In a brand new four-part series for Channel 4, Grayson Perry will explore
the landmark events in all of our lives – birth, coming of age, marriage and
death – and try to reinvent them for our modern secular age. He’ll be
travelling the world for inspiration, spending time with communities in the
Amazon, Indonesia and Japan to see how they treat these great moments. Back
home Grayson will collaborate with British families to devise rites of passage
ceremonies that will mark a genuine milestone in their lives.
Grayson believes in the power of ritual to help us make sense of our lives, and thinks we are in danger of losing our way when it comes to marking those important moments today. Religions all have their rituals – weddings, funerals, christenings– but the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world, so they don’t always resonate with everyone. At their worst, they can feel empty and impersonal. And in a modern Britain of divorce, blended families and gay marriage, the traditional ceremonies don’t always fit with the way we actually live our lives.
In this series, Grayson will work with people who are going through those universal experiences, and try find out what they need and want from the ceremonies they’re about to go through. Then he’ll turn his unique artist-anthropologist’s eye on the ways in which other cultures mark the same moments, travelling around the world to see what we can learn from them. The final result will involve a ceremony that Grayson will help the families to design, as well as ritual art objects that Grayson will make. In its international sweep, and its focus on the universal experiences we all go through, this will be Grayson Perry’s most ambitious series yet.
Grayson Perry: “The day after my funeral, you can put my art in the skip”.
Over four episodes, Perry turns his celebrated imagination to the central
ceremonies of birth, coming of age, marriage and death. This is no longer art
confined to the gallery. In fact, I’m not even sure art is the right word for
it. It’s about people, often in the raw, sometimes joyous, sometimes
distraught. I do wonder if Perry’s playful aesthetic, dancing on the boundaries
of taste, is going to be the right way to approach the death of a child, for
instance. Certainly, this is Perry’s most ambitious project to date.Is it anti-religious? “I don’t reject religion,” he insists. “That’s just
a personal issue for me. I’m not trying to proselytise. But there is a problem
in the relationship between society and religion.” For many people, he says,
religion “is just not a part of their lives any more. Therefore they don’t know
the vicar, therefore it all falls apart. The vicar is just in some council
crematorium going through the motions. I wouldn’t want that job.”
His strategy is to fly off to some exotic locations – the Amazon, Japan, Bali – engage with the local people and some spectacular ceremony, and then return with the wisdom gained to help construct secular liturgies for buttoned-up Brits. It’s all about the emotion for Perry – how to draw it out, how to give it voice. And because he’s so good with people, his ceremonies are a huge hit. He gives people time and attention and signals their worth – not least because they are given the attention of television itself. It’s a whole world away from a 20-minute funeral done by the jobbing vicar at the local crematorium on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.
Compare to The Book of Common Prayer – for centuries the official book of Christian liturgy in England. Compiled by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549, and subsequently translated into nearly 200 languages, it supplied a mass delivery system, an off-the-peg template for the hatching, matching and dispatching of several million people over several centuries. A Perry ceremony, on the other hand, is made to measure.In his studio, little figurines of Alan Measles are scattered throughout – one in gold with an erect phallus. @Alan_Measles is also Perry’s Twitter handle. He’s “an imaginary figure on whom I project my needs,” says Perry. Called Alan after his best friend and Measles after the illness that confined him to bed at the age of three, Perry says of him: “He was my god.”
He isn’t just mocking traditional religion, though there is a touch of that. He’s also pointing to a deeper source of artistic values: psychoanalysis. “Alan Measles became my surrogate father,” says Perry, a “benign dictator” that he cuddled up to at night. Two years ago, Perry’s mother died. He hadn’t seen her for 15 years and he didn’t attend the funeral, having apparently rejected her previous attempt at reconciliation. “Only half of her children went to the funeral, and that was out of morbid duty,” he said later. “She was… a difficult woman. And mentally ill, and it wasn’t our job to fix that.” He tells me that his sister described the service as “one of the most inappropriate things I have ever been to”. It’s clear, though, that this isn’t a subject he’s happy discussing.
As he tells me more of his unhappy childhood, I think I begin to see the connection between art and liturgy in his imagination: if reality is not able to supply the things that we need in order to survive emotionally, then we need to make them for ourselves. As Perry himself says, “I take great comfort in the meaningless. My job is to make meaning. To make meaning in a meaningless world. Ceremonies don’t just fall from the sky,” he insists. “We make them all up.”He talks of the Shinto wedding ceremony he watched in Japan. “It looks like some ancient ceremony, but it’s really only 100 years old.” And the reason many brides like the traditional Shinto costume is that it hides the bump, he chuckles. At times, I feel I’m in the company of a fellow priest sharing stories about the services we have taken.
But are there any underlying values to his life-event liturgies? Is it all just performance art – a term Perry absolutely hates – or is there something else behind his artistic reimaginings of traditionally religious events? The answer sits on the table between us. Alan Measles was Perry’s childhood companion and remains his muse. He is a small beady-eyed teddy bear with a red knitted cardigan, brown trousers and one ear missing. He sits on a Perry-designed throne bearing his name. Like the clergy, Perry has a keen sense that the great dramas in our lives are often flecked with absurdity. But the difference is that for the priest, meaning is found. It is out there, independent of us.For Perry, meaning is made. He is its author. And that makes him stand in an altogether different relation to the life liturgies he creates. So Alan Measles is not the god, I say to him – you are. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course,” he replies. Perry offers the artist – ie himself – as the great creator spirit, supplying meaning. As I follow this line of questioning, a warning bell sounds in Perry’s head. “Oh no. I can see the headline: Grayson thinks he’s God!”
But whenever there is the slightest danger that he might be getting a
little too serious or even (heaven forbid) earnest, he makes a sideways move
into humour, usually sex related. For example, he tells a story of visiting the
cathedral in Toledo in Spain in 2007. It was a hot day but inside the cathedral
it was cool and dark, apart from a statue of the Virgin Mary, illuminated with
candles, with a little velvet cushion before it.
“Why not?” Perry thought. So he knelt down and gave prayer a go. Then he looks at me and, adopting a manic voice, says: “It was a bit of a sexy thrill. That abasement.”This is classic Perry. He strikes me as an intensely serious person who never fully completes on his seriousness, pulling back at the last minute with humour.
“I like to keep my emotional powder dry,” he says. “I like teasing, but not full-on conflict.” Perhaps this is why we, the priest and the artist, end up laughing so much together. He is just too conflict-averse to get into a proper argument. So he tries to get an eight-inch teddy bear to do it for him.Only at one point do I think I momentarily break through that deflecting shield – when I say that when it comes to designing liturgies for the central moments in people’s lives, he has some sort of responsibility to drop the cheeky evasiveness. Surely at some point he has to follow though with the seriousness of the event? There follows a rare moment of quiet.
At the end of our interview the doorbell rings and a beautiful medallion of a silver baby chained to a womb is delivered. Perry designed it as a present to the surrogate family whose birth ceremony he devised. As a mark of the ongoing relationship between biological parents and the surrogate, “I’m not presenting it to the couple, but to the three of them,” says Perry. What were the liturgies that meant the most to him? He describes his wedding in the “register office round the corner” without any particular sense of occasion. More fondly, he remembers the game that he and his family used to play on New Year’s Eve, all sitting in a circle and each recalling the most important things that had happened to them throughout the year.
“The one thing I learnt in group therapy is that everyone is different,” Perry says. Hence, perhaps, his need to design our life events to recognise the individual. Too many liturgies are “one note” emotionally, he says. His ceremonies are characterised by an awareness of ambiguity and emotional mess. They are happy/sad, tragic/comic.
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Since all rituals were invented by somebody, what can we learn from
others? Grayson went travelling to discover, and then found people back in the
UK to help invent their own ceremonies. In this opening episode about death, he
was always informally and casually dressed, never appearing in all the glitter,
make-up and fabulous costumes of his alter ego, Claire. They might have cheered
things up a bit.
In a nearby village, Mrs Joshua had died and a daughter was wailing in grief, draped over her mother’s coffin. The coffin was filled mainly with the dead woman's clothes, and we had only a glimpse of her bespectacled face. In Toraja culture the body remains with the family and is never left alone. Members of the family hold continual one-way conversations, but seemed here to feel a response. The embalmed body is a member of the family living, so to speak, in the house until the funeral.
Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage, Channnel 4 review - making meaning in death. By Marina Vaizey. The Arts Desk , August 24, 2018
In Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage (C4),
Perry sets out to explore the rituals that govern the big moments in our lives
and, where possible, to improve on them. “All rituals were invented by somebody,”
he says. “They didn’t just come out of the ether from God.” Perry begins at the
end, with death. It’s a tough subject, mortality, but Perry is as unflinching
and clear-eyed as ever. His investigation first takes him to the Indonesian
island of Sulawesi, home of the Toraja, who have a much more tangible
relationship to death than we do in the west. Mourners will live alongside the
body of a departed loved one for a year or more before any kind of public
ceremony is held. “It’s hard to be late for a Toraja funeral,” Perry says. They
wait until they are good and ready.The arrangement is, as Perry points out, more cosily domestic than
ghoulish – there’s granny, swaddled in a box, spectacles perched over eyeless
sockets, slightly in the way of the television. Consider yourself part of the
furniture. But it works for the Toraja: their funerals are celebrations of
status and regard – the grief has long since been processed.
Back at home, Perry laments the paucity of meaning in the grieving rituals we are saddled with. “I’m looking to see how we can reframe these big moments in our lives, re-energise them,” he says. “I want us to feel more alive in that moment of death.” Perry has two deaths to reckon with. First up, Alison and Kevin, whose 17-year-son was killed by a drink driver six months before. In the absence of any religious leanings, Alison has begun to formulate her own rites according to her needs. She has redecorated Jordan’s room so that it has become a kind of chapel. “It’s the space where I go to speak to him,” she says. In the living room she has turned one wall into a sort of shrine, painted to reflect Jordan’s sartorial preferences: red on top, blue on the bottom. “I feel like I’m at the beginning of a religion,” says Perry. “I feel like I’m witnessing the birth of a major belief system. I can understand how world cultures were born from strong feeling.”
The other death is more problematic, in that it hasn’t happened yet. Roch Maher was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given 18 months to live. That was eight years ago, but the end, Roch feels, is now nearly at hand. The plan is to celebrate Roch’s life while he is still around. “If the Toraja can separate a death from a funeral, why can’t we?” says Perry.
The ceremony devised for Roch’s life is full of laughter and tears, with mementoes from friends and family placed in an urn made by Perry. Roch is not only present, he also speaks at his own funeral. The pilgrimage for Jordan, a march around the estate he called home to mark what would have been his 18th birthday, is no less moving, and the icon Perry creates for the occasion makes a profoundly touching addition to Jordan’s wall. Even if a rite is just a vessel for us to pour our feelings into, it needs to be sturdy enough for the task, to hold a solemn weight. That is probably why we retreat to conventional rituals when something momentous happens, even when those rituals no longer seem appropriate. “Making meaning, that’s what we’re doing,” says Perry. An end note informs viewers that Roch has since died.
Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage review – how
to create your very own death ritual. By Tim Dowling. The Guardian, August 23,
2018.
Who is Grayson Perry?
Grayson is not only a highly accomplished printmaker and ceramicist, but he is also a master of storytelling and self-analysis: psychotherapy, he says, is the biggest influence on his work. The vivid imaginary world of his childhood, fuelled by childhood fears and a passion for making things, led to the development of mythical stories, in which his teddy, Alan Measles, is the super hero, and also to his transvestite alter ego, Claire, who collected the Turner Prize in 2003 in a Bo Peep-style dress. He also regards Claire as “an interesting kind of visual phenomenon” in her own right. Parachuting Claire into the fervent transatlantic debate surrounding gender politics was always going to be an interesting prospect. And Grayson, of course, doesn’t disappoint. Nothing could quite have prepared the Windsor folk for Claire’s hot pink tiniest of mini-dresses (with matching underpants) at the private view. The extraordinary expanse of leg indeed prompted an inappropriate wolf whistle.
Grayson is not primed to be offended. “I’ve been watching the trans/feminist spats on twitter, they are genuine dilemmas. I come back time and time again to the vanity of small differences: the left will rip itself apart by saying, ‘you are not the right sort of liberal – you are as bad as them by being slightly different from me’, instead of fighting the real enemy.” But surely there are some black and white no-go areas, I press him, in what he describes as the “shaded area of social and human interaction”? What would he say, for example, to the Donald Trumps of this world and their “pussy grabbing” for a starter? “Oh God,” he exclaims, “it’s awful, awful, awful. Zero tolerance – you don’t want that sort of behaviour in the workplace or in, you know... yet the weird thing is, whenever I am doing a talk about masculinity, the audience goes very quiet when I ask, ‘ok can any of you people put your hand up and say that you’ve had sexual fantasies about equality’? That’s because sexuality is not politically correct and it’s also out of date. Men have got to realise they are just emotionally unaware about their behaviour, about what’s appropriate, about what’s right. They’ve got to learn that what’s natural to them is actually really off.” Then again, Grayson refuses to take the moral high ground, and this is perhaps what makes his art and his TV programmes so inclusive and popular. “I find it fascinating that people aren’t adult enough to admit to holding two contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. My word of the year is ‘diaphobia’, which means a fear of being changed by people’s views. The most potent insult in the age of social media is, ‘you hypocrite’. The Toby Young thing blew up through people digging up stuff that contradicted what he was saying, but maybe a lot of hypocrisy is people just changing their mind.”
How Grayson Perry is taking on America: 'People want to be provoked, but
not catastrophically'.
By Alison Cole. The Independent, January 16, 2018
If you want to know more. Wikipedia
Grayson Perry as Claire with his wife Philippa Perry at the private view of his new show in Florida (photo Scott Rudd)
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