Playing to the Gallery

by Grayson Perry

  And the outrageous gestures of the past become merchandise quite quickly. In 1960 Yves Klein, the French conceptual artist, did one of his most-famous performances – which was outrageous at the time – called Anthropométries, where he had these nude models and he painted them blue, with his famous blue paint, and he printed them on to canvasses to make artworks. This was quite a thing at the time. Now, if you go on to the internet and you look up loveisartkit.com, you can buy a kit which includes body paint and canvas and you, according to the strapline on the website, can make art while you make love.

  So the radical art of the 1960s has become a messy-play lifestyle accessory for the Fifty Shades of Grey generation.

  Maybe the biggest change in the past thirty years is that contemporary art is now huge. At the last count there were 220 art biennales around the world.

  My nickname for the Tate Modern is the cult entertainment megastore. This comes from a shop that sells comics and film merchandise. The shop is called Forbidden Planet and underneath its sign it describes itself as ‘the cult entertainment megastore’. This seems an oxymoron to me. If something is cult I assume it only appeals to a few cognoscenti, like art used to. How could it support a megastore? Now, when I go to art galleries, I’m often very aware of their brand identities. I can feel like I’m having a branded aesthetic moment.

  Some diehard avant-gardists get upset by how precious and commoditized previously countercultural throwaway art has become. In 1996 serial boundary trampler Brian Eno, the musician, was upset with the way these radical works had become normalized. So when he saw Duchamp’s famous fountain, the urinal, on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York he rigged himself up with a device involving plastic tubing and a little bag of urine and he urinated through a small gap in the display case and let the urine flow into Duchamp’s fountain/urinal. Afterwards, when he was interviewed about it, he said, ‘Since decommodification was one of the buzz words of the day, I described my action as re-commode-ification.

  Whenever I hear artists moaning about the commodification of the art world and the way that art has just become this money-generating thing, I always think of this great sketch by the comedian Bill Hicks where he talks about marketing and he says, ‘Anybody here from marketing or advertising?’ And when they put their hands up, he goes, ‘You, die! Kill yourself now! Suck on a tailpipe! You are the Devil’s spawn! You spread evil in the world!’ And then he voices out what their reaction might be and he goes, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s that Bill. He’s going for that anti-marketing market. That’s a great market, that is.’ And then he goes, ‘No, no, that’s not what I mean!’ And then they go, ‘Oh, now he’s going for the righteous-indignation dollar. That’s a good dollar. They’re young, they’re hip. They’ve got a lot of free income.’

  So outrage – and it’s a perfect illustration of what happens – outrage has become domesticated. And of course many of these old avant-garde people bemoan this because they remember the chilly old days when they were running around in the nude covered in offal in some freezing warehouse, and now the Tate Modern has a special place to do performance art. They call it ‘The Tanks’. Someone, rather cuttingly I thought, described it as a petting zoo for performance artists.

  Keith Haring, the New York artist – sadly dead – he called this state of kind-of-giving-in-but-gently ‘subversive compliance’. I think collectors often want to be anointed, the way Peggy Guggenheim said she was by Jackson Pollock urinating in her fireplace. But he didn’t wee on the carpet.

  Today, most of the world is pretty unshockable, and the art world is the same. So detached irony – this is a sad moment – has become the default mode of our time in the art world. And that can be problematic.

  Here’s a quote from the musician Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl. I think it’s great. It really describes the problem of irony. She says, ‘It is difficult for people in the arts to be entirely sincere about things without looking like they have not thought about it properly. The problem with irony is that it assumes the position of being the end result, from having looked at it from both sides and having a very sophisticated take on everything. So the danger of eschewing irony is that you look as though you’ve not thought hard enough about it and that you’re being a bit simplistic.’ You see what I mean? That is the double bind you get yourself into when everything is ironic.

  I have to protect myself against this because it’s fine being terribly cynical and ironic when I’m out in the evening and I’m with my mates, but when I want to look at art, I want to have a sincere one-to-one experience with it because I am a serious artist. I’ve dedicated my life to it. So I go to exhibitions in the morning on my own when I can go, ‘Hmm,’ and maybe have a little bit of a moment. I have to protect my tender parts from that wicked irony.

  Perhaps the most shocking tactic that’s left to artists these days is sincerity. And the shocks in the work are not formal but political or social.

  I suspect that’s why a lot of artists like politics – because it is real, it’s serious, and they want to borrow that power because they know that we’re not going to laugh at big, serious issues. And the arguments that you hear now in bars between artists, they’re not going to be about abstract expressionists versus surrealists, they’re not going to be about video installationists versus giant photo peddlers. No, no, no. They’re going to be between worthy activists and ironic market sell-outs.

  In many ways, the great thing about being an artist is that you make your own career and so you choose what you want to do. It might be to make money. It might be to make a political point. It might be to be a challenging philosopher. There are myriad roles for the artist, not just one.

  It was dangerous when art became synonymous with shock, which it did for a while in the 1990s. Then there was so much art that was seen as shocking that it became what people looked for when they went to an art show, when in fact art can be lots of different things. It can (between you and me) be beautiful.

  I asked Cristina Ruiz of the Art Newspaper where she thought the cutting edge was. She said she had asked veteran curator Germano Celant this very same question at the Venice Biennale.

  Celant said that, for him, art has to be dealing with some kind of crisis or sustained battle to be truly cutting edge. This could be anything ranging from an actual war to Aids (New York in the 1980s) or the battle for freedom of speech or equality (feminism, civil rights, and so on). He said that artists like Ai Weiwei and Shirin Neshat used to be cutting edge but aren’t any longer because ‘they have the power of the West behind them’.

  There is definitely a feeling in the art world that being a Westerner might be a bit of a handicap to credibility in the fashion for politically charged productions. Modern-art histories from Africa, South America and Asia are enthusiastically being introduced to us. Whether we are equipped to appreciate them is another matter: they are being made by people with different histories, traditions and values, and what looks formally familiar to us may mean something completely different in their culture.

  But this idea of being real – of having integrity, sincerity, authenticity – these are qualities that all artists need to make their work; and they should protect them.

  Of course, these qualities are also very, very valuable in the marketplace. Boho lefty arty-fartyness still has a high currency in the urban ecology. I have watched it happen several times in different areas. Artists are like the shock troops of gentrification. We march in. We’re the first people to go, ‘We like this old warehouse, yeah, we need a cheap studio.’ Artists move into the cheap housing and the cheap spaces and they do their work and they’re quite cool and a little bit of a buzz starts up. And then maybe a little café opens up and people start saying, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting, that area where those artists hang out. I’m going to go down there.’ And maybe some designers open up a little boutique and bask in the bohemian glow, and rents begin to rise and suddenly, before you know it, the dead hand of the developer is not
icing. And then bang goes the area.

  Developers should pay artists to live somewhere for ten years rent-free. We are a very precious commodity. Or society should ensure that there is a plentiful number of cheap places for people, including artists, to live and work.

  Now this process of gentrification can come about in some interesting ways. There’s a very wealthy mining magnate in Brazil called Bernardo Paz who has built up a vast 5,000-acre sculpture park called Inhotim – in the Brazilian jungle. He’s asked artists to put big, ambitious works that are often too large for conventional institutions in this dramatic landscape. He’s now building hotels, so rich tourists and guests can come and see these works. This is gentrification on steroids. He’s avoided that awkward, urban-decay-hipster part of the cycle. He’s gone straight from jungle to gentrification.

  Another related trend is the re-privatization of the art world. Broadcaster Philip Dodd recently irked an audience by suggesting that the commercial mega-brand gallery White Cube was more important globally than Tate Britain. Public art institutions don’t have as much money and often depend on individual or corporate sponsorship or financial support from commercial galleries. These connections can lead to a tangled web of conflicted interests.

  In the ‘experience economy’ art helps big business ‘render authenticity’. In return for big-buck sponsorship, corporations want a little of the commodified discontent of the art, the dangerous glamour of creative geniuses, to feed into their identity in the marketplace. When we talk of character and identity I often think we are talking of things that don’t work or don’t fit. Maybe companies want a veneer of intuitive, irrational, useless art to glue on their ruthlessly efficient business model.

  As Andy Warhol put it, ‘Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura”.’

  A public relations man with the American company Mobil Oil put it more aggressively: ‘These programmes make us sufficiently acceptable so that when important issues are at stake, we can afford to be brutal.’ That the company can be brutal towards artists and museums became evident in 1984 when it threatened the Tate Gallery, which it was sponsoring, with court action because it had put on an exhibition of works by the New York artist Hans Haacke, some of which take a critical view of Mobil Oil’s corporate policies.

  Fear of offending the sponsor can lead to institutions and even artists practising self-censorship.

  Artist Nam June Paik said, ‘Every artist should bite the hand that feeds him … but not too hard.’

  Nam June Paik was a video-art pioneer. And another place where we find the cutting edge and innovation is technology. Painting was revolutionized in 1841 with John G. Rand’s invention of the paint tube. Suddenly painting was more accessible and could be done away from the studio, where previously pigments and oils had to be laboriously ground and mixed. Painting in fresh air – that was a revolution.

  Around the same time photography was mounting a philosophical challenge to painting. What is art now that photography can do it? These two developments played a big part in kicking off Impressionism and the whole subsequent questioning of what art was – or is.

  Despite being a poster boy of the handmade, like many contemporary artists my default mode of working is with ‘new media’. I have embraced digital technology. I draw on Photoshop and my tapestries are woven in a matter of hours on computer-controlled looms. The technology enables me to design and make things I never would have attempted before.

  But now we tend to be using technologies invented by other people. In the past artists were the real innovators of technology. And often they had quite prophetic interventions. If you go back to 1980 – that’s a long time ago in computer land – there were two artists called Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and they created a work called Hole in Space. They set up a video screen in Lincoln Center in New York and another video screen in Century City in Los Angeles with a live satellite link between them so that people could see and talk to each other in the other location. It was an unannounced event and the public’s reaction was ecstatic and spontaneous – you can see it if you put ‘hole in space’ into YouTube – they’re incredibly enthusiastic about it. The artists called it a public communication sculpture. In a way everyone involved was witnessing the grandmother of Skype!

  Of course the danger of using hi-tech in art is that nothing dates like the future. I call these ‘eight-track moments’. If a work depends too much on the novelty of technique then when the technology becomes commonplace the images are left naked. I find myself looking at the complex photo pieces of Gilbert and George very differently after the ubiquity of Photoshop.

  I hear museums sometimes have stores full of redundant technology like video recorders, TVs and projectors, to use when 1980s video monitors go phut and the pieces can’t be viewed any more. Technology moves in unpredictable ways. Dan Flavin, the American artist who made works using light and fluorescent tubes that he just bought from the hardware store – they have to hand-make some of those tubes now.

  So art now follows technology rather than leading it; art is struggling to keep up. In many ways technology is more cutting edge than art. Of course there are artists that work digitally in a very interesting way. Two artists, British artists – Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead – make thought-provoking, lyrical and often hilarious interventions and adaptations of the material flooding around the web. But I think they know they can’t compete for impact with the majesty of Google Earth or the thrust and parry of Twitter.

  The web does have the alarming potential to realize Joseph Beuys’s prophecy that everyone is an artist. This could spell the end of art as we know it when everyone becomes a producer and we all drown in a sea of mediocrity made up of billions of minutely niched micro-channels. The arbiters of taste melt away.

  But in some ways this is an endorsement of art, in that the approach of the artist is more and more relevant in the age of creative capital. Art will change but there will always be artists. But perhaps the culture that changes our lives and shocks us will not be self-contained within the contemporary art world.

  The culture that will have a revolutionary, disruptive effect on all our lives – that will change how we think and operate in the world – is not happening to a large extent, and certainly not exclusively, in contemporary art. It is probably happening in multiple locations, in some teenage bedroom in South Korea or some games designers’ brainstorming session in California. Because if Michelangelo was around today, he wouldn’t be painting ceilings. He’d be making CGI movies or developing 3D printing.

  But I was thinking about what the ism of today would be, if this twentieth-century parade of modernism was in some ways the age of manifestos, with many of these art movements figuratively nailing their manifesto to the door of the art gallery. Perhaps the twenty-first century is the age of pluralism. We haven’t said, ‘It’s going to be all about dreams now,’ or ‘It’s all going to be about splodgy paint.’

  And then there’s another ism that crops up a lot in the art world today, and that is globalism, because the art world now is a series of art worlds all over the globe, lots of different countries, lots of emerging world scenes. Or of course one of the big, dominant, squatting, toad-like things over the whole art world is commercialism. That’s a very powerful art movement that’s going on. And then there’s always that good old favourite, that one that always has enormous power: nepotism.

  I don’t believe there is an avant-garde any more. There are just multiple sites all over the world at different levels, in different places, using different media for experimentation, and we live in this globalized, pluralistic art world with a lot of money sloshing around in it, and it’s as varied as we are. Most of it is rubbish, but that was ever thus, and some of it is absolutely amazing.

  But if we are at the final state of art then I’d like to end on a positive note and quote the philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto. He said, ‘If the age of manifestos had a political parallel in ethnic cleansing, t
hen in the age of pluralism we have a model of tolerant multi-culturalism.’

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present was a harbinger for a political thing to come?

  Some people may find it surprising, discordant even, that I end this chapter full of teasing with such a sincere, nay even earnest, quote, an anathema surely for any self-respecting British cynic. I feel this is a good point to revisit the question fired at me a few moments after winning the Turner Prize: ‘Are you a loveable character or are you a serious artist?’ Humour and mischief are a huge part of my life but to stick at being an artist for decades, through thick and thin, needs considerably more motivation than just having a laugh. It is these more solemn and tender sensibilities that I wish to speak of in the next chapter.

  I Found Myself in the Art World

  How do you become a contemporary artist?

  THE BASIC QUESTION I WANT TO ASK IS, HOW does someone become a contemporary artist? I could answer, ‘Well, you just say you are one and start doing something,’ but I think it’s more complex than that. I’m going to focus on the experience of becoming an artist and of ‘finding myself’ in the psychological sense, that of self-realization. And also, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I found myself in this strange and often wonderful place, ‘the art world’, and that’s the other meaning of this chapter title.

  People like the idea that artists are somehow mythological creatures that spring fully formed from the womb, genetically gifted and filled with an urge that’s there from birth. Another view is the one of Picasso, that every child is an artist. I take from this the idea that a child has an unselfconscious joy in creativity that is often lost as we get older. We’re playing and painting and making things without a thought in the world and then as we get older we become aware of art history and that what we’re doing might not be very good and so making things becomes harder and harder and harder.