Masculinity, that interesting subject, the bull elephant in the room! It’s about time we were all talking about it, not just inside university departments of gender studies. I can’t make up my mind quite what I think about this book. It has funny illustrations too (a diagram of a floor mop, for instance, designed to appeal to men: a “Turbo 3000 high-performance horizontal surface hygiene system”).
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His latest series was on the subject of masculinity, and now Perry has written a book on that topic, which makes some references to the TV programmes but is properly independent of them. It’s encouraging and liberating that all these things which were impossible to imagine yesterday are suddenly easy today. Surely, even 20 years ago in our cultural history, such an artist could only have figured as an outsider, addressing himself to an avant garde it is unimaginable that he’d have had his own serious show on mainstream TV. He revels in the contradictions, inhabits them outrageously, sparks his wit and his art out of them. His public persona is a reconciliation of opposites: the ceramicist whose fine pots are scratched with shocking sexual graffiti the shambling male who also dresses as a pantomime cutie with pink spots of colour in her cheeks the opinionated art critic opening up to everyone about his teddy bear the working-class sceptic happily married to a middle-class psychotherapist. T he artist Grayson Perry seems to have become a not-so-implausible spokesman for our era in the UK – via the Turner prize, the Reith lectures, and now three television series.
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