GRAYSON PERRY -
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL - WENDY JONES
I don't have any particular interest in Grayson Perry's art nor do I have any particular interest in unleashing my inner transvestite. No, my interest in Perry is in where he's from, that being the swampland of early British punk rock and his forays into anarcho sub-cultures.
There's something very much of the Billy Childish method of confessional writing in the first half of Perry's biography where his honesty and frankness is enough to make you almost blush but at the same time to make you really feel for him. Childhood is never easy no matter what you're born into which for Perry is a working class household in Chelmsford in Essex where family life is rudely interrupted by the arrival of the local milkman and an affair with his mother, leading to divorce and half-brothers and sisters. From the turmoil of family relations Perry retreats into an imaginary world of teddy bears, Airfix models and a penchant for dressing up in women's clothes. It's a fertile breeding ground for being the archetypal cuckoo in the nest and in his own words a 'loner-weirdo on the periphery.'
It's the advent of punk rock that opens up an entrance point to allow him free expression in public, it being the glorious amateurishness of punk that appeals to him. So, come 1977 he's ripped the sleeves off of a grey school shirt and stencilled the word 'Hate' all over it. He's bought himself some plastic sandals, covered his school blazer in badges and put vaseline in his hair but to top it all he's found a huge, very brutal-looking horse collar that he takes to wearing round his neck. He then becomes an ardent and enthusiastic pogo-dancer at all the local punk gigs with such bands as the Vibrators, Boomtown Rats, Crispy Ambulance, The Damned, Bethnal and Fruit-Eating Bears blessing Chelmsford with their appearance.
After completing an art foundation course he moves to Portsmouth to study for a degree and it's here that his artistic expression comes into play, instigated not so much by his tutors but by the two new girl friends he meets. At a time when being 'cool' was becoming the new aesthetic, Perry learns to revel in being utterly uncool in a very postmodern way, to kick against the pricks and to embrace his transvestism.
During a summer break he heads off to London and stays at a squat behind Warren Street tube station where pre-fame Boy George and Marilyn also reside and it's here that he realises he's no more than a yokel in bohemia. Moreover, he also realises that art isn't an activity that you do but something you are and live.
After graduating he once again heads off to London to take part in a performance art project put on by the Neo-Naturists that essentially involves a lot of nude body painting. Such is the success of the project that it becomes obvious to Perry that rather than Portsmouth, London is the place to be so subsequently moves there to live permanently. More Neo-Naturist performances follow at such venues as the Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square and interestingly at the Centro Iberico on Harrow Road, an old abandoned school taken over and squatted by Spanish anarchists where gigs were being put on under the umbrella of the anarcho punk crew who had been running the Crass-funded Autonomy Centre in Wapping.
When it comes to the world of art, the Neo-Naturists in the scheme of things were a blip, an aberration, though their sub-cult status is legendary if not near-mythical. Rather than being outstanding, their performance art was outlandish, provoking violent reaction at some venues, ejection from the premises at others, and even managing to stun the anarchists at the Centro Iberico into silence.
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl is wholly concerned with Perry's life leading up to him becoming an artist in his own right and his winning of the Turner Prize, and it's for this reason that it's so endearing. It cuts off and comes to an almost abrupt end just as Perry creates his first ever plate of the kind that was going to launch him on the path to becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the modern day art world.
Placing the accent upon Perry's childhood and his past influences reveal something of where he is coming from and the kind of detail anyone aware of Perry and his alter-ego Claire might very well be curious about. At the same time, by casting a light upon his appreciation of punk rock and his adventures in London's squat communities it also reveals in the same way it did to many other people how punk rock irrecoverably ruined Perry's life forever - but in a good way.
John Serpico
