Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  Henry Darger, ‘Trapped in lighted cavern they try to elude the Glandelinians surrounding them’

  Most of the figures are carbon-traced from children’s comics, Darger didn’t think he was a very good draughts-man and so he adapted found illustrations. There are explosions, forest fires and landscapes collaged into the pictures. The composition and colour are astonishing. His sense of colour is astounding. The writing in his opus was articulate and his vocabulary mature.

  Darger is the artist I identify with most in terms of his creative pathways. I feel a kindred spirit with how his imagination worked, the way he sought refuge in a fantasy world in the same way that I secreted my imagination and artistic practice into a shed where I retreated to do my work in an enclosed, secure environment while observing the world. I see in Henry Darger’s work that the real world was too painful to bear, so he made an alternative. The Story of the Vivian Girls was a metaphor for his internal, emotional life. I identify with how Darger used to commentate out loud as he was drawing. His landlord, overhearing voices, yelled, ‘No visitors allowed!’ to which Darger replied, ‘There’s no one in here!’ Then the landlord heard him scolding his imaginary people, ‘I told you not to talk so loudly.’

  Getting attention is a large part of making art. Getting attention is a powerful inducement to change or keep certain styles and ideas. Take the fact that I make vases and my vases were well received, which has been a strong motivation to continue creating them. If I were Henry Darger making art for myself I might change this or move that without being aware of art history or what the outside world thinks of it or wants. He chose the style, the content and the format solely to fit in with his needs as an artist, for himself only. What Darger represents to me is that pure artistic drive.

  The idea of Art Brut, of not being aware of the art world, appealed to me. At the time I didn’t have these thoughts, I merely soaked in ‘The Outsiders’ exhibition to the extent that my drawings over the following three years were heavily informed by Henry Darger, but subconsciously. If you’d asked me at nineteen ‘Whom are you copying?’ I wouldn’t have been able to say. The artists whom I would have said I liked were the German Neo-Expressionists, Kiefer, A.R. Penck, Baselitz and Joseph Beuys particularly. I just held the images of Darger’s work in my mind. I didn’t see them or any reference to them again or know where I could possibly find them. I couldn’t even remember his name. I biked to the Art Brut museum in Switzerland with my wife in the late eighties looking for Darger’s work but they didn’t have any: now there is a whole room there dedicated to him. He has become the most sought-after and collected Outsider Artist. Paintings by him sell for $60,000. Darger is the nearest we have to an undiscovered genius in late twentieth-century art and of all the artists I know of, he has the most romantic story.

  It was some years later that I came across Darger again and I was very moved. By then I was in therapy, thinking about the nature of psychotherapy and working on the first vase I made on this theme. I was searching for a set of metaphorical images that exactly matched what I wanted to say about looking back at one’s childhood. In 2000 I made a pot called The Revenge of the Alison Girls – I misremembered the Vivian Girls as the Alison Girls – decorated with nude Alison Girls herding up parents into concentration camps, then executing them. I was describing the pot to someone when they told me, ‘Henry Darger drew the Vivian Girls. He’s just had a big show at the Folk Museum in New York.’

  I identify with the comfort and escape Darger found in creating a parallel universe. He played out himself through all the characters in his story, which meant he was able to be whole in his imaginary world: it was a repository for keeping his whole self active. I am touched by the survival mechanism he used all his life, which I used with my games and models until I was about fifteen. It was as if I was in a prison while my imagination was the exercise yard, and I allowed all the parts of myself to go out into that imaginary world to be themselves.

  Darger did art therapy in his way, a wonderfully spontaneous mode of self-psychiatric medication. And I did it in my way: I played it out with Alan Measles. What has made me an artist – and kept me intact as a child – were the channels whereby I turned a feeling into a metaphor. I went through puberty while this mechanism was still operating, so a lot of my erotic imagination was drawn into it too.

  I still use those well-worn corridors to this day, in that I experience the world, allow it to stew, then I find a way of putting it out there in the simplistic language of pottery. Pottery is not a very effective way of conveying complex thoughts, so I have to communicate what I hope are diverse ideas within the limited vocabulary of ceramics. Henry Darger’s illustrations are so powerful that people get their message within a few moments of looking at his art. This, for me, is the crux of why I’m an artist. It’s not in the detail of the picture; it is in the atmosphere of the world you enter. I haven’t taken being an artist seriously enough through my life: I am starting to do it more now. I haven’t thanked the art world enough for what it has done for me.

  16

  ‘DON’T COPY WHAT’S FASHIONABLE NOW, COPY WHAT’S GOING TO BE FASHIONABLE IN TWO YEARS’ TIME’

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1979 the day came for me to leave home. I piled all my belongings – of which I had hardly any – into a black bin liner, strapped it on to the back of the Suzuki, taped a map of the south-west to the petrol tank and phut-phut-phutted from Bardfield to art college. Halfway there I got trapped on a roundabout by the M11 realising that every turn-off was a motorway, worrying, ‘Fuck! How did I get here? I’m not allowed on any of these roads.’ I was only a learner with L-plates. I decided, ‘Sod it! I’m going on the M11.’ I ripped off the L-plates, got on the motorway and eventually spluttered to a halt outside my landlady’s in Portsmouth. She was incredibly thin, she smoked and she cooked nondescript meals. She had a son in the Marines and a not very good wardrobe. I don’t think I ever saw her eat and I was there until the following June.

  I didn’t want to spend any time in my lodgings. Instead, for my first term I hung out with Chris Cheshire and Greg Palmer. They were from the north. I hadn’t met people from the north before. I don’t know what they thought of me; I practically stalked them. I was round their room in the halls of residence every evening, desperately lonely, but I wouldn’t have admitted it. They probably got annoyed with me. I used to turn up at their room every single night, sit there joking and japing until very late because I could not spend time with my anorexic landlady at the other end of town.

  I was very thin too. I weighed ten stone but, unlike my landlady, I had a voracious appetite. Every morning I ate a full English breakfast, a cake for elevenses, then pie, beans and double chips for lunch in the student dining room. I had a snack in the afternoon followed by a full roast dinner at the landlady’s at six. Later on, after I’d hung around at the halls of residence, I polished off sausages and chips from the chip shop on the way home. I had a huge amount of energy; I never got tired, I was ticking over very fast, at twenty thousand revs.

  My artwork in my first year at college was awful. I made some of the worst things I have ever made. It was dreadful because two forces were still operating within me: I treated art like work, it was something I did, like school or the dog biscuit factory, and I also wanted to please my lecturers to the extent that I made pastiches of their work. Furthermore, the college had Terry, the ineffective pottery technician who was supposed to assist the students, although every piece of pottery I ever gave him to fire came back broken or the wrong colour. I would indicate, ‘I want this piece to come out jet black, Terry,’ but instead it would turn beige. An art college tip is probably the repository for some of the ugliest objects on earth because they aren’t only ugly objects, they’re ugly objects that are trying to be art.

  Every week one or two visiting lecturers would give a talk, then spend the day with the students. Nicholas Pope spoke about his mum bringing him cups of tea in the shed while he was working and his sweet, gent
le way of talking about his art appealed to me. The influences of the artist Anish Kapoor and the sculptor Edward Allington could soon be seen filtering through the students’ work. I saw Anish Kapoor’s work for the first time at an opening of hip young sculptors at the ICA in the summer of 1980. It was a pile of pigment that I desperately wanted to touch to discover if it was solid or merely a mound of powder. In the same show Antony Gormley exhibited a double mattress sculpted from sliced bread with people-shaped holes bitten out of it. Edward Allington sculpted sizeable plaster blobs so within a few weeks of his lecture there was a rash of plaster lumps, an appeal of plaster being that, along with wax and fibreglass, it was a free material. In the early eighties an artist called Larry Knee built a Gothic artefact that looked like a miniature version of the Albert Memorial decorated with fragments of teeth, bottles, clock mechanisms, broken china dollies and scraps of iron and silverware, all of which he unearthed in Victorian landfills. He came to speak to us and I was very influenced by him.

  The Head of the Department was a Francophile who led an annual student trip to Paris. I hadn’t been abroad before. I had some money left over from working in the dog biscuit factory so I decided, ‘I’m going to go abroad.’ I took a huge suitcase stuffed with all my clothes but I didn’t wear any of them apart from a change of underpants. All I wore the whole time was jeans, a T-shirt and my leather jacket even though I had five changes of clothes. There was one cool boy called Ryan who, when he got on the boat, only had one small plastic bag containing three pairs of underpants and two T-shirts, which was his entire luggage for the whole week. I had this mammoth suitcase that weighed a ton and I got searched at customs going out and coming back. I’ve learned since that if I’ve got a favourite look I’m going to wear it all the time.

  While crossing the Channel I copped off with Jen Mortimer, an art student in the year above me. We started snogging as soon as we boarded the ferry and we became a couple during the trip. Jen and I spent our time in Paris eating at no-frills restaurants, drinking plastic bottles of discount wine and looking at a lot of art. We were staying in a student hostel and, despite the boys’ dormitory offering no privacy, Jen spent one night with me in my bunk bed. When we got back Jen discarded the boyfriend she’d had since her Foundation Course, who had moved to Portsmouth to be with her. I was still seeing Diana so every other weekend I would trundle across the south-west on the train to Falmouth where Diana was at art college in the hope of getting five minutes when we were alone – she had three flatmates – to have sex.

  Very soon into my relationship with Jen I was lying in bed with her when I announced, ‘Jen … Jen … I’ve. Got. Something. To. Tell. You. I … AM … A … TRANSVESTITE.’ She burst out laughing, not about me being a transvestite but over the formality with which I told her. It was my emotion and seriousness in confiding it to her that she found hilarious. Jen mocked me mercilessly over it. Although it was cruel of her to laugh, I took it on the chin because I was besotted with her and she was so much fun. I was very earnest about dressing up because transvestism was a large aspect of myself that I was allowing out of the closet and, for me, it was very erotic – perhaps Jen was slightly uncomfortable with that. It would be a while before she saw me wearing women’s clothing.

  Jen and her flatmate Veronica helped me piece together a haphazard wardrobe from Oxfam and advised me on my make-up. Veronica had a higgledy-piggledy heap of wigs from jumble sales that she was using to make an artwork and among that heap I found a wig for myself that was vaguely serviceable. Then, one afternoon when the landlady was out I sneaked into her room to try on some of her dresses. She had snazzy seventies clothes in polyester that I couldn’t resist, but unfortunately she was a small size; we were both thin, but she was really thin. I don’t know if she knew what I’d done, but after that her bedroom door was locked. Nevertheless I began having surreptitious dressing-up sessions in my room, taking photographs of myself in women’s clothing. The lecturers had said that a camera was an essential tool for an artist so I bought an extremely cheap, third-rate SLR, a Zenith, which enabled me to take my first photograph of Claire, an important moment for me as a trannie. Claire was me in a bad frock looking nervously into the lens. I wasn’t sure if I was Grayson or Claire in the dress: many things, ‘Claire’ and ‘transvestite’ included, didn’t exist until they had a name.

  I was spending every evening with Jen and Veronica in their flat, where the record collection, the clothes, the jokes, were all in inverted commas, everything was once removed slightly. It was an environment which asked, ‘Dare I take anything seriously?’ because Jen and Veronica would pounce on me if I did. It was an extremely creative ambience because it meant I questioned what I was doing until it stood up to a very rigorous test of their acerbic wit. I revelled in the masquerade of us being cruel to each other. Nor were we frightened of being naff, which was being prepared to be unstylish and old-fashioned in order to be personally expressive – naff became a strong force in my creativity. We dared to be uncool but we were uncool in a way we knew would be cool in a few months’ or years’ time. The painter Martin Maloney used to say to students, ‘Don’t copy what’s fashionable now, copy what’s going to be fashionable in two years’ time.’ That was a dictum I began to follow then.

  Earliest photo of me in women’s clothes, 1979

  The big event for Jen, Veronica and me was the Students Union disco. Portsmouth didn’t have hip nightclubs so the best night out on a Friday was the students’ regular, to which even the trendies from town turned up. Trendy meant post-punk. New Romanticism was emerging; people were dressing up. The three of us spent every weekend voraciously foraging through jumble sales and charity shops in a quest for eccentric clothes to pose in at the disco. I didn’t go public with my transvestism in that first year so I wore men’s clothes, Lurex shirts and dinner jackets, and launched into dressing up, revelling in the attention it brought me.

  Jen’s elder sister, Fiona, arrived from London for a Friday night disco wearing a skin-tight pink mohair trouser suit and, with her white hair, she looked like a young Mary Peters. She was a dynamo, a combination of a Girl Guide – she was like a Brown Owl – a clubbing butterfly and a bit of a rocker. Fiona had an astonishing wardrobe and was an excellent dresser in the most curious way. I would ask her, ‘Where did you get that outfit?’

  She would reply, ‘They have a jumble sale at St Martin’s Fashion School of all the designs that got rejected.’ Once she found a big roll of corrugated paper in a skip, wrapped it round herself lots of times, tied it on with a yellow scarf, then went nightclubbing in a roll of pink paper. This was an eye opener to me, influencing the way I was dressing. Fiona was very good-looking, very striking and absolutely full of life, the best dancer I’d ever seen – not technically, but the most enthusiastic. When the worst records came on and nobody else would dance, Fiona, Jen, Veronica and I liked to monopolise the dance floor, showing off and larking around. Fiona was the first person I knew who liked Abba in a postmodern way. They were at the tail end of their success, but Fiona, before they’d even come to an end, was being ironic about them, enthusing, ‘Wow! ABBA! Oh, I love ABBA!’ which was uncool because everybody else was raving about punk rock. Abba was in opposition to punk. The flip I got from the sisters was to kick against the pricks, twist things round and say, ‘This could be funny if we just turn it over.’

  On Saturday nights we went to gigs. We saw Black Sabbath, Motorhead and groovy groups like The Cure and The Human League. Local bands had cheap or free gigs, all very poorly attended; the audience would be hugging the back wall of the room while supping a pint. Most local groups were shockingly bad but we nevertheless decided, ‘We are going to make a great big effort.’ The three of us dolled up, got bladdered on cheap, student promo – usually Pernod – and threw ourselves into being the band’s biggest fans, dancing very passionately right at the front. Some bands took us at face value, believing we idolised them, sometimes even inviting us up on to the stage to sing alo
ng with them, which delighted us and was a triumph, our apotheosis, or else they got extremely annoyed and told us, ‘Piss off!’ There was an atrocious, long-haired Heavy Metal band called Zeus whom we adored, for whom Jen would dress in the complete Heavy Metal look. One night she won their head-banging competition and was given a Zeus T-shirt with ‘ZEUS WORLD TOUR’ on the front and a map of Portsmouth on the back with a list of three pubs.

  At the end of my first year I very swiftly made, in one afternoon, a curious little ceramic sculpture that looked as if it were an ethnic object. It was peculiar in that it appeared to be a cross between a gutted fish and a boat. I fired it in the raw clay, then painted it with a blood-red and grey interior. It had a wigwam roof decorated to look like sheepskin and supported on sticks. The Institute of Contemporary Art had an annual survey show of student art called ‘The New Contemporaries’, which had a history of well-known artists who had exhibited in it as their first showing and in 1980 I entered a slide of this piece. To my surprise it was accepted.