Grayson Perry: How I went behind the scenes at the British Museum

Turner prize-winning transvestite potter Grayson Perry long cherished an ambition to show his own art – his own ‘civilisation’, as he calls it – alongside the great ancient civilisations of the world – but little dreamed the British Museum would agree to his proposal… I was approaching 50 and doing OK. Success in the art world means getting invitations to exhibit in some great places. I had shown in contemporary art museums in Europe, America, New Zealand and Japan. I’d also been asked to curate shows, and had made work to go with my selections from historical collections. I realised I could just slot into a very nice contemporary art career trajectory of one-man shows in beautiful designer art galleries, the odd biennale, a growing stack of monographs – in short, a good art career that ends with every good collection in the world wanting a signature piece. Then I sat down and thought: “What sort of exhibition do I really want to put on?” I had called my last big show, which travelled to Japan and Luxembourg, My Civilisation. The territory my civilisation occupied was my mind, which was laid out for visitors to see in my print Map of an Englishman , hung in the first room. I thought mischievously that all civilisations have a religion, so I made my teddy bear, Alan Measles, the leader of my childhood universe, a god. It started as a joke but jokes, like dreams or sexual fantasies, are often messages from the unconscious and can echo dark and deep. I began to think about how my civilisation, complete with tatty little god, could be a framework within which to examine how we look at all cultures and religions. I enjoyed the thought that hovering behind my work is a unifying belief system, just as

Posted by on September 18, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.