Video interview: Grayson Perry, the bloke in the dress

Grayson Perry might just be one of our great communicators. Sure, he’s the bloke in a dress who won the Turner Prize, but five minutes in his company is about all you need to realise that here is a man with a wicked sense of humour, a burning intellect and an almost visible desire to share his thoughts and ideas with the world.

Perry being such a striking, memorable figure – he’s a statuesque blonde who dresses like Little Bo-Peep – means that it’s pretty difficult to look past the appearance and see the man underneath. That’s not just sociological conditioning on my part – he stands at over six feet tall and when we meet is wearing a white dress with an elaborate blue overcoat and shiny black shoes. It doesn’t matter how open minded and liberal you are – that’s a sight that which is difficult to get used to – you might think.

But here’s the thing. After the interview I am asked if Perry was wearing a dress, as his alter-ego Claire, or if he was wearing men’s clothes. For several moments I can’t remember. The paraphernalia that comes with the transvestite Turner Prize-winning artist is just that, paraphernalia. Sure, it’s interesting that he wears a dress and it’s fascinating to listen him speak about being a transvestite, but what Perry has to say underneath all the trimmings is much more interesting. He couldn’t really be a clearer case of substance over style.

All that said, I guess we’ve got to talk about the dress.

“It’s one made by my students (he lectures at St Martin’s College), almost all my dresses now are made by the students. I offer them £500 per dress and that motivates them, because suddenly they have a real client and a real deadline,” he says.

He is without doubt one of the most open people I’ve ever met. He lays everything, comfortably, on the table – down to years of therapy, he says, and we’ll come back to that, but for now the transvestism that, for many, defines him.

“It’s a curse when you’re 13 and you want to do the very thing of which you are most terrified, walking down the high street dressed as a girl is what you’d love to do and it’s very frightening, but hey, I’m an adrenalin addict like many men.

“It’s a psycho-sexual condition and it’s quite exciting.”

A 13-year-old boy? It’s one thing to brave stepping out in a public in a pair of kitten heels when you’re a confident man in your 50s, but as a 13-year-old boy growing up in Essex, it must have been a special kind of hell Perry was setting himself up for.

“I’m not alone, most trannys have that moment where they finally embrace who they are,” he says.

“They are led to do it by their desires. It’s a very odd condition being a tranny because people say if it’s a way of expressing your feminine side, it’s a pretty crude way of doing it – dressing up as a woman – isn’t there a more subtle way of doing it? I always say that you decide you’re a tranny when you’re a child, not a sophisticated adult.

“I was 12 or 13 was when I realised and the unconscious way the mind of a 12-year-old is quite crude.”

Brave and frightened 13-year-old Essex boy to famous artist is quite a journey and it’s one Perry has been exploring in a new television series All in the Best Possible Taste which has been highly acclaimed.

After grammar school in Chelmsford, he studied fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic, before moving to London to join the alternative art set, where he rubbed shoulder pads with Boy George and started creating work.

All in the Best Possible Taste charts that journey, but also looks at our own obsessions with class and culture. Perry is perfectly placed to discuss the notion.

“Class still fascinates me, the way we move through it, changing our allegiance to a different tribe,” he says.

“I moved from a not very cultural, working-class background, to art college and now I live in the chattering classes of North London. Over time you take on the mores of the tribe you join, but there’s always a little bit of you, a more primal part, that stays. A shadow of your class past.

“The structure of our basic personality is built up when we’re children and so we carry that with us through our lives and if you were brought up in a certain class, that has a certain structure that imposes itself on you.

“It’s very difficult to rid yourself of that entirely, and even if it’s subtle, it’s a nuanced way of looking at the world and perhaps it’s about your emotional attitudes.”

So, childhood. Speaking as a thoroughly liberal sort, the last thing I want to do is offend someone who is part of a minority. No matter how far we’ve come, a transvestite is still a minority and will still attract certain reactions. That Perry is more than happy to talk about his transvestism is a relief. But Perry had a famously difficult childhood, with family rifts and schisms blighting his upbringing, will he also talk about that?

The best way to approach it is through Alan Measles, a teddy bear Perry still carries today, and something that he has brought with him through his childhood.

“Psychologists would call him my transitional object. I used him as a talisman to carry through certain stages in life and I projected on to him psychologically a lot of things I needed to keep safe as a child in terms of my personality,” he says.

“So I gave him more male attributes, he was a guerilla fighter, a motor car racer, leader of the country. I didn’t realise his significance until I had therapy when I was 40 and I thought ‘blimey, no wonder he’s the only bit of my childhood I kept’.

“I don’t have anything, hardly any photographs, let alone toys or books, but somehow I held on to him and he’s become very important to me. Five or six years ago I did an exhibition in Japan and I wanted to display all my work as though it were a cohesive culture but all from a single person – Alan was the natural choice for my god. I thought it was a joke at first, but when I started to create the exhibition I realised the idea had legs. So Alan is now up there in the pantheon with Zeus, Apollo, all the Aztec gods – and Alan.”

There’s the key to what makes Perry so entertaining – he’s funny, irreverent, serious and totally open. In answering a single question he jokes about something, then finds a serious undertone to the thing he jokes about and reveals something quite personal.

As a public figure, playing the game of the interview is clearly something at which he has become very accomplished, but why be so open, particularly about something as personal as mental health and his own therapy?

“I’ve been buffed and polished and hammered and so I have reintegrated all the parts of my personality quite well. I can handle all of my parts now,” he says.

“That’s what mental health is, partly, being all of yourself, all of the time and not hiving off a part of yourself that you might think is inappropriate or difficult to deal with in certain situations and so to be all yourself all the time and present is part of mental health.

“My wife is a psychotherapist and this is the sort of stuff we talk about all the time – it’s interesting – I wouldn’t have been married to her for 25 years if she was boring. Your emotions are the lens through which we look at the world. You can’t look round your emotions, you have to look through them.”

See why it’s easy to forget that here is a man in a dress?

This engaging way of communicating is why the TV show has been so popular, and why Channel Four have just given Perry a two-year contract to make more.

The artist has always drawn a crowd. After art school, he studied poetry and writes beautifully about his work. What was interesting, though, is that as a transvestite immersed in the alternative art scene he should emerge as a potter.

When he won the Turner Prize in 2003 with his pottery work, it was a surprise because of the supposed banality of the form in which he works.

“Why can’t you win an art prize with pottery though – people have won it for all sorts of things; arranging stones in a line, turning the lights on and off. People say pottery isn’t really pushing the boundaries, but it’s shocking in its ordinariness, rather than in its outrageousness.

“It’s the vanity of small differences and I think it’s down to class again. To co-opt a urinal into an art gallery is to make a bold intellectual step, to put a pot in is to invite the neighbours round.”

Inviting the “neighbours round”, or to put it another way, to open up art galleries and high culture to the working masses, is Perry’s evangelism these days. When we meet he is in Leeds at the invitation of the Leeds Art Fund, to give a talk at a packed out Leeds Art Gallery.

“One of my campaigns is to get people to understand that art and art galleries are for them. I’m not anti-intellectual, I want to stretch myself and I read a lot, but I think academe is sometimes its own worst enemy. It’s not very good at communicating, and when they do breed academics who are good communicators, people like Mary Beard or Alain de Botton, they hate them, pour absolute bile on them for daring to be understandable.”

Perry hasn’t been in the studio all week, he’s instead been travelling around talking to people, communicating and is in much demand thanks to the popularity of the television series.

“I think of it now as the third job of the artist. Historically first all we had to be was quite good. Then we had to have the bloody ideas when Duchamp came along, and be conceptual as well, and now we have to go out there and sell it as well.”

Fortunately, the artist is also an effective salesman.

When he started out his presenting career he didn’t have the best of beginnings. The producer, who he still works with, had him walk up Chelmsford high street in a dress.

“I was wearing a radio mic and he had the camera about 300 yards away. So I looked like this mad tranny walking down the road talking to myself. People were shouting at me, because I wasn’t as recognisable as I am now and I was just some anonymous pervert.”

No longer. The two-year deal with Channel Four will ensure we hear plenty more from Perry, even though he now faces what he refers to as the “difficult second album syndrome”.

“We like people to communicate. Look at Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, that’s still a cult and well-loved piece of TV.

“There is that brilliant shot that Stephen Fry has talked about, where Clark says ‘no great thought was ever had in an enormous room’ and the camera pans out for the next 10 minutes revealing this absolutely enormous room. It was funny and bright and I think that’s really important with things that as seen as difficult, impossible, impenetrable.

“So yeah, if I’ve got the ability to communicate I’m happy to share the revelations I’ve had, not just about art, but psychotherapy, social issues, anything.”

There will be plenty of people very happy to hear that.

The next Leeds Art Fund talk is on July 11, with Dr Michael Paraskos talking about The Gates of Paradise: Art as the Garden of Eden. Henry Moore Lecture Theatre, Leeds Art Gallery. Details at www.leedsartfund.org.