The National Portrait Gallery is an odd place to decide to visit. There are probably more (and better) portraits on display next door, in the National Gallery. The difference, of course, is that the portraits here are of famous people, which raises the question of what exactly people go to see – the portraits, or the people in them? Regardless, anyone visiting it over the last three months, and until March 15th, would also see Grayson Perry’s new installation, Who are You?, integrated into the first floor collections, which covers Nineteenth and Twentieth Century figures.
Consisting of 14 works in various media, the exhibition presents portraits of people grappling with their identity. Perry’s question ‘Who are You?’ is, as the leaflet, promotional material, and three-part television programme explained, intended to uncover these internal conflicts of identity, and the identification of people with distinct cultural groups. The exhibition begins with two general works, a self-portrait in which Perry portrays himself as a fortified city, with different buildings (and empty spaces) representing elements of his personality, and a huge, garish tapestry, entitled ‘Comfort Blanket’, in the rough design of a banknote and crammed with irreverent references to British culture. Moaning, the NHS, feet and inches, and the Mini all feature prominently, as does “bitter irony”. This juxtaposition of satire and an absurd, comic brashness continues through the individual portraits which follow.
Perry is justly famous as a potter: the vases on display are remarkable, skilfully presenting their subjects in a medium rarely used for portraits. The designs range from the barbed – a reassembled vase covered in pictures of Chris Huhne representing the unbreakable white middle-class ‘Default Man’, the cracks painted over with gold – to the poignant, such as a demon, representing Alzheimer’s disease, slicing up past memories with scissors. I’m not entirely convinced that the almost lurid vividness with which Perry decorates his pots transferred as well to the other materials (silk, tapestry, print), but each was striking in its presentation of the jagged elements of modern identity.
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The placing of the artworks is pointed, too. The ‘Chris Huhne Vase’ sits in the centre of the gallery of Victorian statesmen, under the gazes of Gladstone and Disraeli; the little bronze statue, one of the finest of the fourteen pieces, ‘I am a Man’, of a young transgender boy, placed between portraits of Kitchener and BadenPowell, as well as Frederick Burnaby, reputedly “the strongest man in the British Army”. This can, I believe, misfire a little, such as in the case of the ‘Modern Family’ vase, which depicts a white gay couple with their adopted mixed-race son. This work becomes the focus of attention for many visitors to the 1900-69 gallery, while in the very same gallery, the only portrait of a gay couple (couples being unusual enough in the Gallery) on permanent display, that of Britten and Pears, is almost totally ignored. In creating a dialogue between his new piece and those which are already there, Perry succeeds in altering the character of the existing displays, but perhaps not every portrait is in need of subverting.
The placements take the viewer away from the psychological, identity-based, aim of Perry’s question: it can also be asked in its usual, literal sense, and flipped from his displays to the position in which they are displayed. The question ‘Who are you?’ springs to mind when you look at the portraits in Perry’s exhibition, for, unlike the rest of the Gallery, they are (mostly) of not-famous people, yet the question also pops up when looking at some of the permanent exhibits. Who is this man with extremely impressive mutton-chop whiskers? George Whyte-Melville, according to the card. Behind ‘Who are you?’, though, lies a second question, less easily answered by a helpful label – ‘Why are you here?’
Perry’s additions are each carefully explained and rationalised – if there is a problem with them as works of art, it stems from this fact, for each of the objects on display already has a ‘correct’ interpretation, and so can, perhaps, be seen, like the William Scrots portrait of Edward VI on the floor above, from the prepared angle only.
At the same time, paradoxically, this potential flaw in the art works exposes the flaw in the gallery around it: why are these portraits not justified as well? The question is relevant because the portraits are not presented as works of art, but as representations of their subject; they are hung there, for the most part, because of who is in the painting, not who painted it, or how well it is painted. Perry’s exhibition challenges this vision of the Gallery. In presenting us with an unconventional set of portraits, this exhibition asks us to take an unconventional look at the ‘normal’ portraits that make up the rest of the room.
Perry, then, succeeds in his aim of presenting a portrait of modern Britain, but also provokes a response beyond that brief. Either intentionally or not, he makes the viewer look beyond the exhibit, and at the gallery in which it is located. Hopefully this will make people question not just who they are seeing in the portraits, but why they are being presented with the portraits with which they are being presented and, in the process, consider what it is that they go to the National Portrait Gallery to see.
