Weird alleyways of culture

ART is not just about painting and sculpture. Grayson Perry, an artist best known for his pots though he now spends less than half his time with his hands in clay, drives home the point with conceptually sophisticated works that include ceramic vases, tapestries and prints. In “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman”, a thought-provoking exhibition at the British Museum that will run from October 6th until February 9th 2012, Mr Perry is displaying 30 of his own works alongside 170 objects from the museum’s collection.

Mr Perry sees the British Museum as a “multi-faith cathedral” to which thousands of people make pilgrimage every year. At the centre of his show is a coffin in the shape of a ship topped with a flint hand axe. He made the work in rusted cast iron, a marked contrast to the shiny metallic surfaces that dominate the art market. “Maybe my rust is a reaction against that glossy conceptualism,” suggests Mr Perry, who despairs of generic international-style art and enjoys being thought of as “an interesting cult find”. He feels particularly at home in a museum that celebrates “all the weird little alleyways” that culture has taken.

The show includes a seven-metre tapestry called “Map of Truths and Beliefs” (a detail is illustrated above). The tapestry shows the incongruous places to which people make pilgrimages in the 21st century: from Mecca, Stonehenge and Auschwitz to Davos and Wembley. Maps are very male, says Mr Perry, and more emotional than people think. “Men”, he explains, “rationalise their love of aesthetic things under the guise of function.”

According to Mr Perry, craft is “stuff that you can learn” whereas art is about “self-realisation”. He believes that digital technology will save craftsmanship because it separates the creative process from the drudgery of producing the work. “Map of Truths and Beliefs,” like his other tapestries, was drawn by hand then scanned into a computer where the artist refined the colours. It was then woven on a huge computerised loom.

The tapestry is “a vastly professional piece of outsider art”, says Mr Perry. Outsider art is the name given to work made in places such as asylums and prisons by artists who have not been to art school. Indeed, the exhibition evokes this idiosyncratic genre by presenting a sort of fantasy civilisation in which Mr Perry’s childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles, is heralded as a god. This “transitional object”, he says, helped him survive a harrowing upbringing: “All gods are like cuddly toys insofar as they are inanimate things onto which people project their ideas.”

Many of the objects selected by Mr Perry from the museum’s storage vaults are related to worship and magic and sex. Small god-like figures and fetishes abound: an ancient Mesopotamian clay model of a naked couple in “sacred marriage”; an 18th-century Russian “money devil”; and an African mud and clay sculpture in the shape of a bison, which forensic testing has found is filled with blood. Even odder are the 19th-century coins that were re-engraved by anonymous craftsmen to change the sex of Queen Victoria (Mr Perry calls them “drag kings”).

Mr Perry’s art relies heavily on drawing, whether he is marking the surface of a vase or making a print. He also uses a lot of words, arguing that they are “the most potent conveyor of ideas”. Although often likened to political satirists such as William Hogarth or Honoré Daumier, Mr Perry sees his satire as incidental: “Politics can be an obsessive thing and I’m not obsessed.” He does however admit to fixations with class, sexuality and other social issues.

In the museum’s gift shop, many of the objects for sale—pendants, key chains, mugs, tote bags, tapestry kits and a silk scarf depicting the artist’s personal map of the museum—were designed by Mr Perry. “The gift shop is an inherent part of all pilgrimage,” he explains. In medieval times hawkers would sell lead-alloy badges to travellers and the exhibition, faithful to this tradition, contains many such badges.

For the opening of the show Mr Perry, one of Britain’s best-known transvestites, plans to wear a pink satin blouse with red leather lederhosen. 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 admits. At a time when much contemporary art has a taste of cardboard about it, it is encouraging to see a true original. But Mr Perry suggests that the minute you try to be original you are probably going to fail. “Those things happen out of the corner of your eye”, he says, “when you are striving for something else.”