The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘It saddens me when I look back on the transvestite I was’
It’s hard to imagine a public figure more comfortable in his own skin. But it took Grayson Perry a long time to find himself
Grayson Perry is flicking through the catalogue for a new exhibition of his early work at the Holburne Museum in Bath. “It saddens me when I look back at the transvestite I was then,” he says, pointing at a photograph of himself as a young man dressed as his alter-ego, Claire. “I had the looks and the figure, but I didn’t have the budget or the confidence. I suppose everybody has that experience: you look at your younger self and think, well, that was f------ wasted.”
We are sitting in Perry’s studio, a former watch factory in Islington, north London, not far from his home. “I wanted somewhere within range of a mobility scooter,” he tells me,
“so I could carry on working as I got older.”
This morning, though, Perry – 59-year-old British artist, broadcaster, author and performer – cycled over, in floral dress and bug-eyed spectacles, hair styled in a no-nonsense bob. Aside from an anarchic necklace, with grimacing pink skulls for beads, this is not the Claire we normally see: instead of the outlandish fashionista in lurid, little-girl frocks, this middle-aged suburban housewife harks back to Perry’s years as a twinset-andpearls transvestite of the Eighties.
“I thought it would be funny to see what happened to that woman,” he tells me. “So, this morning I decided to dress up as her 35 years on, four stone heavier, and still in a Marks & Spencer’s dress.” He laughs. “It’s quite weird and rare for me to dress up like this – to go full trans, with padding and everything – because, nowadays, my entire wardrobe is flat-chested, and I don’t worry about trying to look like a woman. I mean, passing helicopters spot I’m a man in a dress.” Now that he’s getting older, is cross-dressing still enjoyable? “Oh yeah, I’m still a transvestite, I still get off on it,”
Perry says, eyes twinkling. “Plus, it is good for PR.”
Not half. Perry talks openly about his “brand” as the “Transvestite Potter”; photographs of him attending red-carpet events dressed as Claire have been a staple in newspapers and magazines since he won the Turner Prize in 2003. For all his success as an artist and, more recently, as a Baftawinning television presenter – acclaimed for his Channel 4 series anatomising, among other subjects, taste and masculinity – he is most frequently recognised in the street, he says, when dressed as Claire. As he writes in the Holburne’s catalogue: “I am now known as much for my wardrobe as for my artworks.”
While he isn’t (yet) mega-famous, in the manner of, say, Elton John
(“I wouldn’t want that level of fame,” he tells me, “which must be stultifying and very disorientating”), Perry has gone from being a well-known artist to a household name who pops up on satirical television quiz shows such as Have I Got News for You. In 2013, the same year he received a CBE, Perry delivered the annual Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4, and
‘I don’t worry about looking like a woman. Helicopters can spot I’m a man in a dress’
poked fun at the pretensions of the art world. These days, he spends much of his time touring successful one-man stage shows. “I’ve done the Palladium four times,” he tells me proudly, before revealing that he is planning a “much more elaborate” tour for later this year.
So, what does it feel like to be a national treasure? “Nice!” says Perry, without missing a beat. “On the whole, I have a very positive experience of fame. If I’m standing outside a pub in a dress, I have a constant flow of people coming up to tell me how much they love me.” He attributes his “very wide demographic” to “my TV, I suppose” (later this year, Channel 4 will broadcast his new three-part documentary series about America under Trump), and believes that his audience is “about 60 to 70 per cent Labour”. I’m not so sure: I once watched him, dressed as Claire, wow a packed-out tent at a festival in the grounds of Chatsworth House: his sensational set – part stand-up, part social anthropology – had everyone in stitches, and suggested that, these days, the “Transvestite Potter” is most beloved by Middle England.
The truth is that, above all, Perry is a gifted communicator and performer. He identifies his stage shows as his “main passion now. I put a lot of my energy into the live work, because I enjoy it very much.” This does, however, make him feel “split”, because he is still known primarily as an artist. “The art chugs on,” he says, before adding, mischievously: “One of the reasons I keep going with the art is that you can be a successful broadcaster, stand-up or author, but nothing pays as well as being a successful artist.” Super Rich Interior Decoration, his recent exhibition featuring satirical pots, tapestries and table lamps at the Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair, sold, he says, “better than any show I’ve put on before”.
How does Perry find the time to fit everything in? “You’ve got to put in the hours, you’ve got to be disciplined, otherwise it all goes out the window,” he says, gesturing at his diary, which lies open on a cluttered table. “Look, you can see the word ‘work’ written [in pink] on every page – which reminds me that the priority is work, meaning [making art] here, in the studio.” He doesn’t employ any studio assistants, so creating pieces takes him a long time. “I’ve always done highly crafted, meticulous work, and it’s become more so over the years,” he tells me. “My USP is the amount of effort I put into the work.”
He also has a horror of producing “substandard” pieces – which may explain why Super Rich Interior Decoration was his first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro since 2012. When I suggest that, following the show’s success, he may soon face pressure to produce another commercial hit, he launches into a semi-tongue-incheek rant. “There’s no reason you have to churn it out,” he says. “Who wrote that script? Picasso. Picasso and Warhol really f----- being an artist – because they were both incredibly productive, so there’s this idea that you should churn out endless masterpieces. But the reputations of some of the greatest artists of all time rest on a couple of dozen paintings.”
The curious thing about Perry is that his own artistic reputation is, paradoxically, the one part of his career that sometimes gets contested. Although he is among Britain’s most famous living artists, the cognoscenti can be sniffy about his transgressive ceramics, tapestries, sculptures and enormous prints. For many in the art world, it was a surprise when Perry beat the Chapman Brothers to scoop the Turner Prize.
But mainstream audiences love him. (His 2017 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London – which he provocatively called The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! – attracted a record-breaking 203,000 visitors). He is at pains to make his work amusing and accessible – he often describes himself as “middlebrow” – and loves thumbing his nose at the metropolitan elite, while, of course, simultaneously being a prominent member of it. He is chancellor at the University of Arts London and a trustee of the British Museum. In 2011, he was elected a Royal Academician (RA), and, two years ago, orchestrated the 250th Summer Exhibition.
“That was one of the best
Grayson Perry: The PreTherapy Years, with a catalogue published by Thames & Hudson, is at The Holburne Museum, Bath (01225 388569), until May 25
things I’ve ever done,” Perry recalls. “The most difficult thing about the whole process was dealing with the RAs, because you have to hang the works they submit. And they can submit six, sometimes quite large paintings, which I christened the ‘fatbergs’.”
Shortly before the opening, one RA – whom Perry describes as a “snippy, older architect” – wandered into the largest gallery, which Perry had painted bright yellow. “He looked around the room, which I’d hung with probably 400 artworks in about four days, and said, ‘Oh, I see what you’ve done: interior decoration.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what we do, us artists: super-rich interior decoration, so get with the programme.’” The exchange inspired the title of his Victoria Miro show.
Does Perry enjoy antagonising people? “Yeah,” he says, “it’s fun.” He relishes “mischief ” – he describes it as “my main motivation” – and abhors “seriousness”, at least the sort that he says is “overvalued in the culture”.
“The intellectual gatekeepers of the art world love the idea that what they’re dealing with is as, if not more, important than politics and economics – that it’s there to affect your deepest soul and existence as a human being. And sometimes, I just want to go, ‘Oh, get off your high horse.’ We’re in the leisure business. People come to art galleries on their day off. Decorativeness, sensuousness, laughter, joy, vibrancy, vitality, they are just as important – if not more profound – than all that miserymaking, pseudo-political, woke bollocks.”
He laughs again – or, more accurately, cackles. For the millennial generation of his 27-year-old daughter, Flo, who published a feminist sex guide last year, Perry may come across, as he puts it, as “a grumpy old man on the wrong side of history” – but that’s something he seems to relish. When he heard that last year’s Turner Prize judges, at the request of the four shortlisted artists, had decided to share the award between them all, “I rolled my eyes. It’s the spirit of the times. And we’ll look back and go, ‘Oh, that’s so 2019.’”
Though now it’s hard to imagine a public figure more comfortable in his own skin, it took Perry a long time to find success: it wasn’t until 1998, he says, 16 years after graduating from art college in Portsmouth, that he started to earn what he calls “a living wage” from making art. For years, he had to rely financially on his wife, Philippa, a psychotherapist and author, who recently published a bestseller, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read. They married in 1992.
Now Perry seems, on the whole, to be enjoying his good fortune. The turning point, he says, was psychotherapy, which he underwent for six years after Philippa persuaded him to try it in 1998. Before that, though, during his “pre-therapy years” – as his subtitle for the Holburne’s show describes his early adulthood – he affected “cockiness to hide [my] low self-esteem and lack of confidence”: “I was angry about every f------ thing. You know, I could be angry at the telephone, for Christ’s sake. I would spit at people in the traffic.”
Some of this was the legacy of a difficult childhood in a suburban, working-class home in an Essex village north of
Chelmsford:
Perry’s parents split up when he was four, and he never got on with his stepfather, the local milkman, who was also a wrestler, and could be violent. (“I’ve got a complete, pathological hatred of violent men,” Perry has said.) His cross-dressing, which began when he was 12, ultimately led to his estrangement from his mother, who once told Philippa, “You must be desperate, to marry a transvestite.” She died four years ago; Perry didn’t attend her funeral.
Perry has often spoken about all this – but the story of his life during the Eighties, the focus of the Holburne show, is less well known. “When I came to London in 1983,” recalls Perry, “you could practically say, ‘What postcode do I want to live in?’ – and you’d find an empty property in the street. You’d just break in, start a squat – and quite often you’d be there for years.”
His first London home was the basement of a squat in Camden Town with a bunch of bohemian artists. In 1983, encouraged by the elder sister of his girlfriend at the time, the painter Jennifer Binnie, he started attending pottery evening classes. One of his first efforts, Kinky Sex, a crude earthenware plate decorated with an ejaculating, crucified Christ, is among the 80 or so pieces on show at the Holburne. How does Perry feel looking back now on his early work, much of which he hadn’t seen for years? “I like it,” he says.
“It’s robust. It’s cheeky. It makes me laugh. And it’s the same person making it.”
Part of the appeal of the new exhibition is that it dramatises an exciting moment in underground British culture, when Perry rubbed shoulders with avant-garde figures such as the filmmaker John Maybury. But, he says, “There’s nothing glamorous or energising about being poor. I did a piece once called Nostalgia for the Bad Times, because a lot of artists cling to this idea that sadness is somehow more complex than happiness.” His eyes glitter again. “I just want to go, ‘F-----bollocks, mate.’ Happiness is just as complex, just as profound. That’s why I love comedy.” Perhaps those pink skulls on Claire’s necklace aren’t grimacing after all; they’re grinning.
‘Sometimes I want to go, oh get off your high horse. We’re in the leisure business’