Playing to the Gallery

by Grayson Perry

  (On the other hand, today there can be a rejection of the creation of many works of art that are not produced by the artist’s hand. But the alternative is that things which are handmade could become overly fetishized. I’m sometimes held up as a poster boy of the handmade but I don’t want to be that person: we’re in a new world now and people can get too hung up on the idea of authenticity or artisanal uniqueness, and the idea that they’re important ways to judge how good a work of art is.)

  Unlike pop art that aped commercial products with relatively humble art materials, Koons and co. replicate the expensive materials and highly crafted finishes of luxury goods. I find myself judging one of his metal ‘inflatable’ sculptures like I would a car. Ironically many of the new mega-rich collectors treat buying art in much the same way as buying a Ferrari or a handbag. Banks recognize the solid asset group that art is. They even have a little space put aside for it in their vaults. They will happily look after your silver, wine, art or gold; they have an acronym for it: SWAG.

  It’s easy to get swept up in the awe of scale and perfection of some contemporary art. And all this leads us back to the question of quality and what the criteria are by which we judge art made today. If an artist exhibits something indistinguishable from a manga figurine, do we judge it as art or product? I often play this game in an art gallery: which artwork would I take home with me? But is that a way of judging art, or is that just fantasy shopping?

  Another type of art, also increasingly prevalent since the mid-1990s, which throws up even more questions as to how it should be assessed, is a type clunkily called ‘relational aesthetics’ or ‘participatory art’. It’s very difficult to actually judge it on terms of quality. To many people it wouldn’t even seem like art at all. It might be some blind people in military uniform soliciting the crowd for sex. It might – these are real artworks – be illegal immigrants selling knock-off handbags in a gallery. Or it might be a pop-up Thai café. Maybe one of the best-known artworks of this kind is Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, where he restaged in 2001 the famous 1984 dispute, the miners’ dispute, using people from civil-war recreationists, the Sealed Knot.

  The whole idea of ‘quality’ seems to be about a contested word now, as if you’re buying into the language of the elite by saying that something’s very good. One of the stars of participatory art is Thomas Hirschhorn, whose sprawling work Gramsci Monument involved building a temporary library, workshop stage and lounge made of plywood in a Bronx housing project in the summer of 2013. He says, ‘Quality-No! Energy-Yes!’

  Which makes me wonder, whose energy are we talking about? My experience of audience participation, as I wrote about earlier, is that it’s unreliable at best. And if quality smacks of elitism, what form of art should the proles have? And if you make a series of identical artworks that are churned out by a technical process, hopefully they’ll all be of as high a quality as each other, won’t they?

  If these artists reject aesthetic judgement as buying into the system, by what criteria should we tell if they’re good despite being energetic? You might say, ‘Oh, it’s dull!’ And they might say, ‘Oh, you’re just not understanding it with the right terms.’ Quite a lot of these works are politicized. So are they as good as existing government arts policies or social work? Do we judge them on how ethical they are?

  But then again I might as well say, what do I judge them against? Do I judge them against government policy? Do I judge them against reality TV, which does participation very well? For the art world, because so much of this art deliberately resists being commodified, it lacks the empirical validation of the market. It therefore depends more than ever on the validation of critics and institutions, who also often house and pay for these projects. And because contemporary art is being made now, most of it is rubbish. Without the market, much contemporary art is really left with popularity for validation. And, of course, we know (don’t we?) what popularity leads to, because Democracy Has Bad Taste.

  What I’ve attempted to explain is how the art that we see in museums and in galleries around the world ends up there, and how it ends up being seen as good. The art world can slightly frighten me because I’m quite middlebrow. The idea of good taste works within a tribe. The art-world tribe has its own set of values that aren’t necessarily the same values as a more democratic, wider audience. But I think we come to art somehow accepting the system that got the art into the museum, or the gallery, or wherever. If the public chose the artwork that was in art galleries, would it be the same?

  As Alan Bennett said when he was a trustee of the National Gallery, they should put a big sign up outside saying, ‘You don’t have to like it all.’

  Beating the Bounds

  What counts as art? Although we live in an era when anything can be art, not everything qualifies.

  A DESIRE TO MAKE THINGS AND EXPRESS ONESELF can lead people to end up working in this strange world of contemporary art. But once you’re here, what are you going to make? Asking the question ‘What is art?’ in the art world is to risk eye-rolling and even hostility from the intellectually invested sections of the art world.

  The very idea of there being boundaries is probably an anathema to many in the art world, who like to think that to be an artist is to have ultimate freedom. The artists of the past were locked into their time in history. Now we are in a time of post-historical art, anything can be art but not everything is art. In an age without boundaries I am more fascinated than ever by their possibility.

  Dictionaries of art and artists often omit definitions of ‘art’ and ‘artist’. I’m fairly sure I’m an artist and what I do is art but there are a lot of people and activities in my world that I don’t feel so comfortable defining as such. I feel that often people want their practice to be defined as art because of the status (and often resultant economic benefit) that comes with that definition.

  So to say that some things can’t be art is quite a task. These days the boundaries are forever shifting. We’re in a post-historical state of art; we’re in a state where anything goes. But there are still boundaries about what can and cannot be art; the limits are just softer and fuzzier. I don’t think these boundaries are formal – I truly believe anything can be art, I’m quite happy to engage with that intellectual idea. I think the boundaries now are sociological, tribal, philosophical and maybe even financial.

  I was in a taxi going through west London once and at a particular junction the driver remarked that there had once been a terrible murder on that spot. The reason he knew that was because when he was learning ‘The Knowledge’ his instructor had given the class such highly charged snippets of information to associate with important reference points so as to aid their memories. Memory and understanding are not purely intellectual processes. They are also very much emotional.

  I introduce this idea of intellectual and emotional memory because there’s some dissonance between an intellectual and an emotional understanding of the boundaries of what art can be. Understanding a new development can happen pretty instantaneously; taking on board a big change at an emotional level might take years or even generations.

  I’ve called this chapter ‘Beating the Bounds’ after an ancient ritual that used to go on way back in Anglo-Saxon times, before the advent of accurate maps. When a parish wanted to make sure that everybody knew where the edge of their parish was, a group of old and young parishioners would walk the boundaries of the parish with a priest, to pass on the knowledge of where they lay. They would march round them in a very ceremonial way. And when they reached an important point or marker stone, they would beat the boys with a whip, to ensure they had a strong emotional memory of that exact location. Because that’s how we remember things. Our emotional remembering is very powerful.

  So I want to give you a few little stings of the whip, so that you might remember where the major boundary markers are as we trawl around the edge of the art world.

  (Of course there’s a subsidiary question that hangs in t
he air and I want you to hold this one in the back of your mind as we walk the bounds: why would someone want anything they’re doing to be considered art? I mean, there are quite a lot of reasons, the most obvious one being because they’re an artist! ‘It’s what I do!’ Or maybe they just want a good excuse to do something. There’s a lot of ‘I fancy doing that. Let’s call it art.’ And of course one of the strongest reasons why you’d want your activity to be called art is economic because there’s an awful lot of money – $66 billion in 2013 – sloshing through the art market. That’s quite a nice incentive to call what you do art.)

  Ask a young child what ‘art’ is and they would probably reply ‘drawing, painting and making sculptures’ (unless of course it is a particularly smart-ass middle-class child from north London who’d probably say ‘performance art’ or something like that). Intellectually I understand this is a very narrow definition of art but emotionally I am still very attached to a child’s idea of what art is. I grew up thinking that drawing, painting and making sculptures was art, and all the art I love is quite traditional. So even though I can intellectually engage and even appreciate some of the more expanding field of art, I still am more attached to the old thing.

  That is, art as a visual medium, usually made by the artist’s hand, which is a pleasure to make, to look at and to show others. For most of the history of art this would have been a good, if rough, starting point for answering the question.

  The Greeks didn’t have a word for ‘fine art’ as we understand it. The Romans were snobbish about what constituted the honourable (liberal) arts, like rhetoric or music, and the dishonourable (sordid) arts, where they put sculpture and painting because they involved a lot of mess and hard labour.

  The concept of ‘fine art’ is a fairly recent construct. We have put paintings on walls and made sculptures since prehistory but ring-fencing it as a special activity as we understand art (something having a privileged status that might be hanging in a museum or gallery) is relatively modern. The art historian Hans Belting thought that the idea of art as we understand it started around 1400.

  This idea of art trawled along and was refined and we really took it for granted – oh yeah, that’s art, that’s art – until modernism came along in the mid-to late-nineteeth century. People started questioning what was art, what’s this thing we’re doing? And it went through this long transition, this very self-conscious process where people, artists, started questioning the nature of art until, in the 1910s, along came Duchamp, who famously posited that anything could be art.

  But the traditional idea still lingers on. If you’re on Google Maps and you put in ‘object of interest: art gallery’, the symbol that shows you where the art galleries are is a little black painter’s palette.

  In 2000 a group of art experts voted Marcel Duchamp the most influential artist of the twentieth century. What did he mean by art? His idea of the ready-made – that just by choosing something, a urinal or a bottle-drying rack, one could denote them art at a stroke – exploded the possibilities for artists. Now, in order to tell if something is a work of art or not, all that we need to know is that someone says it is. This seems to me quite an arrogant assertion. It is all very well for Marcel to say something is art but I’m sure a lot of people have disagreed passionately with him – even his fellow artists. His definition is dictatorial. I think for his idea to really work, other people, a working quorum, if you like, had to agree with him. This took some time.

  When he decided that anything could be art he got a urinal and brought it into an art gallery. That we know about this is a freak of survival. The original urinal that he put into the independent art exhibition in New York in 1917 was destroyed soon after. It was lucky someone took a blurry photograph of it and that it was recorded, otherwise it would never have gone on to be this incredibly influential and important moment in art history. I find it quite arrogant, that idea of just pointing at something and saying, ‘That’s art.’ It’s a very intellectual idea of art somehow. And quite funny.

  But now, nearly 100 years later, his influence and its emphasis on art as an intellectual pursuit have prompted other debates around the definition of art. The street artist Banksy recently brought into play a curious twist on this Duchampian power. One of his works that he’d put on the side of a north London Poundland shop of a child worker sewing Union Jacks – that was his contribution to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations – was subsequently very carefully hacked off the wall and put up for auction. Banksy declared the work was no longer a Banksy now it had been taken off the wall. Banksy used his artistic licence to redefine an object as not being his art. I’d like to be able to take this further and have the power to declare things I don’t like as NOT being art. I’d love that power.

  I like it when the power of the artist to declare something a work of art is somehow challenged. A group of schoolboys visiting Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery in 2000 ate what appeared to be some sweets left on a shelf but which were in fact an artwork by an artist called Graham Fagen. But they were also sweets! The boys were right! You can’t deny that.

  The poet W. H. Auden liked heavy blankets when he was in bed. He liked a weighty bed. (He wouldn’t have liked duvets.) Once, he was in a house and he didn’t have enough blankets on his bed, so he took a painting off the wall, still in the frame, and laid it down on the bed. I love the idea that he took a painting and made it functional.

  Another way that art often stops being art a bit is when it becomes incredibly famous. If you go and see the Mona Lisa, it’s like seeing a celebrity. People just want to take their photograph in front of it. I can hardly see it as art. And of course the other thing that stops art almost seeming like art is when you just look at it and think, ‘Oh my God, that’s worth $250 million.’

  This idea that Duchamp put forward – that anything could be art that he decided was art – people engaged with it intellectually, but it took quite a long time for people to really get going with it as an idea. The first half of the twentieth century – all the isms: cubism, futurism, surrealism, abstract expressionism – seemed on the whole to concentrate on making formal and content innovations within traditional tangible media. The cubists may have exploded notions of representing space but they did it mainly with oil paintings. Art history was still mainly being thrashed out with brush on canvas fifty years later by the abstract expressionists. Artists being artists of course experimented wildly but it wasn’t until the 1960s when Duchamp’s idea really came to fruition, when it was taken up by the pop artists. In 1961 the artist Robert Rauschenberg was asked to paint a portrait of a gallerist called Iris Clert. And in response to this request, he just wrote a little telegram back to the person. He wrote, ‘THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO.’ And that was a work of art. But it’s not quite the same as Duchamp’s cool observer, because Rauschenberg claims the role of meaning maker for himself, the creator.

  With Andy Warhol, one of the most interesting artworks he did was his Brillo boxes. He made some plywood boxes exactly the same size and shape as Brillo boxes and he stencilled the sides with the pattern of the logo of Brillo, so they looked to all intents and purposes exactly the same. But they weren’t! They were art Brillo boxes. This was a moment when almost the whole idea of art collapsed; it was very tricky to tell the difference between the real Brillo box and the art Brillo box.

  There’s a nice little ironic twist to this story – the guy who designed the very attractive logo for the Brillo boxes was an abstract expressionist painter. So he played a part in the downfall of his own art movement in many ways.

  And since the 1960s, really, truly anything has been declared as an artwork. Piero Manzoni famously canned his own faeces and sold them by weight for the price of gold. He also made a piece called The Base of the World where he put a huge metal plinth in the middle of a field and turned it upside down, therefore rendering the entire globe as his artwork. Artists have made art of their own bodies and other people’s,
walking, sleeping, shooting themselves, getting sunburnt, the landscape, animals, light, film, video. Even pottery has been declared art.

  So art has become this incredibly baggy idea.

  When I think of the sort of bag that art might be, it’s one of those very cheap dustbin liners – the ones that, when you drag them out of the dustbin and you’re walking towards the front door, you’re praying that all the rubbish won’t spill out all over the hall carpet. That’s what kind of bag art is. It’s become this incredibly permeable, translucent, fuzzy bag.

  A good example of this fuzziness for me was when Loyalist terrorist Michael Stone charged into the Northern Ireland Parliament in Stormont carrying a viable explosive device. Luckily he was arrested and stopped from blowing himself up or whatever. In court he tried to downplay his actions by saying that he had not intended to endanger life, it was all a piece of performance art. I think it shows that art had become so associated with shock rather than beauty that it seemed a plausible defence for an act of terror.

  This is a relatively common tactic in recent years, where someone declares whatever they fancied doing anyway as art to somehow lend it kudos. This concept was brilliantly parodied (or at least I hope it was a parody) in 1998 by a group of Leeds art students. They got a £1,000 grant for putting on their degree show at the end of their term at art school. And when it came to the exhibition, theirs consisted of a series of holiday snaps of them on the Costa del Sol, frolicking on the beach, and some holiday souvenirs and the air tickets. And of course there was outrage and the papers got hold of it and it was front-page news: ‘Art students spend grant on holiday and call it art.’ I thought it was very funny. But then the real coup that these students pulled off was that they’d faked it. The money was still in the bank; the tan had come from a salon; the beach they were on was Skegness; the souvenirs had come from the charity shop and the tickets were fake. They brilliantly wrong-footed the media who held this common idea that if everything can be art, then art is this stupid mucking about, the idea that you can do something and then just call it art.