The Peter Dormer Lecture is the UK’s major annual applied arts lecture, held in memory of Peter Dormer, the writer and critic who died in 1996. The 2012 lecture entitled ‘Turn up on time, be nice and put in the hours’ was led by artist Grayson Perry.
From his crafty upbringing with an electrical engineer father, Perry talked the audience through his artistic development from sloppily-made plates to intricate Turner Prize-winning pots and vast tapestries for famous art galleries. The focus on the talk was on the handmade and craft, an artistic term which can often have naff connotations (One of Perry’s slides showed a scrapbook magazine- surely scrapbooks are impromtu and shouldn’t need an accompanying manual?! Another showed a typical craftshop with tacky felt bags). Perry says that he came out of art college with a jaundiced view of craft, but that hasn’t hindered his ‘unembarrassing’ venture “into the naffest of territories”. With some advice for the RCA students in the audience, he said: “the one thing you learn at art college is to hate art”.
Craft for Perry is always at its best when it is a bit rough around the edges. He said: “When craft becomes the headline it gets in the way of the art. It must be in our DNA that we like the handmade, we like to see the presence of a human.” You don’t want a piece of art to be perfect, because “perfection often results in a work of art that is a bit dead” he said. Perry then started to talk about scale and the way artists have started to use other people’s labour. Art galleries are getting bigger and bigger, resulting in gargantuan works, for example, the Tate’s Turbine Hall or Anish Kapoor’s sculptures. Indeed, Perry described the Tate Modern as the ‘Cult Entertainment Megastore’, i.e. art has become a normal part of culture, one you don’t have to be an art expert to consume. Thus the number of art galleries and the amount of artwork has increased over the years, but the amount of good art has remained steadily the same.
You can also read a previous post on this blog about Grayson Perry’s Channel 4 series All in the Best Possible Taste. During three programmes Perry went on ‘safari’ through three tribes; the working class, middle class and upper class, to discover our aesthetic taste and the emotional investment in the objects within our homes. The people he met along the way inspired a series of tapestries depicting the story of Perry’s protagonist Tim Rakewell.
Images: Richard Kelly Photography
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