All Visceral Arts

Hide and Fight, 2012

Polly Morgan’s Endless Plains at the All Visual Arts gallery, as you might glean from Hide and Fight, above, is morbid. H&F hits you like a rifle slug as you enter the darkened display room of AVA, the massive carcass of the taxidermied stag sprawled on a white, under-lit platform, every hair and pore preserved in harrowing detail. This isn’t just an exercise in traditional trophy taxidermy – peer closer, if you dare, and inside the stags’ stomach is a colony of bats, hanging upside down, bathed in an uncanny green light.

‘The cycle of one life for dozens,’ ‘the uncompromising cycle of life; the predator, the parasite and the prey,’ as the gallery blurb puts it, is most successfully rendered in H&F; The other three fleshy sculptures don’t quite pack the same punch. A litter of piglets scrabble over each other to suck the sap from a fallen tree truck, on which psychedelic mushroom ominously sprout, in The Fall, which falls short not on conception, but on execution, as the piglets have somehow come out of the taxidermic process just a little too shiny; they don’t look real, and these pieces live or die by their ability to convince the viewer that they are authentic scenes from a perverted natural world.

The mushroom make good on their threat in Archipelago, where they now sprout from the split belly of a dead piglet, picked at by a flock of the small birds that dot every sculpture. Again, sorry, Babe, but I don’t buy you. Morgan’s animal corpses have either died from natural causes or are found road kill, of which she keep detailed logs, so intellectually I know I’m looking at a real dead body, but the second of doubt I experience dulls the impact of what otherwise would be a strange and haunting work.

The octopus tentacles wrapped around and sprouting from the dead fox in Habour, again picked at by small, floating birds, are unsettling, and call to mind the tradition of Japanese shunga (erotic art) that feature mythical tentacled sea creatures wrapped around human bodies.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, 1814 (Hokusai)

I was also reminded of Yumiko Utsus’ Octopus Portrait, currently on show at the Saatchi Gallery (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/yumiko_utsu.htm?section_name=photography), which features another octopus, or at least octopus relative, that I wouldn’t want to mess with.

The series of drawings of birds’ nest, made from cremated bird remains and each featuring the body of its eponymous feathered subject collapsed on its frame, did little for me, though some might like the juxtaposition of these miniatures against the maxiture of Morgans’ sculptural tableaux of mortality.

Time waits for neither beast nor man. Morgan’s exhibition closes next month.

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Fifty Shades of Grayson

The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012

Grayson Perry is my latest arty crush. If you’re wondering, I have indeed read the so-bad-it’s-unputdownable Fifty Shades trilogy of repetitive S&M erotica, and I do also have a crush on Christian Grey; but on my fantasy evening, Grey would take me to a party, then Grayson would take me home.

Grayson is a transvestite and a potter, and I challenge you to visit his current exhibition, The Vanity of Small Differences, at the Victoria Miro and not leave just a little bit in love with him too. His gender bending alter-ego Claire might have committed a series of fashion faux pas, notably wearing that dress when she accepted Perry’s 2003 Turner prize, but she looks great in Perrys’ photograph The Mother of All Battles wielding a machine gun.

The Mother of All Battles

If you missed the C4 series, In the Best Possible Taste – “a safari of the taste tribes of Britain”- which chronicles, rather uninspiringly (not your fault, Grayson, you rocked), Perry’s search for inspiration for his six-panel tapestry, it’s well worth Googling Perry (as a man) to take in those crinkled blue eyes and shock of dirty blonde hair. The tapestries themselves, following the journey of Tim Rakewell (yes, it’s a reference to Hogarth) from working class Sunderland boy to bloodstained celebrity OAP, via the monied middle-class of Tunbridge Wells and the endangered upper classes of The Cotswolds, are a detailed delight, rich in irony and accuracy, their composition cleverly referencing various iconic works of religious art to elevate the mundane (“a commonplace tale of social mobility in average Britain,” as Perry has it) to the sublime.

Witness Jamie Oliver, the king of aspiration, peering benignly from the heavens as Tim is exiled from his mother’s house (Expulsion from No 8) and enters the middle class dining room, before occupying a home of his own, where the Penguin book mugs are emblazoned with the slogans, ‘Class Traitor’ and ‘Knowing Laughter,’ while the cushion reads ‘Bourgeois and Proud’ (The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal).  The figures of Tim and girlfriend in Perrys‘ Expulsion are modeled on Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Later, Tim’s dying gasp is the word ‘Mother’ (Lamentation); here, Grayson might have woven in a personal thread, as Tims’ mother, like Graysons’, takes a second husband, and Grayson, like Tim, was thrown out of his family home for being too different.

Just as absorbing are the signature ceramic pots on display; although there are only three and a couple of sketches (compare this to the 20 – 30 Perry produces yearly from his Walthamstow studio), they were attention-grabbing enough for me to spend an hour poring over the Perry books made available to the public at the Miro, which detail hundreds of his pieces, while I ignored the gallery assistants’ pointed hints about purchasing the books from their bookstore.

Perry makes these pots, unlike his tapestries, by hand, and transfers various slogans, images and ideas, from cliches and catchphrases to obscenities and beyond, onto the old fashioned and harmlessly elegant forms of the vase/urn, making them a statement about and a document of our zeitgeist. If you don’t want to pay the £8,000 – 15,000 Perry now commands per piece, I’d advise purchasing one of the excellent books aforementioned, if, unlike me, you’re not too stingy to shell out 25 quid.

The exhibition is free. That I would have paid for.

The Vanity of Small Differences @ the Victoria Miro until 11 August 2012

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