On first hearing that Grayson Perry and his alter ego Claire, UK potter and now infamous transvestite had won the controversial 2003 Turner Prize, there was no doubt that ceramic artist/makers across the globe initially cheered. Finally, finally craft and art were holding hands in public, no longer frightened to admit to their long standing relationship as Perry himself put it.
43 year old Grayson is the package deal. A media frenzy is inevitable when the winner accepts his award in a beautifully tailored lilac silk party frock. His naïve images of child abuse illustrated on simple ceramic pots are the product of a distinctly unhappy childhood laid bare. Grayson says 'this is who I am' now deal with it.
Perry has made no secret of his own self-confessed perversions. His proclivity for frocking up is not as contrived as it may first appear. It stretches back into his difficult and dark adolescence that has clearly left its scars. In many respects 'Claire' is the happier product of what was without doubt a bleak start in life. Perry has describes dressing as a woman as 'the crack cocaine of femininity' beginning as a way of expressing emotions he couldn't as a boy. For someone seemingly so candid, the details are in fact quite sketchy. His mother left his father and married the milkman who turned out to be a brutal figure. After many years of therapy Perry's relationship with his mother remains broken beyond repair. He cites art as having rescued him from his upbringing.
Perhaps it's not about a ceramicist winning a major award. It's about an outsider artist working his way in. There is no doubt that the craftsmanship is lacking, they are little more that hand built coil earthenware pots and without the surface decoration are thoroughly unremarkable as objects. But there is also no doubt that it is the surface is the point. He sets out to challenge and subvert. He irritates and itches on many levels. He makes pots, he draws on them, he tells stories; he wears a frock and in doing so becomes his art. He learned about ceramics through evening classes, he dabbles in embroidery, photography, collage. It's not the medium - how wonderful it would be if a perfectly thrown pot could be seen as perverse in this age of mass production - but the message that captured the imagination of the Turner jury.
It is confronting to look at a plate, a bowl a vase - at any work that is at once highly personal, ultra political and overloaded with raw and often ugly imagery. It's not how we like our decorative art, that's for sure. We were happy for Brueghel and Goya to do it but we never had to consider using their work as a vase.
The 2003 Turner Prize when looked as at a whole does not seem like such an unusual place to find Perry's work. The Chapmans (brothers Dinos and Jake) were at it again revisiting their now famous polychrome sculpture 'Great Deeds Amongst the Dead' that brought one of Goya's more grotesque etchings to life. They must have had fun pushing the imagery even further adding maggots, critters and general rot to the scene. Right next to all this death, sex made a show if it. Two inflatable dolls posed 'ready and willing' looked cheap and plastic but were in fact cast in bronze.
Willie Doherty's video installation 'Re Run' was sterile in comparison but equally black. On one screen a man runs towards something, on another he runs away.
Anya Gallows bronze tree was festooned with shiny red real apples that slowly rotted to a cidery stench over the course of the two month show as did her 1,600 red gerberas pressed lovingly behind glass on the wall.
Nihilism, decay, sadness and pessimism pervaded the Turner and perhaps this is ultimately why Perry, the saddest, most bitter of the lot, walked away with the £20,000 plum. His work is angry (the vase 'I Was An Angry Working Class Man'), bitter (the pot 'We've Found The Body of Your Child') and funny (the quite lovely vase illustrated with 'Boring Cool People').
Perry's imagery is quite cosy next to the likes of the Chapmans. Over-sexualised boys and girls wield knives, machine guns and bad attitudes amidst scrawled parental insults and missives of doom. The difference being that unlike the Chapmans who always seem to remain aloof and impervious to the grotesque imagery (like boys watching R rated movies and not quite getting it).
Perry gets right inside the guts of it .He coils his big fat swollen ugly pots and draws his stories on to them. He accepted his award not glammed up like the Boring Cool People but in a party frock fit for a demented little girl. He accepted his award, not as a fine ceramicist, not as a member of the Brit Cool art elite, but defying any categorisation other than his own: as a great transvestite potter from Essex .
