Just once in his retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland (Royal Scottish Academy), Grayson Perry seems to speak from the heart. In his nearly three-metre-long woodcut print Reclining Artist, he stretches out nude on the sofa, with long fingernails against a slender thigh, his penis dangling over saggy balls, and plump female breasts.
It is a synthesis of who he is and who he dreams of being: “a fantasy version of myself, neither fully male nor fully female”, as he notes in the caption. Yet if it is a fantasy, this 2017 vision is also the most authentic work of art in this entire assembly of Perry’s “Smash Hits”. Here he is, he can be no other. He looks you dead in the eye, serious and for once not breaking out into the blokey laugh that’s familiar to watchers of his TV shows.
Perry is a manifestly talented artist who can draw detailed, precise, complex images. But his love of clutter wrecks almost every work in this exhibition. Even in Reclining Artist, there is a manic array of symbolic objects, including his childhood teddy bear Alan Measles.
Wandering around the show, I started to feel sorry for poor Alan. Perry, as you can learn from his lengthy texts appended to every exhibit, constructed a private imaginary universe around this teddy when he was an unhappy child in 1960s Essex. It inhabits his art, like felt and fat haunt the sculptures of Josef Beuys – a mythological presence, whether in a recent bronze called Alan Healing the Wound in which he cradles Perry’s “inner child”, or posing as a knight, or being transported in a glass carriage on the back of Perry’s motorbike. Measles, who was given to Perry in the year he was born, is 63 now and surely deserves a rest.
Or at least, some privacy. This particular childhood icon is so overshared in Perry’s art – here he comes again, driving a racing car across a wasteland – that his symbolic power has long since evaporated. But then Perry doesn’t present his obsession with Alan Measles as a serious monomania. It is more like a self-conscious parody of one. Measles is a jokey, intensity-free totem in the endlessly ironic and embarrassed apology for an artist’s inner life that blares at you from all these pots, prints and tapestries.
It is all very English – as Perry is so painfully aware. One wall here features a collection of objects that people gave him as he toured England in his recent Channel 4 series Grayson Perry’s Full English. The random haul doesn’t communicate much about England, although I found a football fan’s flag bearing his late friend’s name moving. Scots may enjoy Perry’s own meditation on his national identity, a brown and yellow plate that parodies the clumsiness of early English slipware ceramics, decorated with a pair of gloves and the words “English Wanker”.
That apart, no explanation is offered for why an exhibition obsessed with Englishness is in the Scottish capital, or what Perry thinks makes England different from the other countries of the UK. Then again, clarity is not his forte – throwing out “ironic” cliches is. Comfort Blanket is a tapestry that names the things he associates with a good, inclusive – as opposed to a narrow, Brexity – Englishness: fish and chips, The Archers, Eric and Ernie, a nice cuppa . All of which a Brexiter might like, too.
As analyses of national identity go, it is not exactly George Orwell. I used to think Perry was a very clever man who wasn’t much of an artist: great at curating and commenting, not so good at making pots. His increasingly scattergun outpourings on English identity are, however, making me wonder about the cleverness. There is no insight to his recitals of English attributes. The Vanity of Small Differences updates Hogarth’s pictorial narrative The Rake’s Progress to the 21st century with vague, random references to technology and social media: Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell is now a tech billionaire (wow!) who dies in a road crash. But the busy, overelaborate tapestry scenes don’t land any satirical punches: they just get lost in whimsy and empty quotation. Other artists, such as David Hockney and Yinka Shonibare, have done much better modern versions of The Rake’s Progress.
Perry does understand the English middle class, though. He has become popular, famous and beloved by sharing its ambivalence towards art. There is a national prejudice against people who “take themselves too seriously”, especially artists. This exhibition is full of artworks that appeal to that suspicion by being flip. Perry constantly denies that he takes art seriously at all. He parodies modernism and even African religious art in pseudo-fetish sculptures he made for a show at the British Museum. It’s not offensive, just pointless: how silly that anyone should believe art can be salvational or possess magic powers! Any hint of romance has to be undermined by a joke. And yet, there is not much hilarity here. It’s all too bitter and twisted and … English.
Perry has chosen to be a certain kind of middle-class entertainer, throwing away his talent on the vanity of small amusements. The lack of passion and courage in so many of these works is depressing. Quoting and mocking, in an art that relentlessly avoids poetry or depth, he is the philistine’s Blake, the idiot’s intellectual and the artist modern Britain has chosen for its own.
• This article was amended on 26 July 2023 to give the correct venue and organisation for the exhibition.
