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00:00Brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before. It's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right. Brilliant ideas. Looks at the artists at the heart of this. They have a unique power to inspire astonish provoke shock. To push boundaries ask me questions and see the world afresh. Artists like Grayson Perry is making he's been notified I like he's a cross dressing Potter from Essex isn't he. That's what that's how he described himself . He quite uniquely among contemporary artists has had something very witty and funny and very prescient to say about contemporary art. I really love about Grayson Perry is the way that he crosses over and transcends so many different things . I'm a quality control freak. I have to do it badly in the right way. She mistakes is your style. Contemporary artist broadcaster author transvestite lecturer and as his Twitter biography states a worshiper of teddy bears Grayson Perry is probably best known for his classically shaped vases traditionally beautiful until you take a closer look. In 2003 he won the Turner Prize Britain's most prestigious award for contemporary art but he's now setting his sights on a global stage with work ranging from tapestry to graphic novels and addressing universal themes around identity in the modern world . He's one of Britain's most compelling and best loved artists . I was born in 1960 and jumps forward about 30 miles from London . My father was an electrician but he left when I was 4 . My mother was quite she still alive. My mother is quite what you call a drama queen I have a list of banned words that includes passionate spiritual and profound or words it would be easy to reach for when describing the thing that keeps me making art but the motivation is tender and it needs to be protected from clichés. I have a particular acute allergy to cliches because my mother ran off with the milkman I suppose what I did though I sort of retreated into an imaginary world because it wasn't the happiest environment to grow up in. And. My teddy bear which I got when I was one became kind of a symbolic father for me all my games and I was a child centered around his leadership. Alan Mazer was that's my teddy bears name. He led the set of the rebellion against the invading German statements an ongoing game of chess and on until I was about 15 he was called Alan measles because my best friend when I was very little with my next door neighbor son and he was called Alan and Mesa was because we bonded . When I had measles very simple and often people sort of say you know about say I'm a transvestite and they say isn't dressing up in women's clothes a very sort of simplistic way of accessing your femininity and I would say yeah but I became a transvestite when I was a child when I was quite simple in the same way. Isn't there a more sophisticated way of kind of supplementing your lack of male role model than giving it to a teddy bear. I was a child. You know you use the material that's available at the time playing I was top of the class at school until all of my demons came home to roost. When I was about 40 my academic career collapsed I think it was just all my demons you know. That was a day with my father leaving and my stepfather being so violent difficult person I always liked art. And then my art teacher said Oh I think you do really well art college. One day and I thought what if I saw that I went to Portsmouth Polytechnic which wasn't a particularly prestigious art school but it was okay. You know it's very free and easy and that sort of 60s mold of you know try a bit of everything. We don't really mind what you do. You can do printing you can do sculpture you can do ceramics you can do painting filmmaking I did it all when I was there. And then when I left art college I did what every aspiring art student did. I came to London and at the time so I can't imagine a student now doing it. I came to central London and squatted for four years which no. So I lived rent free in central London with a bunch of 1980s bohemians for four years. That was amazingly fertile grounding for me as an artist. He hung out with a group of artists called the neo naturists who were kind of really interesting group of mostly women kind of performance artists. But they did these very grotty slightly shabby not very professional performances where they would get naked. They would often paint themselves . Grayson was involved in some of those performances as a wonderful early photo of him with his body paint all over him and a little bell hanging off his member. And he obviously got into the spirit of real kind of fun silliness and almost like a. . The slick art that they were seeing coming out of places like New York in the 1980s everybody in the squat was had a good sense of humor and we had quite a ruthless mockery of any pretension. And so we used to laugh about people's aspiring trendiness or something even though of course we were kind of being fashionable ise. That's the irony of it. And that kind of filled me and so I was always attracted to the slightly naff thing really unfashionable and a bit awful and so I was always attracted to that and that's why when one of my friends in the House said would you fancy doing pottery evening classes because she was going along I said Yeah that sounds interesting it seemed foolish to go down that route. Pottery pottery D is award winning contemporary artist Grayson Perry has been described as one of the great social and cultural commentators of our era. But his discovery of his signature medium ceramics happened almost by accident . In retrospect it could look like that was a major moment in my life. Oh God yes. Suddenly the minute I touched Clay I knew that I had a spiritual connection with the earth. You know . But no it wasn't. It was like it was like it was like I had a facility with. I enjoyed it. I was incredibly inept ise Zero's craft skills at the time the very earliest piece that Grayson Perry made was a plate called kinky sex where there's an image of Christ being crucified on the cross drawn and it's very loose slightly messy style which wasn't on purpose. It was because he wasn't very skilled at that time at ceramics and over his groin there's a melted coin which has kind of gone a bit wrong in the firing of the ceramic piece and across the bottom of the plate written the words kinky sex. So that collision of religion fantasy sex pottery domesticity were kind of all there from the very earliest work. Here's my trusty Kailey Leinz. This is my little kitten and maybe kill him because you don't want to fire or be killed all the time. And here's my trust one of my trusty killing dogs. This is my Alan Keyes who was killed. God this is him as a kind of dough goo which is the early Japanese ceramic and I use him as a kill go to protect to protect my work from what I call the gift of the fire because often potters we know when they see a lovely dribble or a crack they get that's so lovely. That's the gift of the fire and I kind of go gifts . They're a bit like what your auntie gives you at Christmas. You don't really want I didn't know if it was going to be sort of my defining medium or at least it set me on a path of the way that I work with tradition. Then immediately I was having a dialogue with all these different times and cultures. And that is what I do to this day. Whatever medium I pick up on I'm always looking backwards and forwards. I just go round museums and go Yeah like that. I'll do one of them and that's how I operate. And I've never worried about being original because I don't know. Originality is light as they say it's for people with short memories I operate on what I call the Chinese whispers track. I copy something and get it a bit wrong so it becomes something new . The words contemporary ceramics always fill me a little bit with dread because there's a certain knowingness about them whereas I like something that seems to sort of be unself consciously decorative and joyful. I think it sits uncomfortably in the art gallery because it was already an art form and yeah it was an art form that was linked to craft and tradition and I was sort of hovering in and out of the art world because of that I could feel the tension right up to the point I won the Turner Prize . Practically there was tension around what are these bars is doing in an art gallery on the night of the award. He turned up with his wife and his daughter wearing this incredible pale purple ridiculously kitsch baby doll dress and his little red pump shoes. I remember him saying and he's very cheeky way . It's about time a transvestite Potter won the Turner Prize suddenly meant that he was on the international stage and was a force to be reckoned with. And after that many invitations for exhibitions came many commissions for work. There was suddenly a much greater interest in his work on the art market. I felt sort of love hate relationship I think with the market. I mean I've never had any problem selling my work and I'm one of the reasons was it was incredibly cheap and ceramics had a kind of understandable you know he's like would someone spend thirty five quid on a plate or a very very cheap piece of conceptual art. And I always thought they're probably more liked by the play. And so there was something satisfying about that so I never had any problem selling the work I did I didn't sell it for very much money. But at the same time I didn't try to second guess what people wanted. I just made what I wanted to make. I enjoyed making and hoped they would come along. And so every time I've tried a new media or a new category of object we didn't know. I mean the first print I did God to be underpriced it you know I read the first print we did the back of an Englishman . I think it was up for sale for three and a half thousand pound sold out in two days. And now they sell for forty thousand pound. You know we'd be underpriced that I suppose all my big themes are kind of quite social class and taste. I mean again it's about this. If I if I see the overarching themes as has been a being about what's what's happening unconsciously what is affecting our behavior without always realizing it you know it talks about our education the way we talk what we eat what we wear what we do is a job you know it has all these huge repercussions. And so I'm interested in that and then politics you know I'm always whatever's going on in the world around you know the problems in the Middle East or whatever with the banking crisis. Early on my work is a lot about me me me me. Like many young artists everything is lots of work that is quite autobiographical. I probably do that less now. So this is as near as you're gonna get for me to really that is for self portrayed as this idea that in the middle of Ise there is this sort of pearl that is our identity and everything else kind of sticks to it whereas I think actually we are just a kind of bunch of experiences we develop in communion in relationship to other people. That's how we become who we are. Identity is something that we don't do on our own is co created. I might work about the world more now and about the issues of people that I'm interested in I follow where I'm enthusiastic my detective says go this way and I go that way I don't have an agenda. I'm I'm looking to see what excites me . I know this stuff as some little kid once said What do I do . They know stuff he's a potter. He's a sculptor. He works in an unfashionable material as he puts it. He uses his these objects as vessels literally metaphorically to carry meaning. He's a conceptual artist so but he's a performance artist to think it's too reductive to say the alter ego Claire the cross dressing is part of a performance artistic practice that that was carefully planned. It's part of who he is. But that projection that persona is inextricably linked. Gender and what is to be a man or a woman that's always interested me greatly being a tranny I was pretty kinky. Even as a very small child I enjoyed tying myself up but from about the age of 7 I mean being the school play I was playing angel Gabriel when the dress was a big had a definite robe going on. Thinking about it and I sort of like that was the sort of early sort of sexual feelings and then I just had I had a fantasy and I thought it was having a fantasy and some cross-dressing was involved. Really. Wow that's exciting and then one day I was reading the Sunday paper like one of the tabloids and it had an article about transvestites and it and I was like oh m g. There are others out there and then I knew I was a transvestite. And that was interesting . And I just gradually I kept it secret. I knew enough about it . There wasn't somebody you bragged about in the playground and I didn't really come out until I was out of college . But then it was almost an asset . I think he is a living sculpture of sorts. He is an ongoing performance and I think he is also very symptomatic of. Of the world in which we live in where boundaries are blurred. I don't think there's any significant difference between him as a critic or commentator or television film maker or intervener or producer of artistic objects. I think it's all part of one creative personality. I think the central identifier about my art might be that it's familiar and yeah it's talking about fresh things. So it's like you know everybody knows what a pot is what a tapestry what a print is everything I do is an archetype. And yeah I'm talking about the contemporary world and I'm trying to make it fresh and I'm trying to make it visually arresting and seductive there seems to be able to reach people in different ways and I think part of that reason is because he's a modern artist. It doesn't take himself very seriously even though the ideas he talks about it engages with all very profound. I'm not scared of being seductive and I like lots of detail and texture know all the traditional things that I'm not scared of doing. I'm in I won't deny me them like some more acetic ideas based artist. I will wallow in it. They're rather beautiful close up. I do like the tapestry because most so digital products have a sort of dead ness about them . But this has got a liveliness almost like a handmade object in that it doesn't behave like that I'm interested in making this sophisticated for a popular audience. That's what I'm interested in. The first what I would call celebrity artifact I made was the Walthamstow tapestry which is my big 15 metre tapestry. And that was the first where even though I'd been making pottery at that point for twenty five years or something it was the first artifact where people could say name it artwork by Grayson Perry and people called Walthamstow tapestry I was cycling one day and somebody came past Nikkei and it had lovely tapestry. And I thought yes I've got an artifact. That's my Damien Hirst shark moment. I thought that's good d he's with work ranging from tapestry to graphic novels and addressing universal themes around identity in the modern world. Grayson Perry is one of Britain's most compelling and best loved artists a household name in his native country. He's now setting his sights on the international stage with the US publication of his bestselling book on contemporary art and shows in Australia and Turkey in 2015. I've done so many big projects recently that I quite like the idea of going back to being an artist that makes individual work you know on a because they fancy banking them without any kind of overarching big plan but then a big plan come along and I kind of end up making stuff about that. I haven't quite had that Orthodox international contemporary art career and I'm kind of thinking you all of a go to that for a while you know and have shows abroad and then be an artist you know I think I really like about Chris and Perry is that there's a really specifically English thing about him. He just seems like someone that we should feel proud of. Because only Britain could have created someone like him. I do like the idea of being a kind of ambassador for certain sort of Britishness . I think you know I'm a pretty British guy. I like the idea of that. Oh yes that's modern Britain. Very interesting. But he's got that. Yeah it's got tradition he's got humor. Humor is very important to me. It's you know it's engaged socially . So yeah I think and I think my work you know by trying not to be original. I got I think I've got a distinctive voice. I hope that his internationalization doesn't turn him into an English eccentric and I think I don't mean that he will become native he's far too smart. But I hope he's not pigeonholed as not because actually he's so much more important . I'm probably quite unusual as an ise these days in that I work on my own. I don't have a studio system apart from when I can't pick up one of my parts and I have to get my friend to help me lift it . In terms of all the drawing the sculpting making is ceramics I do it myself when I make a bronze I sculpt the thing myself when I make the tapestries I draw every bloody glass into me a little bit myself. And so I'm a man I was sort of art and I realized actually you know that's nice and people can approve of me for that but it's also a bit of a handicap in the modern art world because you know I can only make so much art. And the demands of the vast acreages of flashy space there is to film nowadays means that is voracious. And I can't keep up with it. So I think I deny myself opportunities that I could have but that I'm a quality control freak. I have to do it badly in the right way I need I need to be able to make mistakes. I can't trust anybody else to make the right sort of mistakes because mistakes is your style. Otherwise we'd all be doing fi realism as an artist who exhibits in the public sphere I still think that my job is to make material culture that people will come and see that will operate on a level where my unconscious talks to their unconscious. And that's what visual art does brilliantly you know it's uh it's it's under the radar. So they're looking at stuff and while they're looking at it something's happening they might not even know what it is. My audience is you know people are interested in culture but they might not be in the r ghetto. They are generally interested in culture you know I love it when people say oh I took my 14 year old son to your show and I'd never taken into an exhibition. Folks he always complained that his interest was paid to me he came away convinced I was a good thing from your show. Yeah. Good kick probably when people in CAC. I mean even to this day they're thinking what are these viruses doing in and out. And of course for me that is like a golden opportunity process like. You mean you you you'll accept a urinal they didn't even make himself. And yeah I'd be delighted to pour it. No no way. It's been a gold mine for me a gift brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor .

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Brilliant Ideas: Artist Grayson Perry | Episode 01

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