Grayson Perry – Portrait of The Artist as a Young Girl

Up And Coming Artists

Grayson Perry – Portrait of The Artist as a Young Girl

An Artist Who’s Hard to Ignore
Most people, if they actually know who he is, tend to have quite strong opinions about Grayson Perry. Mention his name and people fall into three broad camps; those who say ‘Grayson WHO?’, those who listen to Front Row on Radio 4 and used to watch the South Bank Show say “Ah yes, the controversial potter who won the 2003 Turner Prize” and everyone else smiles and says “The ridiculous-looking bloke in the dress”. As the wife of a man who’s utterly obsessed by ceramics and spends his life researching potters and stalking the older ones in order to ‘buy before they die’ I was aware of Perry quite a while before he hit the mainstream.

We were sitting in the kitchen of an elderly but very esteemed potter, one of hubby’s best pottery contacts who has sent him off on many a mission to track down other potters. We’d just had a very nice lunch when the gentleman concerned (who I won’t name because it wouldn’t be fair) started to rant about Grayson Perry. “The man can’t paint and he’s not much of a potter.” he said “He’s just pornographer”. He showed me a picture in what was then a recent copy of the leading UK ceramics journal. “Look at that” he said pointing to a pot decorated with an elderly man touching up a young boy. I had to concede that he did seem to have a point. As Perry has commented since, you can get away with a lot on a pot that you wouldn’t get away with in a painting because “the vice squad would never raid a pottery exhibition”.

He has a point. The world of pottery is filled with less than colourful characters – chaps with beards and sandals wearing clothes that fit into the spectrum of colours related to muesli. Nice, good hard-working folk but seldom flashy and usually with clay under their fingernails. Enter Perry stage right in a gingham dress with his hair tied back with an Alice band creating pots that look gorgeous until you get closer and see the themes of abuse and violence that cover them. In an art form where controversial means changing your kiln temperature or altering your ash glaze, Perry burst in like a bad smell – immediately apparent and hard to shake off.

It’s hard not to be fascinated by what drives this entertaining and charismatic man who seems to be getting a lot more airtime over the last couple of years. When I spotted his biography on the shelves of the second hand book room in a local National Trust property, the juxtaposition of classic ‘old England’ and such a quirky artist meant I had to grab the book, thinking that my husband would love it and add it to his expanding collection of potter (auto)biographies.

It’s All About the Dresses
When seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong wrote about his recovery from testicular cancer, he called the book ‘It’s Not About the Bike’. Perry could equally have called this book ‘It’s Not About the Pots’ and it’s a shame, because unlike those looking for something more sensationalist, I wanted a book about the pots. In ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’, Perry has shared his childhood and youth up to the age of 22 with his friend, writer Wendy Jones. Yes there’s a joke in the title with its pun on James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ that won’t be lost on many of the readers. However, lest you expect something heavy going, the cover photo of Perry dressed as his alter-ego ‘Claire’ riding on a tricycle soon tips you off that this isn’t the tale of his work or his professional success, it’s the story of how his childhood influenced the man and the artist that he became. It’s crying out for a sequel or sequels since the book takes us only as far as his discovery of ceramics and it stops a long way before he established himself in his field.
Nature or Nurture?
Perry was born in 1960 to a rather dull father and a mother who found her amusements outside her marriage, if you know what I mean. You can’t expect even the dullest father to not mind when your mum gets knocked up by the milkman so divorce followed and young Grayson was caught between a mother and step-father who were rather too tied up in themselves and a father who moved on to start a new life and a new marriage. He sought solace in his teddy bear, the oddly named Alan Measles, with whom Perry started to act out bizarre and complex fantasies which over time became (no other way to put this) a bit kinky. He started to experiment with auto-eroticism in the form of strangulation and wrapping himself tightly in sheets and clothes. He discovered the thrill of Crimplene (I kid you not) and the buzz he got from women’s clothing, dressing in his mother’s clothes and finding himself excitedly aroused. All this evolved to become a more and more integral part of who young Perry saw himself to be. He started to buy women’s clothes, went looking for places to get changed into or out of his clothes and he tangled with the thorny issue of which toilet to go into if you’re planning to dress up whilst you’re in there (do you go into the ladies dressed as a man or come out of the gents dressed as a lady?)The chapters when Perry is away at art school were some of the ones I found most enjoyable. His open-minded girlfriend and her friends gave him the space to be as wild and crazy as he no doubt needed to be. They took a lot of drugs and worked as little as they could get away with and in this part of the book we start to learn about how he developed as an artist. At last after wading through chapter after chapter of frock-fetishism, I was getting to the meat of the bits I wanted to know more about. Sadly, they were a very small part of the overall book.
Potter or Pornographer?
The great thing about this book is the honesty and the openness that’s expressed on every page. Too many biographies and autobiographies restrict themselves to only telling the reader the ‘nice bits’ or the bits that make the subject of the book look good. Not too many people would jump in both feet first like Perry has and tell you EVERYTHING, regardless of how it reflects on him and how much it might shock his reader. He comes across as warm, funny, honest and likeable, even whilst the things he’s telling you are maybe wriggling into your mind like dirty little worms of discomfort.

When you have an artist whose work is so tied up in his own history and emotions, it’s a fair proposition to create a book about what made him what he is. His pots and his paintings are filled with images of rejection, abuse, mutilation, violence and juvenile sexuality (and LOTS of penises) so it’s natural to want to give some background to why someone feels the need to express himself through such images. The problem is that at times the art gets lost behind the history. The pottery takes second place to Grayson Perry’s greatest artistic products – himself and his alter-ego Claire. It’s so excessively ‘not about the pots’ that my inner voice was crying out “Sod the frocks, tell us how you learned to apply colour, how you worked with glazes, how many pots you exploded before you learned to do it right”.

Particle Physics
I have nothing against transvestites and if someone told me they liked to cross dress it really wouldn’t bother me in the slightest but if they wanted to talk about the erotic frisson of touching fabrics, I’m probably going to squirm in my chair and try to change the subject. Transvestism is a bit like the Large Hadron Collider; I’m happy enough to know they’re doing it, but I really don’t need to know all the details of how and why. I take the policy of ‘each to their own’ and ‘live and let live’ and I hope I’d never be the type to snigger over anyone trying to find their place in society by cross-dressing. I’d rather see a bloke in a dress than a teen-aged boy with his jeans halfway to his knees showing off his boxers – at least the transvestite looks like she’s taken care with her appearance (I think I just sounded like my mother for a moment there). However, what this book made me realise was that whilst I don’t mind how anyone chooses to dress and express themselves, I don’t always want to read about it. If Perry wants to dress as a young girl, that’s fine but if he wants to tell me all about the sexual arousal of touching and wearing women’s clothing, I’m not quite so comfortable reading that. Especially when what I bought the book for was to learn about his art.
Recommendation?
It’s really hard to say whether I’d recommend this book. I didn’t like it but even so I would probably buy a sequel if and when it becomes available, in the hope that we’d finally get round to learning about the pots. I’m still not sure who this book is supposed to target. I suspect it’s for those who already love the man, think he’s a genius and would buy his shopping lists if they were published. As someone who’s interested in art in general and pottery more specifically, it’s not my cup of tea. If you want a book to tell you about what Grayson Perry does, then this is not it. If you want an insight into the way his mind works, it might be. And If you’re looking for a bit of titillation and a kinky read about child sexuality then sorry for my judgemental approach but please go see a therapist. 

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Up and Coming Artists
Coming up Wednesday, Aug. 17, the show will be interviewing Mary McDonald who played “Erin” on “The Waltons” and future interviews with politicians such as US Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., and US Sen. Jay Rockefeller, DW.Va., are also slated. …

Up and Coming Artists question by Kristin: Who are the hottest, up & coming female music artists right now?
I want to know who you consider to be the hottest female music artists right now. Not talking about old news such as Britney Spears. Interested in up and coming artists.

Up and Coming Artists best answer:

Answer by I Am The Walrus (RIP MJ<333)
there are none.. basically all good music is dead.