I’ve taken an interest in the work of the British ceramicist Grayson Perry for some years now, visiting several of his exhibitions and (most recently) watching his series of TV programmes in which he tries to create rites of passage with a contemporary relevance. He is invariably imaginative in his interpretation of his subject-matter, and is an excellent communicator about his art, avoiding the kind of verbiage in which art is often wrapped these days. Watching the third of his series about rites of passage (on this occasion, coming of age) recently I was struck by a thoroughly heretical question. Is Perry actually a better anthropologist than he is an artist? This might strike you as an outrageously heretical question to ask of a winner of the Turner Prize but I ask it in all seriousness.
What really engages me in Perry’s work is actually the penetrating nature of his questions about society, and the skill with which he elicits meaningful information from his respondents, trying to answer these. He has also an impressive ability to relate specific actions or comments from the people he is observing to terms that are actually theoretically interesting and useful–such as “social class” or “identity”. I am constantly impressed by his ability to combine empathy for the people with whom he deals with the objectivity necessary to evaluate what they tell him. Every film I have seen about Perry engaged in the process of gathering information for one of his projects could be used with benefit as a part of the training programme of a bunch of anthropology graduate students. This is how you do field-work.
The finished product of each of his projects also could be read as an academic article, only with fewer words and more illustrations than might be usual in scholarly journals. We don’t get footnotes either. As a former university social scientist whose research methods leaned heavily towards the classic approach of the founding fathers of British social anthropology, and had little to do with the analysis of quantitative date in the American manner, I find myself completely at home in Perry’s world.
The down-side of my assessment, however, is that I wonder just how good an artist he is. No: seriously! As a ceramicist he is often rather unadventurous in his work. The same old pot crops up again and again, competent but technically uninteresting. My friend Roger Lewis puts Perry in the shade every time with his adventurous approach to his art and the sheer blinding skill with which he handles material, so I do have a point of comparison here. What really gets me going is the way in which, when it comes down to making stuff, Perry farms out the hard work to specialists who work up his ideas from his sketches. Those wonderful tapestries produced for The Vanity of Small Differences were all woven on computer-controlled looms in Belgium. The amulets he delivered at the end of his “coming of age” programme were all cast for him. Often as I am in awe of his imagination and impressed by his intelligence, I am not often astonished by him as an artist.*
In one of the chapters of Perry’s book based on his Reith Lectures (Playing to the Gallery) he has some very acid remarks to make about “amateur” artists. (In his book that means you have not studied full-time at art school.) Should I be similarly incensed by “amateur anthropologists”? I don’t feel inclined to do so. I’ll go on enjoying his projects I’m sure, despite the fact that he is dabbling in my professional area as an amateur. I’ll tell you what, though, Grayson. In return I think that you should recognise that the cap fits, and take back your comments about the indispensability of an art-school training. I’ll meet you half way.
* Was Perry the object of David Hockney’s gibe about his own work being made “by hand”? Could well have been.