Above, from top: the
artist in his north London
studio; Searching for
Authenticity (2018)
and Thin Woman with
Painting (2019), both
glazed ceramic; Perry
as Claire, with his
wife, Philippa, at the
2017 Baftassome from the archives of Martin Parr (“I just asked him for
a load of pictures of posh people”) and Richard Young (“all
these grande dame society types, but on an African-style pot.
The subtext being colonialism, because those posh British
people’s money had to come from somewhere”).
Thin Woman with Painting came about after he googled
the interiors of rich art collectors and observed there was
always a skinny lady sitting on a sofa in front of the paintings.
Money on Holiday is plastered with the names of tax havens
from Panama to the Isle of Man, while Searching for
Authenticity bears the iconography of alternative culture, the
CND symbol and the leather jacket, the rejection of the
mainstream that all becomes yet another lifestyle option.
Other pieces are “responses to that sort of Instagram culture
of the perfect life, and the clichés of what is aspirational, and
the kind of pseudo-bohemianism, the hipsterfied west
London version of what it is to be cool. I’m always interested
in how clichés become clichés. Like hipsters – I don’t call
them hipsters anymore, I call them normal people. Even
right-wing activists look like hipsters now – you can’t assume
that the guy on the single-speed bicycle is a vegan liberal.”
Perry grew up in Essex, in a series of frustrated, violent
homes, with a mum who literally went off with the milkman- he says this is when he began to dislike cliché – before said
milkman turned into an aggressive stepdad who later kicked
him out. He went to art school in Portsmouth, unaware that
he could probably have got into a better one. When his mother
died, in 2016, he didn’t attend the funeral, relations with his
family having remained sour after Perry published a memoir
of his childhood in 2006 (in collaboration with Wendy Jones),
called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, in which he reveals
their disgust on discovering his fetish for women’s clothes.
Recently, it strikes me, his alter ego has been looking a lot
more glamorous, and I wonder if she has been through
something of a transformation? But no, he says Claire’s style
has always evolved, partly thanks to the fashion students who
provide the clothes. “The students keep me fresh; I keep buying
dresses off them. I’ve got fussier over the years, and better at
kind of shepherding them to make things that I think are
stylish. I’m fairly wide-ranging in the things I like. I go from
Upper East Side to clown. I might dress clownish for a Royal
Academy Summer Party, but if I’m going to some red carpet
thing I’ll try and look a bit more chic.”As for beauty tips, he
used to use a lot of Frizz Ease and “one of those rotating dryer
rollers, Babyliss Big Hair, but now I’ve started wearing a wig
a lot. And I always use the same red lipstick – Chanel Passion.”
He met his wife, whom he refers to as Phil, at a creative
writing evening class where she, coming from a more
moneyed background (she’d been to finishing school in
Switzerland), was initially put off by his working-class Essex
accent. After class, they started going for drinks in a grotty
pub, where they would sit and smoke “and bitch about
everybody”, as she puts it – they don’t smoke anymore. They
live in middle-class Islington and have one grown-up
daughter, Flo, who is an illustrator and writer about to publish
her first book, called How to Have Feminist Sex. They remain
a very close-knit, warm family, and recently held Philippa’s
60th birthday party in this studio, where we meet, with
Grayson making a speech in which he not only celebrated
his wife’s humour and accomplishments, but also happily
admitted that all of his best ideas come from her.
Obviously I want to know how he positions himself in all
this mockery of wealth, now that his pots sell for hundreds of
thousands of pounds. Isn’t he trying to have his cake and eat
it? “I don’t say I’m standing outside it. I’m part of the one per
cent, I’m not going to pretend. I’ve
been to those parties, I’ve been on
private jets. I’m at once inside and
outside. Artists are on an escalator,
you know, they keep trying to go
up and down the class system. I
can’t bear it when people tell you
to keep it real. You mean being poor
is good, is it? F*** off,” he says, with
no small amount of conviction.
On his television programmes,
Perry is brilliant at connecting with
the humanity in everyone, finding
a way to chat to and understand
people whatever road life has taken
them down. Yet in person, in his
own studio, it’s interesting how
stridently he speaks. He is not
remotely fluffy when it comes to
his beliefs.
“I can’t bear it when people
think they’ve got Brownie points
for being somehow more authentic,
the poorer they are. A lot of my
work in this show is abrasive to the super-rich but, at the
same time...” and then his understanding slips back in,
“they’re just as human as everyone else is.” He explains
that, having had a lot of therapy and also being married
to a therapist, he has learned that “money is one of the
things that is this seemingly simple idea but has huge
unconscious stuff attached to it”.
He believes something really does have to change
in the distribution of wealth, though, and we discuss
this for some time. “The super-rich could do with
paying a bit more tax – social mobility is at an all-
time low. I get really pissed off with the international
investors who park their money in London, but won’t
pay for the upkeep of the stable society that makes
it a place worth parking your money.”
Yet those making the assumption that Grayson Perry
is a hardcore leftie, and a cutting-edge, gender-fluid queer,
might be surprised. He has made the point that his transvestism
depends on what he calls “gender rigidity”, that if he weren’t
very clearly a straight man dressing up as a woman, if it were
all jumbled up together, the thrill would be lost. “Whenever
I meet young artists, I always ask them, ‘What sort of art do
you do?’ And they quite often say, ‘I’m a political artist,’ to
which I always reply, ‘Oh, you mean a left-wing artist?’ Because
you can’t be a right-wing political artist, or even mildly to the
right of Jeremy Corbyn, because then they’ll call you a sell-out
centrist Nazi. But, you know, both sides are as orthodox and
locked into a belief system as each other.”
They assume, like many, that Perry himself is profoundly
left wing, “because they think that all artists are”. In fact he
thinks, with some disdain, that universities are “liberal
factories” and describes himself as “increasingly militant,
not centrist, but – I call it a middle-brow activist”.
So what does that entail?
“Taking the piss out of everyone.”
It all makes sense when he reveals that the show hangs
on a quote from the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik,
who died in 2006: “The artist should always bite the hand
that feeds him – but not too hard.” n
Super Rich Interior Decoration is at Victoria Miro, W1, from
25 September to 20 December133DIGITAL ARTWORK: HEMPSTEAD MAY. GRAYSON PERRY/VICTORIA MIRO; VENETIA SCOTT; GETTY IMAGES
A RTS & CU LT U R E
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