated The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. This has been extended until 26 February so there is still time to go and see it. I enjoyed it very much. The convenient shorthand often used to describe Grayson Perry is 'the transvestite potter', which I suppose he is, much as A.E. Houseman was a suppressed homosexual versifier or Vita Sackville-West a bisexual essayist and gardener. Some angry critics have described him as a charlatan. I don't know about that. He's come across as an entertaining and thought-provoking man in interviews with him I've read, and that was my reaction to his exhibition. Grayson Perry has got the measure of his audience, since the first object inside the exhibition is a pot decorated with museum visitors with speech bubbles coming from their heads. I try to keep up with what's going on in the arts. It is an almost spiritual experience. The Times website says it is a must-see *****. It is the kind of thing people like me go and see. Ouch, Grayson Perry has got my measure, and that of the nay-sayers who regard him as a joke or a fraud, judging by the less adulatory speech bubbles. I don't think he's too fussed.
The format of the show is that objects chosen by Perry from the BM's collection are displayed alongside new works by him, so an Asante helmet, decorated with small horns and feathers, sits alongside a Grayson Perry Early English motorcycle helmet in dull aluminium. The ramshorn ear defenders look quite ancient, the motorcycle crest on the top less so. A medieval lead alloy pilgrim badge is displayed above a set of twentieth century ones, including a couple celebrating 15 years of the twinning of Havering with Ludwigshafen. He is interested in the themes of pilgrimage, shrines, maps, the power we invest in objects,the way that one culture plays on another, and representations of sexuality and danger in art. These are all big, serious themes, and I can't see that an academic curator would necessarily have come up with a better list, though they might have omitted the teddy bear fixation. Perry plays with the idea of a museum as a modern shrine to self-improvement, or as a tomb, given that so many of the things in it were taken from tombs. He likes maps especially when they are maps of ideas and the imagination, rather than a literal exercise in how to get from A to B. He coins some good phrases. Everything in the British Museum was contemporary once.
I found myself looking with a keener eye at many of the museum artifacts than I think I would have done if I'd encountered them along with dozens of similar items from their own culture in a strict and purist anthropological setting. There is a strange Boli figure from Mali, made out of mud and hair, shaped liked a huge guinea pig or coypu (which are not even African animals but that's what it looked like) next to an elaborate Congolese power figure decorated with rags and feathers, plus a Grayson Perry skull drawing on the aesthetics of Goth horror (not generally my favourite) and covered, when you look closely, with images of the English heritage industry, buses, Tudor ruffs, and heraldic lions. There are several more Grayson Perry pots, him being a potter, one examining his ideas of Africa, entitled I have never been to Africa, and a couple poking irreverent fun at the UK buzzwords of early 2011, and the ideas behind the British Museum.
The show finishes with a homage to craftsmanship, the long and sympathetic hands-on relationship with materials. A relaxed, humble, ever-curious love of stuff is central to my idea of being an artist, says Grayson Perry. Funny, David Hockney has just said something rather similar. It looks like a manifesto is brewing. The centre-piece of the final part of the show is a ship that seems to owe much to the aesthetics of Pirates of the Caribbean, called The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, its central cargo a quarter of a million year old flint hand axe. Grayson Perry certainly knows how to do astonishingly kitsch. The pots, on the other hand, are not kitsch. Elegant, funny, thought-provoking, but not kitsch. I left with my brain buzzing with ideas, which was presumably the idea. Getting off the train at Colchester a stranger, seeing my British Museum shop bag, asked enthusiastically whether I'd been to the Grayson Perry. Turned out she went last week, and loved it. I should say that was evidence of a good show.
My thoughts on Hajj, which I saw next, will have to wait until another time, as will the buzzing thoughts, since it is now late, and I'm tired and want my supper (left-over cold sausage) and the chest cold is pressing in with a vengeance. It was worth going to London to see that, but possibly not sensible.
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