by Wendy Jones
The degree show was my first proper exhibition although only a few desultory people came because in Portsmouth there was hardly any art world. A feature of the show was the poor lost-looking parents who had never been down to the college before, wandering around bewilderedly: Mr and Mrs Beige Windcheater from Surbiton or Solihull, not quite knowing or understanding, thinking, ‘God! Is this what our Jeffrey’s been up to for the last three years!’ My mother didn’t visit my show but she came to my graduation with Uncle Eddie and his wife. I hired the gown and mortarboard, and we went through the ritual but it felt empty. Back at the squat I showed them my film of Captain Potts – I was very proud of it – by projecting it on to a blanket hanging over the window. I bought a lemon sponge cake and made cups of tea, which they found touching. My mother was horrified that I had orange boxes for chairs and blankets for curtains, but to me it seemed like perfectly normal student living, although there must have been a seediness to which I had become inured. I didn’t know it then but my mother found it upsetting that I was living in squalor. I thought it was fine; it was how I’d lived for a year. By then I even had the master bedroom – the best bedroom in the squat.
Working on my degree show, 1982
Death of Macho: bronze figure
While I was at college I had kept in contact with my mum on the phone maybe once a fortnight. I didn’t see my dad very often; occasionally I visited him on the motorbike. All passion was spent in the relationship with my father. I still wanted my parents’ approval. I don’t think they understood my world. Perhaps they understand more, now that my mother has encountered it for herself. I don’t know if it’s true because I heard this third-hand, but my mother went into a local shop and the woman behind the counter was talking about her son who was a student at art college and who was obsessed with an artist called Grayson Perry, to which my mother responded, ‘That’s my son.’ I don’t know how believable that was. My mother was led through to the back of the shop where there was virtually a shrine to Grayson Perry. What must have gone through her mind?
The day after graduation, in July 1982, I hitched to Wapping with a mattress, a sleeping bag, a load of body paint and some ideas. For one week fifteen people were going to live in the nude in the B2 Gallery for a Neo-Naturist residency. The Neo-Naturists were Fiona, Jen and Angela, who had recently graduated in painting from St Martin’s, along with a floating pool of people, of which I was one.
Angela sewed us each a bulky floor-length overcoat in fun fur, a material that was extremely unusual then, so we all had a fun-fur coat, which was useful for naked Neo-Naturists because they easily covered us, they were reasonably warm and they looked comical. Fiona visited the British Museum and, when no one was looking, did a quick flash while Angela took fantastic photos of Fiona standing naked next to Egyptian statues with a big face, like the Magritte painting, painted on her torso, before Fiona wrapped her cloak back round herself. Every lunchtime we would all put on our fun-fur coats and pop to the Prospect of Whitby pub and, of course, Angela’s coat would fall open and the men who worked there used to love her, this woman with her tits falling out at the bar. They liked Angela so much that when they finished their lunchtime shift they would bring all the spare food from the Prospect round to the gallery and give it to us as a pretext for visiting Angela.
The gallery was beautiful, it had balconies – the old loading doors – that looked out on to the river and the weather was sunny all week. The audience were a small gathering of people who used to wander down to watch us while we were cooking or hanging out, but from noon onwards we would all be in the nude. We unfailingly got a good audience of dirty old men who came to stare at Angela’s bosom, because Angela had huge breasts and a very slim model figure.
The first day’s theme – every day had to have a theme – was Art Day, so Fiona invited every artist she knew to come to the B2 Gallery to use our bodies as canvases. Andrew Logan, Dougie Fields and even Derek Jarman came, and we stood around while the artists painted us. Paint was flicked on Angela with a toothbrush until she was like a Jackson Pollock painting. In the evening we had a private view where we posed motionless, being the art. Macbeth Day had an evening performance of the play although it was an extremely fleeting version of Macbeth, ten minutes long, with seven witches because they were the favourite part. Fiona was Mrs Macbeth: she had an industrial cooker on stage and spent most of her performance draped in tartan, frying Scottish pancakes. I was the Forest of Dunsinane, holding up a bundle of buddleia that I’d ripped up from an old East End bombsite, and covered in body paint that was mixed with Scottish oats so I had a crusty tree trunk texture all over me. The porridge set hard in the same way that when cereal sticks to a bowl it turns rock hard, clinging to the hairs on my body something chronic. This crusty oatmeal was all over me. It was very, very painful to move in, let alone wash off. After our performance we were directed to sprint out of the gallery screaming, so I hobbled down the road feeling quite vulnerable.
Fashion designers painted us on Fashion Day for an evening catwalk show during which we modelled body-painted clothes. The fourth day was Black Day where we were only allowed to use black body paint. It was the most photogenic day. There were people in stripes, splatters, dots and tribal markings, all these adults of varying body shapes in various patterns. At the Black Picnic we sat in the nude on Wapping beach eating solely black food – black bread, black pudding, black olives and Guinness. We looked like a strange, apocalyptic tribal gathering. A police boat chugged past and juddered to a halt when it spotted us.
The Black Day picnic, Wapping
By the fifth day we were all manky. Bath time was a massive chore because there were fifteen Neo-Naturists yet only enough hot water for one bath. So if I was fifteenth into the bath it wasn’t very enjoyable. I was lucky even to get the body-paint off me. By Punk Day all my crevices had collections of brightly coloured dirt in them. Word had passed around about our installation so a big crowd arrived for a heaving Punk Day party. Everyone was sniffing glue as a punk homage – someone had turned up with a gigantic tub of Evostick – and getting hallucinatory. I wasn’t sniffing glue, it didn’t appeal to me; instead, I made a very raw video of the night.
The week ended. I had left college and I was very frightened because I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. I had applied for an extension on the unreality that is student life. I had an interview at Chelsea School of Art to do an MA in sculpture, but they rejected me because they said I had too strong a voice, was too much of an artist and not enough of a student. Jen and I decided we must move to London because that was where everything was happening. We heard that the basement of Marilyn’s squat, a big house in Crowndale Road next door to Camden Palace, was empty. Marilyn was becoming a pop star, although he was already taking heroin, and there were a couple of other junkies in the squat and I think the woman on the top flat was a prostitute. Nobody wanted the basement of the house because it had been flooded and had a fire so it was both very damp and very black. An elderly Irishman had abandoned it, leaving it littered with empty beer bottles, Catholic regalia, medals and, sadly, whole drawers full of birthday cards from the previous thirty years. Jen and I clambered in through the window and saw that the basement was horrendous but we were desperate as we had nowhere to live. I knew how to rig up the electricity so we turned on the electric fires in every room to dry the flat out and we put the soggy mattress next to a fire to dry. Apart from hot water the flat had everything we needed and it was free, nor were we afeared of being evicted because the council realised that squatters kept derelict properties in better condition than if they were left empty to rot. I didn’t particularly like living in the same house as a lot of junkies, though, because they kept nearly dying.
Jen was a good homemaker and I took great pride in the decoration. The walls had originally been pastel pink, but despite our spending days scrubbing them they remained half sooty black and dusty especially in the corners, which gave the decor a trendy, distr
essed look. All our furniture was from skips, as were the stinky carpets. I made a throne from scaffolding boards. We had drapes, posters, pictures, pieces of jewellery and Jen’s paintings hanging up on the dusky walls. It was Gothic. No matter how rough the flat was – there were mushrooms growing in a damp patch in the hallway where the water heater dripped – we had a base, we felt secure. It was exciting. That first night, after we had dried the mattress out enough, we squeezed into the cell-like bedroom which backed on to the car park of the Post Office sorting office and it was noisy all night long with banging doors and shouting postmen, but it was a home and that was enough.
The unofficial grant for artists was the dole with its depressing experience of signing on – perpetual queuing in rooms cluttered with horrible nylon-covered chairs. I lost my dole money once, the whole £28, on the way home from cashing the cheque, that was depressing too. The dole wasn’t enough to live on but what appealed about poverty was that it removed all my decisions. I had no spare money, so I didn’t have to consider what to spend it on; there was a relaxation to that. I only bought food – the cheapest food – and I got clothes when we had a few extra pence to go to a jumble sale. There was no money at all for luxuries. To get some cash we did life modelling in art colleges, standing in the nude getting very bored and stiff. It’s hard work sitting still. I realised that when I was naked in the class, people would be scared of me and slightly back away. I never saw a good drawing of me in all the time I did it.
In the spring of 1981 Fiona met a tightrope walker. Hermine was married to the poet Hugo Williams and had scripted Sheherazade, a feminist version of The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, which Fiona and Hermine decided to stage. Fiona was Sheherazade, Raymond was going to be the sultan – the main male lead – and everyone was cast in some part or other. We didn’t have to bother with costumes because it was going to be a Neo-Naturist production. I volunteered to do the set, but had no materials whatsoever. Lying around the squat I found several piles of rotting carpets that I painted skulls and tribal patterns on to with old household paint, then hung them up as the backdrop. I assembled all the household furniture we didn’t want in the flat, nailing offcuts of wood into it to construct thrones and altarpieces. We did our second Neo-Naturist performance at the Notre Dame Church Hall again, although this time we did two performances. People bought tickets and it was a well-attended production, with an assemblage of nude actors, featuring in a Sunday tabloid under the headline KIDS IN NUDE ROMP IN CATHOLIC CHURCH HALL.
On the success of the show we were booked to do a Neo-Naturist performance in Brixton at the Spanish Anarchists Association, which was similar to a working men’s club, an extremely anachronistic place that had become somewhat hip because of punk’s associations with anarchy. As it was May Fiona thought we should do a Communist, May Day-themed cabaret. Cerith, Fiona, Jen, Angela and I all had identical Communist uniforms body painted on to us with khaki paint and we decorated ourselves with big red five-pointed stars. We spent that afternoon making placards with very naïvely drawn self-portraits with joke Chinese versions of our names underneath, like Gray-SUN, Jen-Bin and ANG-lee-AI, which we nailed on to wooden poles. Cerith was going to give a reading from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and we had a record of the Red Army Choir to play. We had what Fiona decided were capitalist consumer objects, little pottery knick-knacks that we were going to smash.
Neo-naturist show
The performance consisted of us goose-stepping into the room to the strains of the Red Army Choir, reading from the Little Red Book, smashing the capitalist consumer artefacts, making pseudo-political gestures and declarations, then marching around while waving our placards. It only lasted ten minutes. We were cavorting and having a very good time, with no political message involved, but when we goose-stepped out of the room at the end of the record there was a dead silence. There were around a hundred anarchists in the audience as well as some punks and they all hated it, not one of them clapped, the room was dead quiet. The only sound was of us laughing in the men’s toilets, these echoy, chipped urinals, wondering, ‘What have we done?’
We all piled into a taxi, painted and naked, then did the same performance at the Fridge nightclub round the corner, in exchange for free entrance and drinks. The performance received a very antagonistic response at the Fridge, mainly because of me, a man, being naked. A bloke in the audience had encouraged his girlfriend to climb on stage and grab my willy when suddenly there was the sound of smashing glass and a guy with a broken beer bottle clambered on to the stage. We were standing there, scared stiff in the nude. The bouncers leapt on stage and shoved us off halfway through our performance. It was a real kerfuffle. We were innocents, we had thought our show was fun but the drunken, aggressive blokes did not like it. When men were performing as Neo-Naturists it was edgier because then the show couldn’t be about titillation; instead, it mocked the concept of titillation because we were unselfconsciously nude, we weren’t glamour models, nor were we necessarily fantastic physical specimens. The performance implied, ‘Right now you should be seeing naked cabaret performers in tutus, boas and itsy-bitsy tassels but instead you’ve got us lot. You’ve got a bunch of pseudo-hippies prancing about doing performance art and being a bit boring, actually.’ There were various provocative dissatisfactions involved that I think caused the hostile reaction, though sometimes at gay clubs, like Heaven, we would get a fantastic reception.
Jen and I did our own Neo-Naturist performance at the Camden Palace where I was a painter in a smock and beret while Jen was my canvas. We were placed in the foyer as people were coming in. I don’t think the management knew what they were letting themselves in for, as we were a bit more robust than they expected. I was painting a Picasso on to a naked Jen, all very innocent. Then I took all my clothes off. We had a great big French stick and two bread rolls sellotaped together which Jen sellotaped on to me like a big willy. Then Jen got out a bread knife and was cutting off slices of my willy. She also had a whip that she was dipping into green paint and was whipping me with while people were coming into the club and buying their tickets. We got hustled off when we did that, it got a bit too much for the management.
We gave a lot of probably quite tedious Neo-Naturist performances where the audience would be shouting, ‘Get them on! Get them on!’ We did poetry, very bad gymnastics, maypole dancing and all the girls gave birth on stage in puddles of blood. On nights when we weren’t doing Neo-Naturist performances we went clubbing at places with free entry. I used to go to the Taboo nightclub in a black suit with skin-tight Lycra trousers and a jacket two sizes too small – so it was very tight – and a naff shirt and tie. I put sunburn-coloured make-up on my face and left white rings round my eyes, like ski goggle marks. I wore steel-capped shoes and big sunglasses. And I had a tail. It was a stiff, furry dog’s tail, like one of those that hits you round the leg. I hooked it on the back of my belt and there was a hole in the back of my trousers where it poked out. That year there was a photo of me wearing that outfit in Harpers and Queen for an article called ‘English Eccentrics’. In the article I describe myself as poet, film-maker and artist. Pretentious twit! I don’t think the word transvestite even cropped up because that was still very much a quiet thing.
‘Famous Five’: Jen and Grayson off to Ardnamurchan
I separated my transvestism from my social life because I was into male fashions at the time. Claire was something I did in the daytime on my own, though Claire was blossoming because I felt stable and London seemed to be a reasonably tolerant society, so she kept coming out of the woodwork. I found a stall at Brixton market that sold oversized women’s shoes and bought a pair of sling-back sandals. I dressed up and trolled to Oxford Street in the daytime, and occasionally to an opening, wearing a hippy dress that I liked very much, a floaty frock from the late seventies. By then my hair was long, thick and curly. I thought I looked like an off-duty nurse or an Avon lady and took photographs of myself in the photo booth at Euston station. I wou
ld skulk down to the West End on my own, travelling by tube dressed up, despite the underground having the most unflattering lighting and being trapped in a carriage with anybody who might hassle me. If I had been confident about dressing as a woman, people would have treated me like a woman but because I was uncomfortable and inexperienced within myself, people didn’t know how to deal with me. In my early twenties I was not wholly accepting of myself. I was nervous and still ashamed of cross-dressing; it would be a long time before I would be able fully to embrace my sexuality and publicly celebrate Claire.
Claire in a photo-booth at Euston station, 1983
22
POTTERY AND NIGHTCLUBS AREN’T EASY BEDFELLOWS
MY FIRST PROPER pottery lesson was in September 1983. Fiona went to pottery evening classes at the Central Institute. She said, ‘The teacher’s really nice. You should come along, Grayson.’
I wanted to be an artist, to get a gallery and an exhibition. I had been working hard at making small sculptures on our kitchen table, building pieces from junk I’d found on the pavements or in skips around the squat. I built Baba Yaga’s hut – Baba Yaga was a witch in a Russian fairy tale that ate children, flew about in a pestle and mortar, and lived in a hut balanced on chicken legs. I bought a chicken, hacked its feet off, dried them in the oven, then varnished them. I made the hut to fit the chicken’s feet, which set the scale, then we ate the chicken. I also made a tower out of tiny flints stuck together with plaster and Polyfilla. Every day I was working intensely on the elaborate collages in my sketchbook for which I had a colossal collection of encyclopaedias, textbooks and old World War One tomes I’d accrued from jumble sales. I spent hours pouring over and cutting up these books while a record played in the background. The collages’ obsessive detail, busyness and horror vacui set the tone for the work I make now: even if it is a pot that doesn’t have an image on it, it has to have a texture; it has to have marbling or crackle. I find it difficult to leave empty space, my instinct is to cover up emptiness and always elaborate, to my detriment sometimes. It’s part of my psychological make-up that I’m a detail freak.
