Lois Ruben Aronow on mon 8 dec 03
Not my headline - give the Times full credit for that one.
Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/arts/design/08TURN.html
and here is the story:
TRANSVESTITE POTTER WINS TURNER PRIZE IN ART
By ALAN RIDING
Published: December 8, 2003
Associated Press
LONDON, Dec. 7 =97 Grayson Perry, a relatively unknown British artist
who decorates ceramic vases with disturbing images and texts and who
also occasionally appears in public as a transvestite named Claire,
received the Turner Prize on Sunday. The award is the most prestigious
in Britain for contemporary art.
Mr. Perry, 43, who was chosen by a five-member jury led by the
director of the Tate Gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota, was dressed as
Claire in a flowerly blue frock when he received a check for =A320,000
(nearly $35,000) from the British artist Sir Peter Blake at a
televised ceremony at Tate Britain in London.
The other shortlisted artists, whose works have also been on display
at Tate Britain, were the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, favorites
of the news media here, as well as Anya Gallaccio and Willie Doherty.
The Turner Prize, in its 20th year, has increasingly stirred debate
over the nature of contemporary art =97 there is rarely a painting to be
seen among the contenders =97 and the quality of the shortlisted
artists, who must be under 50 and working in Britain.
Although many significant artists have won the award, including Tony
Cragg, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, British newspapers have
tended to focus on the scandalous, profane, erotic or absurd aspects
of the work by each year's shortlisted artists.=20
This year public attention focused most on the prolific Chapman
brothers, who first made their name by creating child mannequins with
genitalia growing from different parts of their bodies and by building
a three-dimensional tableau of a Nazi-like apocalypse. This year's
most debated work was piece "Sex," a bronze version of plastic blowup
dolls engaged in oral sex. In "Death," which provoked protests when it
was first shown in an exhibition in Oxford this spring, the brothers
doctored a 1937 set of 83 etchings of Goya's "Disasters of War."
Mr. Perry's vases also generated headlines because some of them
address pedophilia and violence against children in a way made all the
more shocking by Mr. Perry's good draftsmanship and sense of design.
He has not described that work as autobiographical, but he has never
hidden his difficult and unhappy childhood with a distant mother and a
stepfather.
It was also as a teenager that he began wearing his sisters' clothes.
"One of the reasons I dress up as a woman is my low self-esteem, to go
with the image of women being seen as second class," he once
explained. "It is like pottery; that's seen as a second-class thing,
too."
The Tate Britain display of Mr. Perry's work includes three
photographs showing him as Claire. Receiving the Turner Prize, he
thanked his wife, Philippa, for her support, and added, "About time a
transvestite potter won the Turner."
Most striking, though, are his ceramics, many two feet high and shaped
like Etruscan vases. Although some are colorful, most are melancholic,
a mood emphasized by such titles as "Boring Cool People," "We've Found
the Body of Your Child," "I Was an Angry Working-Class Man" and "Weeds
Are Just Plants in the Wrong Place."
In this sense, Mr. Perry's themes =97 sex scandals, crime, violence
against children =97 reflect the fronts of British tabloids. Yet while
seemingly appealing to primitive instincts, Mr. Perry's drawings on
the vases are more subversive, designed not to shock but to raise
questions.
"A lot of my work has always had a guerrilla tactic, a stealth
tactic," he said earlier this year. "I want to make something that
lives with the eye as a beautiful piece of art, but on closer
inspection, a polemic or an ideology will come out of it. Not so that
it destroys the intrinsic pattern and beauty of it. I don't want to
sacrifice the aesthetic for the idea. I want the two to be so close
that they live happily together, or maybe not happily, but so there is
a frisson."
As for the other shortlisted artists, Ms. Gallaccio's main works on
view here are "because I could not stop," comprising a bronze tree
cast with real apples that have been left to rot, and "preserve
`beauty'," which shows 2,000 red gerberas pressed against a pane of
glass and left to decay.
Mr. Doherty, a video artist from Northern Ireland who was also
shortlisted in 1994, presented "Re-Run," a video with images of a
running man on two screens.
In a separate informal competition to celebrate the Turner Prize's
20th anniversary, visitors to the Tate Britain and to the Tate Web
site voted the sculptor Anish Kapoor, who won the prize in 1991, as
the best artist of the last 20 years.
=20
************
Lois Ruben Aronow
www.loisaronow.com
Modern Porcelain and Tableware
The Tattoo is back!
L. P. Skeen on mon 8 dec 03
IMAGES, dammit, we want IMAGES!!!!!!!!!!!! (of the work, not the drag
queen.) Not a single one to be found on the NYT site. :(
L
----- Original Message -----
Subject: Transvestite Potter Wins Turner Prize in Art - from the NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/arts/design/08TURN.html
Millie Carpenter on mon 8 dec 03
Lisa this is the site that you want.
http://www.graysonperry.co.uk/recent_work.html
Millie in Md
On Monday, December 8, 2003, at 07:24 PM, L. P. Skeen wrote:
> IMAGES, dammit, we want IMAGES!!!!!!!!!!!! (of the work, not the drag
> queen.) Not a single one to be found on the NYT site. :(
>
> L
> ----- Original Message -----
> Subject: Transvestite Potter Wins Turner Prize in Art - from the NY
> TIMES
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/arts/design/08TURN.html
>
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