Exhibition Review: Man Hours by Grayson Perry

Perry’s Selfie with Political Causes introduces visitors with a sharp critiquing of the rise of ‘Social Justice Warriors’ in modern-day society. This vibrant and colourful woodcut print displays exhaust pipes emitting toxic fumes representing the growing lack of tolerance in communities, especially in online spaces. Intolerance underpins the neighbouring colour etched piece The American Dream. This map depicts Perry’s ‘culture war’ polarising society via social media. The godlike figure atop - Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg - physically embodies the power imbalance between social network billionaires and the user, as the former utilises advertising and algorithms to exploit the latter’s money and time. Perry insists that this attention grab is achieved by fuelling the ‘culture war’ - encouraging conflict and divisiveness to engage and outrage the masses into more online activity. He incorporates social movements such as climate change and Black Lives Matter into the piece, inscribing them onto the fighter jets colliding with presidential plane, Airforce One. This crash encapsulates the conflict bred by these networks between ‘Woke’-ism and governmental bodies, this divergence being the primary propagator of social intolerance. 

This ‘culture war’ rages on in Perry’s three-plate etching Print for a Politician. Produced for an exhibition in Venice, this panoramic map details a world of total intolerance with a Venetian battleground split between two groups of opposing belief systems in total warfare. Within the (seemingly) seventeenth century landscape, a fissure created by religious and political differences splits Venice in two, polarising the land. This social commentary highlights the general social readiness to have fixed opinions on issues without room for healthy debate - a mindset which Perry considers to be both self-righteous and unsustainable in our modern-day society. 

British politics come into play in this exhibition with Perry’s sizeable self-portrait as Margaret Thatcher, Vote for Me!. This woodcut print exposes the assumption that artists and their audiences are exclusively left leaning in their politics and criticises it for the subsequent alienation that it causes of the half of their viewership who lean right. Perry also notes the relationship between politics and income with this piece, remarking how, as his, and expectedly others’, income has grown, his political stance has become more and more right leaning, inviting the viewer to consider this political hypocrisy within the art world that remains hidden under the guise of the ‘progressive’. 

The English commentary builds in Perry’s adapting of maps from the past. Map of an Englishman is an etched piece inspired by the county maps typically found in upper-class homes. This piece is said to be a map both of Perry’s mind, and that of the English everyman’s. The shape somewhat resembles the cross-section of the brain with emotive phrases scattered throughout the imagined lands, providing this window into the artist’s stream-of-consciousness. This emotional re-branding of the upper-class wall art both ridicules the pretensions that the middle class is somehow socially superior to other classes while highlighting how, emotionally, we are all in fact rather similar. Perry is strategic in his teasing of the upper classes, as while he may criticise the super-rich for their lifestyle, he is acutely aware that the rich are those who can afford to hang his work on their walls alongside the beloved county maps he mocks with his own. 

The super-rich exposé persists with the woodcut print Sponsored by You. This provocatively titled print sees Perry’s childhood teddy, Alan Measles, and female alter-ego, Claire, speeding along Silicon Valley in a flashy supercar. Perry claims that “super-rich people spend a lot of money on supercars, art and handbags” and visualises this phenomenon with the lavish joyride of a large green sportscar inscribed with the names of various tax havens spanning Luxembourg to the Cayman Islands. 

This focus on the socio-political power of the wealthy elite ties into the side room of the exhibit smoothly, as we are greeted with Perry’s Animal Spirit. The monochrome woodcut print spans six panels and dominates this side of the exhibition with its exploration of economic forces at work. The title plays into the theme, as market commentators used the phrase regularly to disguise the widespread mismanagement of resources that led to the 2008 financial crash with this abstract ‘spirit’ no one could have tamed. The hybrid bull-bear is cut cross-sectionally, revealing innards labelled with various sarcastic adjectives. Perry’s bull-and-bear being is not the only allusion to popular stock market phrasing in this piece, in fact many economic symbols are involved; an abandoned baby lies beneath the beast, three black crows sit atop it, and a hanging man haunts the background. Here, we see Perry’s overt criticism of the men whose negligence and ‘bullish’ spirits brought about the crash, and the general lack of accountability faced. 

To the left of this hyper-political piece, the exhibit takes a personal turn with Perry’s ‘idealised self-portrait’ Reclining Artist. With visuals comparable to Titan’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia, Perry’s naked form spans a couch set amongst a chaotic scene of artist’s paraphernalia, some of his own pieces, and multiple different forms of Alan Measles. The introspective work showcases Perry’s transvestitism as he is adorned with both male and female anatomy, blurring the lines between the masculine and the feminine and capturing the duality of his identity as Grayson Perry and, other times, as Claire. This combination of intellectual reference and Perry’s personal reality sums up Man Hours quite neatly, posing both satisfaction and a subtle challenge to his educated middle-class viewers. 

See Grayson Perry: Man Hours at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts until Sunday 5 January 2025. Free entry.