33 Artists in 3 Acts (40 page)

Does the show reflect displaced fantasies of omnipotence? I ask. Perry looks at me like I’ve just delivered shocking news. “The show is about the veneration of the transitional object,” he replies after some pondering. “All gods are like cuddly toys insofar as people project their ideas onto them. It’s a form of survival, a way of dealing with fear.” Perry cites his experience of psychotherapy as a huge influence and suggests that it has been essential to his success in three ways: it has helped him with his emotional health, given him methods to access difficult truths, and led him to some of his most important subject matter. We slip under a cordon to enter the exhibition, which is still in the midst of installation. Surrounding Perry’s distinctive vases are ethnographic oddities such as tabletop temples (an Egyptian “soul house” and a Tibetan shrine) and “power figures” including a Malian one that resembles a bison and a Congolese character suggestive of a witch doctor.

One work that Perry made especially for the show is
The Rosetta Vase
(2011), a two-and-a-half-foot-high pot depicting a landscape-cum-map drawn in blue glaze with a fine brush on glossy yellow and white backgrounds. It stands chest-height on a pedestal under a heavy-duty vitrine typical of anthropology museums. Alan Measles appears on the pot in several places, at one point riding a crusading horse as part of a heraldic sign that says, “ICONIC BRAND.” Perry peers at the pot with me. He has a blonde bob, a ruddy complexion, and British teeth. “From mud to masterpiece, the pots are totally me,” he says. “My assistant doesn’t even order the clay; she just does email.” Perry enjoys the slow, physical process of making pots and relishes the thinking time afforded by the “boring bits,” such as drawing the many small lines that form the ocean at the base of the pot. He is “slightly suspicious” of artists who never get dirty.

The Rosetta Vase
is displayed against the wall but, from the side, one can see a painting of a baby labeled “THE ARTIST.” The infant has oversized Buddha-like ears and his body parts are covered with phrases like “interior quest,” “risk-taking,” “unconscious enactment,” “class mobility,” and “power,” which appear to list Perry’s artistic drivers.
According to Perry, craft can be taught whereas art is about self-realization. “I can teach someone to make my last artwork but not my next one,” he explains. Mutual antagonism tends to characterize the two domains. “A lot of artists are really bad craftsmen and most craftsmen are really bad artists,” he explains. The craftsmen grumble that the artists “can’t even draw,” while the artists criticize the craftsmen’s work as conventional and kitsch. “I try to have the best of both worlds,” he says, “making things as well as I can and developing ideas that are chunky.”

Perry has long been fascinated by Duchamp’s urinal, not least because it is made of porcelain. “Duchamp didn’t choose a ceramic knick-knack off his auntie’s mantelpiece but hardware from a plumbing supply shop,” says Perry. “Conceptually the readymade gesture would have been the same, but the cultural connotations were different.” Perry notes that the 1964 edition of Duchamp’s
Fountain
, the one found in most museums today, is not a readymade at all but a sculptural replica, handmade by an Italian potter to look like a 1917 mass-manufactured urinal.

We wander past the shrines into an area full of talismans and fetishes. Among them is a Perry work titled
Coffin Containing Artist’s Ponytail
(1985), a small, crudely made ceramic coffin with a glaze drawing of a body at rest with a three-dimensional sculptural head. I point at the face and look puzzled. “Charles I,” deadpans Perry. The small bust used as a mold came free in a box of cornflakes. “I grew my hair for about five years then cut it off as a means of trying to kill off my feminine side. His long hair reminded me of mine,” says Perry, his Essex accent weighing in more heavily when he speaks of the past. Charles I, who believed in the divine right of kings, was beheaded in a proto-democratic coup in 1649, which temporarily abolished the British monarchy. Losing your hair was a kind of decapitation or castration? I ask. “Maybe,” says Perry noncommittally.

Perry is wearing trousers and a baggy beige jacket this morning, but his shaved eyebrows and the small blob of makeup in the corner of his eye betray the fact that he wore a dress last night. The artist no longer attempts to suppress his feminine side. Ever since 2003, when Perry accepted the Turner Prize on national television in a baby-doll dress covered in embroidered bunnies, his alter ego, Claire, has become a
public personality. She appears in several works here:
La Tour de Claire
(1983), a tower of flint and found objects;
Shrine to Alan and Claire
(2011), a ceramic sculpture that resembles an Orthodox Christian roadside memorial; and
Map of Truths and Beliefs
(2011), a 23-foot-long tapestry that Perry calls “a vastly professional piece of outsider art.” At the opening next week, he is planning to wear a pink satin blouse with red lederhosen, made by a master costumer who has done work for movies such as
Batman
. Do such sartorial transgressions make it easier to break the rules of art? “The emotional loading of cross-dressing is so powerful that other sorts of taboo-breaking don’t faze me,” he says.

Despite Claire’s noteworthy presence, Perry is adamant that she is not a work of art. She emerged out of his sexual obsessions rather than his artistic concerns. Perry pivots to look at his grand tapestry, focusing on Claire, who is wearing a long necklace from which his teddy bear dangles in lieu of a crucifix. Eventually, he admits that his refusal to elevate Claire is a means of disassociating himself from performance art. At college, Perry “wallowed” in performance art and decided that it was painfully pious. “When it’s entertaining, it becomes theater; when it’s not, it is earnest and boring,” he says. Perry has never experienced a work by Marina Abramovi
but he did see Andrea Fraser’s
Untitled
when it was shown in “Pop Life” at Tate Modern. “I remember thinking that it was one of those ideas that needed to be done. It’s a boundary marker around the edge of art,” admits Perry, excluding Fraser from his sweeping dismissal of her medium. “The show was slammed but I really enjoyed it. Damien’s gold stuff was seductive and irksome. Like wine, his work needs laying down. It will look brilliant when it comes back in twenty-five years.”

We continue to examine Perry’s detailed
Map of Truths and Beliefs
, which charts the incongruous places to which people make pilgrimages, from Mecca to Davos, Nashville to Auschwitz, Venice to Stratford-upon-Avon. This tapestry, like his others, was drawn by hand then scanned into a computer, where the artist refined the colors. It was then woven on a massive computerized loom. “I don’t fetishize the handmade. I program it in now!” declares Perry. He believes that digital technology will save craftsmanship because it separates the creative process from the
drudgery of production and offers easy customization. “A computer is more blank than any blank canvas. It’s not like a box of crayons that can only do one thing well,” he explains. “We shouldn’t be nostalgic about our analogue skills because new skills are coming along all the time.”

Although he has adopted conceptual and digital modes, Perry still loves beautiful objects. “It is a noble thing to be decorative,” he says as we enter a section of the exhibition devoted to sexuality, which includes some “drag kings,” nineteenth-century coins that were painstakingly reengraved by anonymous craftsmen to change the sex of Queen Victoria. “Objects are the unique selling point of art,” he continues. “All those alternatives to the art object are precisely that—alternatives. They need the gravitational pull of the object in the museum to maintain their relevance.” The artist notes that alternatives such as performance art are usually financed directly or indirectly by the sale of art, so the “high-minded” stance of many of these artists against commodities strikes him as old-fashioned and two-faced.

Perry wouldn’t want to be seen as a cheerleader for the art market; he laments its excesses and distortions. “Big is not best,” he says by way of example. “Artists’ big work is rarely their best, but big work often sells for higher prices. Every artist has their ideal scale—a kind of bell curve of quality—but nowadays they aggrandize their work into incompetence to promote themselves in the art world.” One exception that proves the rule is Christian Marclay’s
The Clock
, which Perry describes as the “Sistine Chapel of video art.” Not only is it “hypnotic and conceptually tight,” it achieves the “permanence of an object” because, as a twenty-four-hour piece, it doesn’t go away.

We wind our way deeper into the installation, whose walls darken as we go, changing from pearl to charcoal gray. A workman in white overalls emerges through the back door, beyond which lies the gift shop. “Oh, hello, sorry . . . I’m the guy whose show it is,” says Perry. The man nods in a way that suggests that he already knows the famous artist. At the center of
The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman
is a sculpture with the same name—a coffin in the shape of a ship that is supposed to be sailing into the afterlife. Perry made the work in rusted cast iron. “Maybe my rust is a reaction against that glossy conceptualism. I had
to resist my lust for shininess,” says the artist, whose ceramics often glisten with glaze. On top of all the metal is a prehistoric flint hand axe—“the original tool that begot all tools, the lodestone of craftsmanship,” says Perry.

A miniaturized death mask with a crooked nose and full lips represents the unknown craftsman. Who’s that? I ask. “Oliver Cromwell,” replies Perry flatly. Cromwell, the reformer who had Charles I beheaded? That is hilarious.
Coffin Containing Artist’s Ponytail
implies that the artist is an autocratic king, while this tomb proposes that the craftsman is merely a man from the middle gentry, though a potentially lethal one. “I’ve never noticed that,” says Perry deliberately, mulling it over. “You can read into it what you will. I like the theory. I think I’ll use it!”

For Perry, the split between art and craft has long involved class. “Whereas a craftsman is a worker, a painter is often just an incredible craftsman in a suit jacket.” In fact, he believes that, despite its high status, most painting today is just craft. “Painting is locked into a tradition,” he explains. “It is very difficult to be original unless you can find a micro-niche, and then it’s difficult to step out of your niche because the territory on either side is already inhabited by another artist with his own micro-niche.”

Perry also believes that the distinction between artists and craftsmen relates to the acknowledgment of authorship. “Everything in the Tate has a name attached, which gives the objects their significance, whereas almost everything in my show—and in the British Museum—is anonymous,” he says. “Historically, craftsmen have subsumed themselves in communities. Only since about 1400 have artists developed egos that seek the plaudits of genius.” The development of artists, as we know them, is linked to the rise of humanism and individualism during the Renaissance. Indeed, Giorgio Vasari’s
Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times
(1550)
,
which culminates with the assertion of Michelangelo’s genius, is considered the first written installment of art history.

“Being an artist is a narcissistic business,” admits Perry, “which is made worse by fame.” When people hang on your every word and when your signature alone is worth money, the world seems to revolve on a
different axis. “If you weren’t a narcissist before, then you become one,” he adds. “It is most potent when you are unaware of it. If you’re aware, then it starts to dilute.”

For Perry, self-consciousness is both an obstacle and the main route to change. “The big burden for artists working in the art world is self-consciousness. We’ve lost our innocence. We’re constantly looking at ourselves making art,” he explains. “It’s one of the many appeals of outsider artists; they don’t give a damn about what other people think.” However, the more self-aware you are, the more chance you have to improve your life and work. “The first tool of intellectual growth is awareness. They say that consciousness is a candle in a warehouse, so there is an awful lot you cannot see. I’m keen to move the candle about.” Perry believes that, although the link between art and madness is over-romanticized, it can’t be dismissed either. “You need to be quite obsessed to get art made.” Personally, however, he prefers “high-end sanity.” As it happens, his wife, Philippa, is a psychotherapist who is writing a book titled
How to Stay Sane
.

Is there a craft to being an artist? “I don’t think you can discount the fact that who you are and how you comport yourself is part of the deal,” he replies. “Even if you become a hermit and don’t utter a word, it’s part of the deal.” Perry brainstorms on the craft of being a conceptual artist, suggesting that probing habits of thought and spotting things you really care about are essential. “Don’t wait around for a thunderbolt because a flicker is what it might be,” he advises. “Don’t discount silly ideas, because coolness is the enemy of creativity. Do pay attention to the things that hipsters haven’t noticed yet.”