How Grayson Perry is taking on America: 'People want to be provoked, but not catastrophically'
The artist with a transvestite alter ego, Claire, who collected the Turner Prize in 2003 in a Bo Peep style dress, was in Florida this week for the opening of his major US exhibition ‘Grayson Perry Making Meaning’, heralding a three-year transatlantic partnership between The Gallery in Windsor, Florida, and London’s Royal Academy, where he will curate this year’s Summer Exhibition
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Your support makes all the difference.It may seem surreal – Grayson Perry in a golf buggy, whizzing past polo fields, luxury homes and beach clubs – but here he is, revelling in the relaxed ambience of the 425-acre private residential resort of Windsor, Florida, where his most important American show of 2018 opens this week.
“Anthropologically, it’s fascinating,” he enthuses, as we talk together on the clubhouse balcony, overlooking the golf course and a smattering of Windsor’s well-heeled inhabitants: “It’s an hermetic culture that looks exactly like it does in the brochure. I’m always fascinated by the image that advertises anything. On that account Windsor delivers.” But when I suggest that this is an American vision of Eden, Grayson can’t resist poking gentle fun. “It’s more like JG Ballard the Prisoner by Farrow and Ball isn’t it?” he chuckles. “But it’s great, very comfortable, with brilliant service, nice food. It’s all good. Of course, the entry requirement is a hell of a lot of dosh...”
Grayson is fresh from his triumph at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where his aptly titled The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! had people queueing round the block. But he is, of course, a peculiarly British phenomenon and his north Atlantic appearances so far have been few and far between. The Gallery at Windsor, which is at the heart of the Windsor experience created by the billionaire British-Canadian couple and philanthropists Galen and Hilary Weston, hopes to change all that. Hilary is confident that Grayson’s extraordinary works will bring “colour, texture and a taste of what it is to be British” to this American community, even though some of the content may be a little explicit for American family taste. But then again, Grayson relishes being naughty – though never so much as to offend the people who may acquire and live with his work. “I’m unusual for an artist – I do think about collectors. People want to be provoked, but not catastrophically. I think that it’s good to come to a place like this and to think about a material manifestation of a certain mindset. It’s a perfectibility with money.”
Grayson Perry is also a Royal Academician, and this exhibition launches a major three-year collaboration between Windsor and London’s Royal Academy, as well as kicking off the RA’s 250th anniversary year. It’s as a printmaker that Grayson wears his Royal Academician ribbon (there is no current category for a ceramicist), and he has the honour of curating this year’s Summer Exhibition. It will include a room of “fun” and will be provocatively called Art Made Now – a very Grayson riposte to the cool, contemporary art label. Grayson is proud to belong to the RA, which is uniquely led by its eminent artists and architects, although several of his works in the show affectionately parody the British art establishment and the RA “tribe”. “What I like about it,” he says, “is that it is a melange of its members, from superstar architects to printmakers that most people have never heard of. Somewhere in there is the vestige of an artist’s trade union. It’s quite a bolshie group. What’s interesting to me is that in an age when social mobility is stagnating, most of the people at the RA are the products of free art schools and I wonder if the that’s going to be tragically reimagined in years to come.”
The Windsor show – an overview of some of Grayson’s major work in a wide range of media – includes his trademark pots, such as You Are Here (2011), the embroidery Hold Your Beliefs Lightly (2011), his much-loved Walthamstow Tapestry (2009) and the etching The Island of Bad Art (2013). It opens with an exuberant splash of colour, humour and social commentary: Grayson’s huge tapestry Comfort Blanket (2014). The tapestry is designed as a giant banknote, with an enormous, bespectacled portrait of the Queen, and a patchwork of affectionate, semi-autobiographical British references of “things we love and hate”, ranging from Eric and Ernie to Hogarth, from brollies to chavs (all expressed in words). Does he worry that some of it might be incomprehensible to an American audience or a younger generation? “I’m delighted if they like it – which they do,” says Grayson, “but I don’t make it for a millennial. I make it for myself really. I’m interested in the universality of what it is to be human – taste, gender, class, identity. I don’t think Raphael worried about how he would go down in 21st century America, but he seems to be doing pretty well!”
Grayson is happy for his works to appeal on many levels, including the jolly and decorative. Using a computer to design his 7-metre tapestries allows him to zoom in until details become lifesize, or zoom out until the work becomes the size of “a postcard”. In this way he can cop the “whole image in one eyeful”, and ask himself, “if it’s working as a piece of delightful colour, and everything in between. I am still making physical objects that I want to be attractive – unusual as that may seem.” He laughs. (“God I’ll get drummed out of the RA for that!”)
Grayson is not only a highly accomplished printmaker and ceramicist, but he is also a master of storytelling and self-analysis: psychotherapy, he says, is the biggest influence on his work. The vivid imaginary world of his childhood, fuelled by childhood fears and a passion for making things, led to the development of mythical stories, in which his teddy, Alan Measles, is the super hero, and also to his transvestite alter ego, Claire, who collected the Turner Prize in 2003 in a Bo Peep-style dress. He also regards Claire as “an interesting kind of visual phenomenon” in her own right. Parachuting Claire into the fervent transatlantic debate surrounding gender politics was always going to be an interesting prospect. And Grayson, of course, doesn’t disappoint. Nothing could quite have prepared the Windsor folk for Claire’s hot pink tiniest of mini-dresses (with matching underpants) at the private view. The extraordinary expanse of leg indeed prompted an inappropriate wolf whistle.
Grayson is not primed to be offended. “I’ve been watching the trans/feminist spats on twitter, they are genuine dilemmas. I come back time and time again to the vanity of small differences: the left will rip itself apart by saying, ‘you are not the right sort of liberal – you are as bad as them by being slightly different from me’, instead of fighting the real enemy.” But surely there are some black and white no-go areas, I press him, in what he describes as the “shaded area of social and human interaction”? What would he say, for example, to the Donald Trumps of this world and their “pussy grabbing” for a starter? “Oh God,” he exclaims, “it’s awful, awful, awful. Zero tolerance – you don’t want that sort of behaviour in the workplace or in, you know... yet the weird thing is, whenever I am doing a talk about masculinity, the audience goes very quiet when I ask, ‘ok can any of you people put your hand up and say that you’ve had sexual fantasies about equality’? That’s because sexuality is not politically correct and it’s also out of date. Men have got to realise they are just emotionally unaware about their behaviour, about what’s appropriate, about what’s right. They’ve got to learn that what’s natural to them is actually really off.”
Then again, Grayson refuses to take the moral high ground, and this is perhaps what makes his art and his TV programmes so inclusive and popular. “I find it fascinating that people aren’t adult enough to admit to holding two contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. My word of the year is ‘diaphobia’, which means a fear of being changed by people’s views. The most potent insult in the age of social media is, ‘you hypocrite’. The Toby Young thing blew up through people digging up stuff that contradicted what he was saying, but maybe a lot of hypocrisy is people just changing their mind.”
Do you think Toby Young has changed his mind, I ask? Grayson cackles: “He’s changed his mind about publicly tweeting about women’s tits! In a way, feminists should be thankful that at least it’s all out in the open. And that John Humphrys thing... as a man I can tell you that those conversations go on.”
I ask him what he would have worn to this year’s Golden Globe Awards, and the question is met with a guffaw of laughter. Later, he decides that he would have suggested “pink” as a dress code, as it would have made the men feel uncomfortable. And what sort of art would an American version of Grayson Perry be producing in this present climate; an American quilt with a mosaic of Trumps misogynist tweets? “Yeah, that wouldn’t be far off,” he concludes, as the cultural divide evaporates: “Quilt is very vibrant – American quilts are a big influence on me. I identify with outsider art, folk artists – and much to my chagrin, that has now become fashionable.”
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