Image:Grayson Perry, as Claire, outside the British Museum in London, ahead of his show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer
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 there is behind Egyptian or Ancient Greek art. It just happens that the person who thought up the belief system behind my work is still around – ie, me.
Perhaps it was hubris, or maybe a dwindling sense of immortality, but my desire to see my own internal culture displayed alongside the great civilisations of history grew stronger the more I thought about it. I had ridiculous fantasies of one of those blockbuster/coach party exhibitions like the British Museum’s 1972 sensation The Treasures of Tutankhamun. I had read that the world’s most powerful museum was the Metropolitan in New York. I designed a set of shamanic robes embroidered with pots and maps of the Met in the hope that sympathetic magic would influence the high priests of culture into giving me an opportunity.
I was interested in what a museum such as the Met or the British Museum means, as a hub of learning, a world of wonder, a tourist magnet, a tool of cultural diplomacy, a site of pilgrimage, a place to take the kids on a wet bank holiday. I wanted to find out how the context of such an august institution affected the audience’s reaction to my art.
So I sent a proposal to Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. I suggested a show presenting my civilisation alongside objects I would select from the museum collection. I called my idea The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a title that could perhaps be applied to the whole museum because, after all, tombs are where a large proportion of the BM’s collection came from. I also wanted to celebrate the countless anonymous men and women who have crafted the marvels in the collection.
The tomb itself was to be an elaborate iron coffin in the shape of a ship festooned with casts of museum objects. It would be at once an imagined site of pilgrimage, perhaps brought to the museum from some chapel in my mind but also an actual here-and-now destination of pilgrimage for visitors to the museum. (Pilgrimage is another of my ongoing interests but little did I know at the time that this fitted perfectly with the museum’s programme, as my show nestles between Treasures of Heaven, about medieval Christian relics, and a coming show about pilgrimage to Mecca, Hajj.) In the heart of the tomb would be the pivotal relic around which the show would revolve, a flint hand axe 250,000 years old, the tool that begat all tools. I wanted to get people thinking about what I call the “reverence machine”, the process by which we bestow potency and significance on objects. Things from tombs are always associated with death and so inevitably attain meaningfulness.
I was aware that the museum had a sporadic contemporary art programme but what I was proposing , I think, is the deepest and most prolonged relationship with a contemporary artist in its history so far, involving nearly every part of the organisation.
And what an organisation the British Museum is. It is a huge body with many stakeholders. Decisions – particularly about contemporary art proposals – take a while. There were many emails and meetings. I wore my magic robes whenever I went to the BM. It was a year before I got the final go-ahead and even then I felt like an aircraft rolling slowly along the runway, knowing take-off speed would not be attained unless sponsors were found. Selling such a concept to potential supporters is tricky in a recession but fortunately AlixPartners and Louis Vuitton liked the idea and came on board.
The BM is very keen continually to reassert the relevance of its collection to the contemporary world. I think my proposal very much fitted into that philosophy. I was introduced to Philip Attwood, keeper of coins and medals, who is also chair of the Modern Museum Group. Philip would chaperone me through the bulk of my engagement with the museum. We organised a PowerPoint presentation of my proposal for all those that might be involved. It was not very well attended. I comforted myself with the thought that maybe everyone was too busy but in the back of my mind I began to feel like an imposter. I thought maybe they weren’t interested or they felt hostile to a jumped-up potter coming in, making up stuff. I pluck ideas out of the ether then post-rationalise wildly – a very different thought-process from that of an archaeologist or historian. The feeling of ignorance in the presence of world-class experts was not to leave me. Contrary to my anxieties, though, warm invitations started popping into my inbox asking me to come and view suggested objects. Curators seemed to like nothing better than showing off the treasures in their care. Their profound enthusiasm I found infectious and endearing.
When I tell friends that I have been selecting objects from the entire museum collection they imagine I have just been let loose in the stores and allowed to rummage as if I was at a car-boot sale. I did encounter huge rooms stuffed with canoes, drawers full of what looked like rusty nails and corridors lined with the contents of a thousand tombs but the car-boot sale fantasy was a long way from the truth. Each object is stored and packed with great care whether it is a million-year-old flint tool or a Hello Kitty hand-towel. As soon as an object is in the custodianship of the museum it is treated as precious and important. To look at one African textile might take half an hour of finding, donning of gloves, unpacking, checking, repacking. I soon realised that no way was I going to see more than a tiny fraction of the 8 million objects housed in the museum in the flesh.
I sent lists of themes and areas of interest out to all the keepers. I included Grayson Perry staples such as transvestism, bears and motorcycles and also categories that might flesh out the idea of a tomb: entrance guardians, maps of the afterlife, souvenirs of pilgrimage. I wanted all the exhibits to spark off each other, hopefully in the visitor’s head. The curators then put together groups of objects to show me that in turn led to chance encounters. Enquiring about eastern European folk costumes led to a bizarre carnival mask, a tour of Islamic ceramics unearthed an earring with ear still attached.
One of my saviours was the online database, an area in which the BM is a pioneer. This meant that I was able to continue my search even when at home recuperating from a bout of kidney stones. Through photographs I could get a good idea of what was in the collection in a much shorter period and then start to whittle it down, make requests and visit the various departments. Some stores would have a distinct smell: the Asian had a lingering tang of incense, the Egyptian gave out wafts of dung.
All the time I was very aware what a privilege I had been granted. I had been given permission to translate a vague fantasy into an increasingly daunting reality. I feared it was a fantasy that perhaps I had not thoroughly thought through, one that involved dozens if not hundreds of other people, many of them extremely knowledgeable. Was I treading on their toes? Had I been given an opportunity they sorely desired? I feared I would be seen as an ignorant interloper by the people who spend their lives learning about and caring for the collection. I thought they might see me as a trendy Thor Heyerdahl, falling into easy but spurious cross-cultural comparisons, misinterpreting objects. These were people whose careers were forged from accurate knowledge collated on many arduous field trips or from years of painstaking research and in I would come for a few hours and say “Ooh I like that, what fun!” Did I see them flinch?
I learned not to use the word “fun” so much and to temper my light-hearted intuitive approach. In the end, though, I had to face up to the fact that I was there because I was an artist and to be confident about that. All I could do was choose the things that fascinated and delighted me. A Georgian-style bonnet from Samoa made of tortoiseshell, a headscarf depicting Middle Eastern leaders (I chose this before the Arab Spring), an ancient Egyptian drawing board complete with sketches left half-finished 3,500 years ago. Over dozens of visits, looking at thousands of objects in the museum stores in Bloomsbury and scattered around London I learned to make my mind up fast. One of the nicest things that anyone said to me during the build up to the show was a comment by no-nonsense exhibitions manager Sarah Scott. “I like working with you, Grayson,”, she said. “You decide and you deliver.”
The idea that governed my choices was this: instead of responding to history, as I had in past projects, here, in such a vast and varied collection, why not reverse the process and find objects that related to the work I wanted to make? In the end the dialogue was two-way as I could not help being influenced by what I came across on my journey through the bowels of the museum. Some objects reminded me of pieces I had already made, sometimes decades before. Bronze Roman nails with magic inscriptions were too neat a complement not to display with a bronze I made a few years ago called Head of a Fallen Giant pierced by very similar spikes. The colour and texture of a small Tibetan shrine prompted me to dig out and restore a model tower I made from detritus on my kitchen table in 1983. An Indian amulet is the long-lost cousin of a reliquary I designed for the Tate Modern gift shop in 2009.
Over the course of two years I ruthlessly winnowed the entire history of world culture. I eventually had a long list of maybe 1,000 objects that had caught my eye and this I boiled down to the final 170. I could have selected a dozen other completely different exhibitions but I had to decide and also deliver the 30 artworks of my own to go alongside them.
In wanting an exhibition at the BM I did not just want to stage a contemporary art show within its walls. I wanted an exhibition that looked and felt like a historical or ethnographic show. The white cube of the art gallery bestows a certain cultural status on any object, such is the Duchampian power of the context. I feel this has become tired. I want my show to take a knowing squint at the ethnography of the art world by stepping just outside of it. My art would not have the luxury of a “neutral” white space. The work would be displayed in the same way as the British museum’s artefacts. I have taken the risk of putting my own works up against a selection of already very potent objects. I could not depend on the sparse glistening temple of the contemporary gallery and the cool intellectual blessing of the art world to legitimise my efforts. My artworks were on their own, standing among things already throbbing with historical, religious and social significance, a Russian icon, a mud and blood power figure from Mali, a badge from the 1961 Aldermaston march. Many of the objects in the museum were made not just for display but have a history of veneration and ritual. Some of my artworks, too, have stories, such as the AM1 motorcycle which I rode around Germany with Alan Measles on a personal pilgrimage, the embroidered cape I wore at the opening of my Japanese exhibition and my youthful ponytail in its own ceramic coffin.
The preparations for my very first exhibition in 1984 consisted of banging a line of nails in roughly the right place and hanging plates on them. I don’t think a tape measure or a spirit level was involved and the whole process took less time than the session in the pub afterwards. Even in a top-level contemporary art gallery I might rock up a week or two before the opening and start leaning things against walls and shuffling them around before standing pots on MDF plinths stuck down with museum wax ( My favourite brand is called “Be still my art”). At the BM, I found, things are very different. A show is designed months in advance, down to the last acid-free, LED-lit detail complete with visitor “dwell” times and hierarchies of explanatory text. Security and care of the objects is paramount. Arty composition comes after everything is safe from greasy fingers, humidity or excess light.
In a way the entire exhibition is an artwork utilising the stupendous context of the BM. If I wanted to use that context to the full I needed to be involved in all aspects of the enterprise. I was encouraged to have a say in the design, interpretation, marketing, special events, even visually impaired access. Of course, when dealing with such a behemoth compromises have to be made but I do feel the spirit of my show has been allowed to permeate, right through to the menu in the restaurant. The venue, room 35, has its own shop. If I had more time I could have spent another six months just designing a wider selection of fridge magnets, key rings, bags and headscarves. Souvenirs of pilgrimage are nothing new – I have devoted a section of the show to examples from the collection.
What did I learn in my time hanging out at the BM? That native Americans did satire, that grand tourists sometimes brought a mummy’s head home in their baggage and that I still don’t like classical statues despite spending a lot of time with the brilliant and funny Ian Jenkins, senior curator in the department of Greek and Roman antiquities. I also learnt that a museum is very different from an art gallery.
Every time I visit the place I am awestruck by the sheer volume and variety of visitors that attend the BM, 6 million last year, running the gamut from Mexican pensioners to Chinese school parties. Neil MacGregor calls it the place “where the world meets the world”, and I was given it to play with.
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