Border crossing: Grayson Perry's queerly utopian English journey. (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Roberts, Graham H.
• Is Part Of: Queer studies in media & popular culture. Volume 5:Number 2(2020)
• Page Start: 129
• Page End: 148
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: Gender identity in mass media -- Research -- Periodicals; Gays in popular culture -- Research -- Periodicals; Gays in motion pictures -- Research -- Periodicals; Homosexuality in motion pictures -- Research -- Periodicals; 305.3
• DOI: 10.1386/qsmpc_00032_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2055-5695

Abstract

In 2012, British contemporary artist Grayson Perry undertook a journey from Sunderland in northern England to the Cotswolds in the south. His stated aim was to explore the relationship between class and taste in twenty-first-century Britain. This journey was screened on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 as a three-part documentary entitled All in the Best Possible Taste. Throughout his journey, Perry uses his observations and interactions with those he meets to produce a series of six large tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences (2012). These tapestries, inspired by Hogarth's series of paintings entitled A Rake's Progress (1733), trace the meteoric rise, and tragic fall, of a fictional character Tim Rakewell, whose ascension through the social ranks ends in a rather violent death (this narrative echoes that of Hogarth's equally fictional Tom Rakewell). In my article, I analyse Perry's documentary, and in particular the artwork, which he produces as a part of that documentary, using concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Maffesoli and Louis Marin, among others. I argue that Perry's purported exploration of the relationship between British (or rather English) class and taste is in fact primarily concerned with two other things: first, Perry's own status as a contemporary artist ‐ a desire to portray himself as a 'latter-day Hogarth', if you will; and second, contemporary art's capacity to be both relevant to society and popular among members of that society. Ultimately then, via his performative exploration of subjectivity in this documentary and indeed elsewhere in his work, Perry 'queers' not just masculinity, but also, and perhaps more importantly, received notions of national, social and artistic identity.