Art for the pandemic: Grayson’s Art Club
I have belatedly been watching Grayson’s Art Club on Channel 4. Readers of this blog know that I have been an interested follower of Grayson Perry’s artwork, curating, thoughts and television programmes for some time. I think he is insightful and inclusive, his television programmes offer a relaxed but informed way into thinking about art, but sometimes I have felt this means that the artworks need the television programmes to bring them to life.
I was therefore interested to see how the Art Club would work. Over 6 episodes, Perry has aimed to bring together the nation through creativity during lockdown. Each week has had a theme – portraits, animals, fantasy, view from my window, home and Britain – for which he has invited submissions from the public. He and his wife Philippa have also each made a piece, and Perry has spoken to an invited celebrity comedian and an artist about their thoughts and work each week. Noel Fielding, after being a guest in week 3, continued to contribute and I really enjoyed the maverick approach that he brought to each theme. For ‘Home’, I loved the ideal model house offered by Kevin McCloud.
The underlying theme throughout the show was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic and our social responses, so I was interested to see how elements here overlapped with trends I have been noticing in artistic responses to coronavirus more broadly. Most obviously, Perry is offering a directed creative outlet for people stuck at home and with a suddenly limited sphere of activity. Many, many artists and institutions have been doing something similar. My favourites have been artist Liz Atkin’s #TextureHunterGatherer hashtag on Twitter, and the #GettyMuseumChallenge where people have posed as famous artworks. Different visual richness in both of these, and an equally impressive range of works submitted to Perry.
In the first week of portraits, comedian Joe Lycett contributed a portrait of the UK’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Witty with the words ‘Wash your filthy pig hands’. While not quite the official government wording, this picked up on both images of Witty which have generally become prevalent across our media, and on the role of design in the government’s crucial public health messaging. A brilliant website called ‘Design in Quarantine’ is bringing together the many design innovations coming out of the crisis.
In this series, compared to others I have seen Perry present, I particularly enjoyed the emphasis on him working in his studio. There was a real chance to watch him making and thinking, turning and building his ceramics, drawing on his iPad, consulting books and images, and talking through his thought processes as he worked. It struck me how his best work is a feast of thoughtful storytelling, just as his TV programmes are, and that is where the strength lies. An exhibition is promised from the works that he selected each week, and I will be really interested to see what narrative he weaves out of these in the final curation.
Watching most of the episodes over the past few weeks when I have been furloughed and thinking a lot about the Black Lives Matter movement, I was particularly struck by two things said by participants. Artist Chantal Joffe commented that ‘time feels endless’ during lockdown, and this is something I have been finding particularly unsettling about furlough, that odd sense that I haven’t experienced since school holidays of not really knowing what will come next from one day to another.
In episode 4, Perry asked the artist Jeremy Deller what work he might produce in response to the pandemic. Deller said that it was too soon to respond meaningfully but, in thinking about how the NHS response has been central to our sense of the crisis, he commented that ‘the greatest memorial to the Second World War is the NHS’. With so many physical memorials to historical figures being, I think rightly, pulled down at the moment, I took heart in this striking statement. Let’s hope that we might have as positively world-changing a memorial to this pandemic experience as the NHS has been since 1948.