33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 27
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.”
We retrace our steps, stopping near the entrance to the show next to a pot called The Frivolous Now (2011). The duck-egg blue vase with an ancient Greek shape is covered in graphically rendered expressions such as “LOL,” “tagging,” “improvised explosive device,” “phone hacking,” “privileged elite,” “stunning 3-D,” and “cute YouTube clips” (the latter is next to a childlike drawing of a cat). “Ceramics are very much my signature dish, but I only make pots about half the time,” he says. In addition to making tapestries and sculptures, Perry writes and presents television programs. He’s currently working on a three-part series for Channel 4 on taste, a theme that is also inspiring his next series of artworks. “I’m only going to have shows with TV tie-ins now!” he says, with the cackle of a pantomime witch.
Perry is mindful that such moves could undermine his credibility among art-world insiders, but he sees their version of “seriousness” as an unappealing set of conventional behaviors, sprinkled with jargon and somber tones. In any case, the “inherent ridiculousness” of his transvestism, as he puts it, excludes him from that club. A journalist once asked Perry, “Are you a lovable character or a serious artist?” The artist has since been fascinated by the dichotomy. “Apparently, serious artists are rude, difficult to understand, and unconcerned with popularity,” he says with incredulity. “The very opposite of lovable.”
* The British Museum is an encyclopedic museum of mankind with some eight million pieces in its collection, including many important ancient objects, but few modern or contemporary artworks.
Yayoi Kusama
Obliteration of My Life
2011
SCENE 8
Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is gazing at an image of herself. Glenn Scott Wright, director of Victoria Miro Gallery, has just handed her a copy of Sotheby’s quarterly magazine. On the cover is a photo of the artist wearing a shiny red wig and a red polka-dot dress. Today, she is wearing the same synthetic bob and similar garb. While the Kusama on the magazine poses in front of a pulsating red-and-black spot painting, the artist here sits at a table on the third floor of her Tokyo studio, with bookshelves on one side and a glass-brick wall on the other. Takako Matsumoto, a documentary filmmaker who has been shadowing the artist for the past eleven years, logs the self-reflexive moment.
Kusama was famous in New York in the 1960s, but she was almost forgotten as an artist after she moved back to Japan in 1973 and checked into the psychiatric hospital where she still lives. Since childhood, Kusama has made art to help her deal with her psychological problems. These include terrifying hallucinations in which she experiences the sudden melting of the boundary between herself and the universe. But if there is one thing that Kusama has never feared, it’s the limelight. The artist often starts her working day by reviewing her press. Media presence would appear to be an instant, if short-term panacea for fears of annihilation.
“I’m very excited to show you my new paintings,” says Kusama. She understands English but doesn’t speak it well, so one of her assistants translates. Scott Wright needs to select thirty or so works to show at Victoria Miro in the spring, when the artist’s retrospective is on display at Tate Modern. Kusama refocuses on the magazine. “This is fantastic. Is it Morandi?” she exclaims, pointing at a beige still life by the Italian modernist. “And Richard Serra?” she says, regarding a large metal sculpture by the American artist on a subsequent page.
Kusama has always been highly aware of art history. In the late 1950s, shortly after moving to New York, she made abstract paintings in which white loops of hand-painted mesh float over black backgrounds. With prolonged viewing, these “Infinity Nets,” as she called them, become undulating oceans of dots. The “Nets” deliberately one-upped Abstract Expressionist works, such as Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings; the compositions were more radically all over the canvas and the process of producing them was more intense. They also coincided with the arrival of the next notable art movement, Minimalism. Perhaps most importantly, these paintings acted as psychological safety nets, protecting the artist from her fear of melting into the void. In 1961, she created an “Infinity Net” that measured thirty-three feet, an unusually large abstract work for the period, which betrayed the scale of both her obsession and her ambition. Kusama has never stopped making “Net” paintings; they are an “endless” series.
Kusama peers up at Isao Takakura, her studio director, who wears a white-collared, short-sleeved shirt and polka-dot shorts. “Brother,” she says, “where’s the two-page article about our exhibition at the Reina Sofía?” The retrospective was initated by the chief curator of Tate Modern, but it has opened first at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. The show will go to Centre Pompidou in Paris before London and then finish up at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Takakura returns with a double-page spread from Asahi, a high-circulation Japanese daily. Kusama shows it to Scott Wright, promising to have a translation sent to him soon, and again becomes captivated by her press. She turns the page and examines an article about Francis Bacon, whose work has made a high price at auction. “He died a few years ago, didn’t he?” she comments. Twenty years ago, in fact. An assistant emerges with two copies of a new catalogue raisonné of her prints, which are gifts for Scott Wright and me. Kusama autographs them for us, but looks inquiringly at an assistant when it comes to writing the date. “Two zero one one,” says the young woman patiently.
Although Kusama clearly has difficulty keeping track of time, she has demonstrated near genius when it comes to her sense of space. In 1963, she created one of the first fully realized instances of installation art. Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show features a rowing boat filled with phallic sculptures installed in a room papered with 999 black-and-white photographic reproductions of the very same work. Three years later, Andy Warhol imitated her treatment of walls with his Cow Wallpaper (1966). About Warhol, Kusama has said wryly, “We were like . . . enemies in the same boat.”
Kusama went on to make masterful “Infinity Mirror” rooms. When I first experienced one of these works, titled Fireflies over the Water (2002), almost a decade ago, I found myself moved to tears by its godlike view of a sublime universe. These dark rooms contain hundreds of tiny lights that are reflected by mirrored walls and ceilings, and a black pool of water that covers the floor. With such spellbinding spaces, Kusama translates her existential terrors into works that inspire feelings of awe, elation, and plenitude.
Another assistant—apparently there are eight of them—suggests they show Scott Wright “the products.” I am told that they are “very, very secret” and I promise not to write about them until after their release. She leaves and returns with three Louis Vuitton handbags over each arm. “Aren’t there more? Please bring them all,” says Kusama. She sips water from a yellow-polka-dot glass while a few more bags are loaded onto the table.
Your average polka dot tends to be identical to its mates, lined up mindlessly in equidistant rows. A Yayoi Kusama spot, however, is a living, breathing thing that throbs with a sense of purpose. Louis Vuitton has superimposed a couple of Kusama patterns over the brown LV monogram on their handbags: a psychedelic galaxy of small, medium, and large spots and an arrangement that the artist calls “nerves,” which assembles multisized dots into snakelike forms.
