Godammit, I’m Mad!

Everything I read about Grayson Perry just makes me love him more and more. When he accepted the Turner prize in 2003, wearing a fantastic lilac frock of his own creation, he said “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize!”

His views on art and society are refreshingly unpretentious. He is happily married to a psychotherapist with whom he has a 14 year old daughter. His wife Philippa has joked that his obsession with dressing in women’s clothes could be worse…”It could be football!”

Here is what he says in one interview:

“To have men in frocks is disturbing for people, but in fact most of them are straight, hetero people with marriages and kids,” says Perry.

He says he is horrified by the “spiritual bankruptcy” of modern society, and its focus on appearance. “There is more to attractiveness than who is looking in the mirror. Sexiness is a terrible tyranny.”

Grayson Perry seems like a funny, gifted, endearing, original thinker who I’d like to add to my list of People To Look Up To.

UPDATE:  Grayson Perry has curated a touring exhibit called Unpopular Culture.  Check it out!

All day I’ve been thinking about Liz Lou. Maybe it’s because her art involves such a passionate, superhuman commitment in time and labor. My own fits of art are so half-assed and meager.

“Liza Lou has often been trivialised as the “bead lady”. Her art is distinguished by the thousands of tiny threaded and glued beads that cover every millimetre of her life-sized sculptures and environments. There are those who would see Lou’s work as a kind of extreme and cranky craftwork, an obsessional but minor art. Her most famous piece is a full-scale kitchen, whose counters, cupboards, sink, dishes, tap and even the gushing water are all picked out in chains and whorls of beads. There has been a beaded trailer home and a backyard, every blade of grass a spike of beads. Beaded blankets, beaded portraits of all the US presidents, a beaded toilet bowl with beaded stains, beaded saints, a beaded suicide. When can it ever end? It started when she was in college. If Lou could she’d bead the world.”

I would probably spray the world gold, because it takes less effort. Read more about Liza Lou here.

I was intrigued by a review in the Los Angeles TImes of Matthew Barney’s latest performance piece, called REN.  The two hour event took place in a car lot, and featured the destruction of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial.

The car was dragged by “four dozen dirt-smeared laborers” into a showroom, where it was smashed by a backhoe. The shattered glass injured three people in the audience, but hey, they came to see Art and they got it!

After the paramedics left, the audience was ushered into a fake tomb where Lila Downs sang to a corpse and - this is my favorite part - “a menstrual shroud was extracted from the loins of a masked nude woman.”

Is Matthew Barney a fucking genius or what?!

If you’re not convinced, how about this: Just last month in New York, Barney used another Chrysler to fascinate a crowd of 200, wearing a dog on his head. A legless athlete in a silver ballgown and a marching band in terrorist masks were there to bring Barney’s vision to life, as were a pair of semi-nude girls who peed in an arc onto the floor. Then a bull was led over to the Chrysler but refused to mount it.

I’m not too good as symbolism, but I think it’s obvious that the bull was a witty reference to shit. Right?

Poor Bjork!