Brilliant Ideas: Artist Grayson Perry

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this they have a unique power to inspire astonish provoke and shock to push boundaries ask new questions and see the world of fresh artists like Grayson Perry is he's a very naughty boy but I like him he's across dressing pata from Essex isn't he that's what that's how he describes himself he quite uniquely among contemporary artists has had something very witty and funny and very prescient to say about contemporary art what I really love about Grayson Perry is the way that he so crosses over and transcends so many different things I'm a quality control freak I have to do it badly in the right way you see mistakes is your style contemporary artist broadcaster author transvestite lecturer and as his Twitter biography states a worshipper of teddy bears Grayson Perry is probably best known for his classically shaped versus traditionally beautiful until you take a closer look in 2003 he won the Turner Prize Britain's most prestigious award for contemporary art but he's now setting his sights on a global stage with work ranging from tapestry to graphic novels and addressing universal themes around identity in the modern world he's one of Britain's most compelling and best loved artists I was born in 1960 in chumps furred about 30 miles from London my father was an electrician but he left when I was four my mother was quite she's still alive my mother is quite what you call a drama queen I have a list of banned words that includes passionate spiritual and profound all words it will be easy to reach for when describing the thing that keeps me making art but the motivation is tender and it needs to be protected from cliches I have a particular acute allergy to cliches because my mother ran off with the milkman I suppose what I did you know I sort of retreated into an imaginary world because it wasn't a happiest environment to grow up in and mmm my teddy bear which I got when I was 1 became kind of sort of symbolic father for me all my games when I was a child centered around his leadership allenbys or was that's my teddy bears name he led the sort of rebellion against the invading German it was it's an ongoing game that's I've turned on until I was about I don't know 15 he was called Alan measles because my best friend when I was very little was my next-door neighbor's son and he was called Alan and me there was because we bonded when I had measles very simple and often people sort of say about say like I'm a transvestite and they say isn't dressing up in women's clothes a very sort of simplistic way of accessing your femininity and I always say yeah but I became a transvestite when I was a child when I was quite simple in the same way as isn't there a more sophisticated way of kind of supplementing your lack of a male role model than giving it to a teddy bear I was a child you know you use the material that's available at the time playing I was top of the class at school until all of my demons came home to roost when I was about 40 my academic career collapsed I think it was just all of my demons you know they were to do with my father leaving and my stepfather being a sort of violent difficult person I'd always liked art and then my art teacher just said oh I think you do really well at art college one day and I thought what never thought of that I went to ports of polytechnics which wasn't a particularly prestigious art school but it was okay you know it's very free and easy and that sort of 60s mold of you know try a bit of everything we really mine what you do you can do printing you can do sculpture you can do ceramics you can do painting filmmaking I did it all when I was there and then when I left art college I did what every aspiring art student did I came to London and at the time so we I can't imagine a student now doing it I came to central London and squatted for four years which now so I lived rent-free in central London with a bunch of 1980s Bohemians for four years that was amazingly fertile grounding for me as an artist he hung out with a group of artists called the neo natureís who were kind of really interesting group of mostly women kind of performance artists but they did these very grotty slightly shabby not very professional performances where they would get naked they would often paint themselves Grayson was involved in some of those performances there's a wonderful early photo of him with his body paint all over him and a little bell hanging off his member and he obviously got into the spirit a real kind of fun silliness and almost like ante the slick art that they were seeing coming out of places like New York in the 1980s everybody in the squat was they had a good sense of humor and we and quite a ruthless mockery of any pretension and so we used to laugh about people's aspiring trendiness or something even though of course we were kind of being fashionable I said that's the irony of it and that kind of filled me and so I was always attracted to the slightly math thing really unfashionable and and a bit awful and so I was always attracted to that and that's why when one of my friends in the house said would you fancy doing pottery evening classes because she was going along I said yeah that sounds interesting it seemed foolish should to go down that route pottery pottery award-winning contemporary artist Grayson Perry has been described as one of the great social and cultural commentators of our era but his discovery of his signature medium ceramics happened almost by accident in retrospect it could look like that was a major moment you know my oh god yes suddenly the minute I touched clay I knew that I had a spiritual connection with the earth you know but no it wasn't it was like it was like it was like I I had a facility with it I enjoyed it but I was incredibly inept yeah I have Xero's craft skills at the time the very earliest piece that Grayson Perry made was a plate called kinky sex where there's an image of Christ being crucified on the cross drawn in this very loose slightly messy style which wasn't on purpose it was because he wasn't very skilled at that time at ceramics and over his groin there's a melted coin which has kind of gone a bit wrong in the firing of the ceramic piece and across the bottom of the plate were written the words kinky sex so that collision of religion fantasy sex pottery domesticity were kind of all there from the very earliest work here's my trusty killers this is my little kill and maybe kill them because you don't want to fire up the big kiln the time and here's my trust one of my trusty killing dogs this is my Alan Leeds kill god this is him as a kind of Dogu which is an early Japanese ceramic and he I knew him as a kiln God to protect to protect my work from what I call the gifts of the fire because often Potter's we know when they see a lovely dribble or a crack they go oh that's so lovely that's the gift of the fire and I kind of go mmm gifts they're a bit like what your auntie gives you a Christmas you don't really want that I didn't know it but it was gonna be sort of my defining medium or at least it set me on a path of the way that I work with tradition then immediately that I was having a dialogue with all these different times and cultures and that is what I do to this day whatever medium I pick up on I'm always looking back with some Ford's I just go around museums and go yeah like that I'll do one of them and that's how I operate and I've never worried about being original but I don't know originality is as they say is for people with short memories I operate on what I call the Chinese whispers track you know I copy something and get it a bit wrong so it becomes something new the words contemporary ceramics always fill me a little bit with dread because there's a sort of knowingness about them whereas I like something that seems to sort of be unselfconsciously decorative and joyful I think it's it's uncomfortably in the art gallery because it was already an art form and yet it was an art form that was linked to craft and tradition and I was sort of hovering in and out of the art world because of that I could feel the tension right up to the point I won the Turner Prize practically there was tension around what are these VARs is doing in an art gallery on the night of the award he turned up with his wife and his daughter wearing this incredible pale purple ridiculously Kitsch babydoll dress and these little red pomp shoes I remember him saying in his very cheeky way it's about time a transvestite Potter won the Turner Prize suddenly meant that he was on the international stage and was a force to be reckoned with and after that many invitations for exhibitions came many commissions for work there was suddenly a much greater interest in his work on the art market I think sort of love-hate relationship I think with the market I mean I've never had any problem selling my work and one of the reasons was it was incredibly cheap and ceramics had a kind of understandable you know it's like would someone spend 35 quid on a plate or a very very cheap piece of conceptual art and I always thought they're probably more likely to buy the plane and so they were certainly satisfying about it so I never had any problem selling the world I just didn't sell it was very much money but at the same time I didn't try to second-guess what people wanted I just made but I want to make what I enjoy making and hope that they would come along and so every time I've tried a new media or a new category of object we didn't know I mean the first print I did god did we underpriced it you know I'll be the first print we did this map of an Englishman I think it was up a for sale for three and a half thousand pound he sold out in two days and now they sell for forty thousand pound you know we'd yeah we under price that I suppose all my big themes are kind of quite social class and taste I mean again it's about if I see the overarching themes has been a being about what's what's happening unconsciously what is affecting our behavior without as always realizing it you know it talks about our education the way we talk what we eat what we wear what we do is a job you know it has all these huge repercussions and so I'm interested in that and then politics you know I'm always whatever is going on in the world around you know the problems in the Middle East or whatever well the banking crisis early on my work there's a lot about me me me me you know like many young artists I was doing lots of work but it's quite autobiographical I probably do that less now so this is as near as you're going to get from it really that it's for self-portrait it's this idea that in the middle of us there is this sort of pearl that is our identity and everything else kind of sticks to it whereas I think actually we are just a kind of bunch of experiences we develop in communion in relationship to other people that's how we become who we are identity is something that is we don't do on our own it's co-created I'm a work we're about the world more now and about you know the issues of people that I'm interested in I follow where I'm enthusiastic my detector says go this way and I go that way I don't have an agenda I'm looking to see what excites me I know his stuff at some little kid once said what do eyes do they know it's tough he's a Potter he's a sculptor he works in an unfashionable material as he puts it he uses his the the these objects as vessels literally and metaphorically to carry meaning he's a conceptual artist of sort but he said performance artist too I think it's too reductive to say the alter ego player the cross-dressing is part of a performance artistic practice that that was carefully planned it's part of who he is but that projection that persona is inextricably linked gender you know what it is to be a man or a woman that's always interested me greatly being a I was pretty kinky even as a very small child I enjoyed tying myself up but from about the age of seven I remembering the school player I was playing angel Gabriel in the dress was a big it had a definite sreob going on thinking about it and I sort of like that was the sort of early sort of sexual feelings and then I I just had I had a fantasy and I thought you know I was having a fantasy and some cross-dressing was involved in it really wow that's exciting and then one day I was reading the Sunday paper like one of the tabloids and he had an oh I call about transvestites and it and I was like oh em gee there are others out there and then I knew over to transvestite and that was interesting and I just gradually I kept it a secret I knew enough about it there wasn't something you bragged about in the playground and I didn't really come out until I was at art college but then it was almost an asset I think he is the living sculpture of sorts he is an ongoing performance and I think he's also very symptomatic of the world in which we live in where boundaries are blurred I don't think there's any significant difference between him as a critic or commentator or television film maker or intervener or producer of artistic objects I think it's all part of one creative personality he was central identifier about my author might either it's familiar and yet it's talking about fresh things so it's like it's a you know everybody knows what a pot is what a tapestry what a print is everything I do is an archetype and yeah I'm talking about the contemporary world and I'm trying to make it fresh and I'm trying to make it visually arresting and seductive these seems to be able to reach people in different ways and I think part of that reason is because he's a modern artist who doesn't take himself very seriously even though the ideas he talks about it engages with are very profound I'm not scared of being seductive and I like lots of detail and texture you know all the traditional things that I'm not scared of doing that I'm you know I won't deny me them like some more acetic ideas based artists I will wallow in it they'd rather beautiful close-up I do like the tapestry because most sort of digital products have a sort of deadness about them but this has got a liveliness almost like a handmade object in that he doesn't behave I like that well I'm interested in making as sophisticated for a popular audience that's what I'm interested in the first what I would call celebrity artifact I made was the world mr. tempest tree which is my big 15 metre tapestry and that was the first artwork even though I've been making pottery at that point for 25 years or something it was the first artifact where people could say name wood artwork by Grayson Perry and people got well from stoat up the street so I was psyched alone one day and somebody came past in the car and they said love you tapestry and I thought I've got an artifact that's my damien hirst shark moment I thought that's good with work ranging from tapestry to graphic novels and addressing universal themes around identity in the modern world Grayson Perry is one of Britain's most compelling and best loved artists a household name in his native country he's now setting his sights on the international stage with the u.s. publication of his best-selling book on contemporary art and shows in Australia and Turkey in 2015 I've done so many big projects recently that I quite like the idea of going back to being an artist that makes individual works you know on a because they fancy making them without any kind of overarching big plan but then a big plan have come along and I kind of end up making stuff about that I haven't quite had that Orthodox international contemporary art career kind of that for a while we know and have shows abroad and and being an artist I think I really like about Grayson Perry is that there's a really specifically English thing about him he just seems like someone that we should feel proud of because only Britain could have created someone like him I do like the idea of being a kind of ambassador for a certain sort of Britishness I think you know I have a pretty British eye I like the idea of it oh yes that's modern Britain and they're very interesting but it's got that yeah it's got tradition it's got humour Hume is very important to me it's it's engaged socially so I think yeah I think I think my work you know by trying not to be original I got I think I've got a distinctive voice I hope that his internationalization doesn't turn him into an english eccentric and I think I don't mean that he would become that he's far too smart but I hope he's not pigeon-holed as that because actually he's so much more important I'm probably quite unusual as an artist these days in that I work on my own I don't have a studio system apart from when I can't pick up one of my pots and I have to get my friend to help me lift it in terms of all the drawing the sculpting but making this ceramics I do it myself when I make a bronze I sculpt the thing myself when I make the tapestries I draw every bloody square centimeter of it myself and so I'm a man hours sort of artists and I realise that actually you know that's nice and people can approve of me for that but it's also a bit of a handicap in the modern art world because you know I can only make so much art and the demands of the vast acreages of flashy are space there is to fill nowadays means that is voracious and I can't keep up with it so I think I deny myself opportunities that I could have but there I'm a quality control freak I have to do it badly in the right way you know I need I need to be able to make mistakes I can't trust anybody else to make the right sort of mistakes because your mistakes is your style you know otherwise we'd all be doing photorealism as an artist through exhibits in the public sphere I still think that my job is to make material culture that people will come and see they will operate on a level where my unconscious talks to their unconscious and that's what visual art does brilliantly you know it's a it's a it's under the radar so they're looking at stuff and what are they looking at it something's happening they might not even know what it is my audience is you know people that are interested in culture but they might not be in the art ghetto they are generally interested in culture you know I love it when people say oh I took my 14 year old son to your show and I've never taken into an exhibition books he always complained that they his interest was Pete and he came away you know convinced art was a good thing from your show I think yeah good kick probably when people encounter me even to this day they're thinking what are these VARs is doing in an art gallery and of course for me that is like a golden opportunity push this like you mean your you'll accept a urinal but he didn't even make himself and yeah it's been a goldmine for me a gift brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake: Originals

Views: 185,970

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: PI2JG67b-fs

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2015