Art on TV: A house for Essex
Grayson Perry has designed a house for Essex. I have not seen it in person, but in a television programme on Channel 4 'Grayson Perry's Dream House'. Normally, it would be anathema to comment on a work of art on such a basis, but this digital engagement has become more and more the essence of Perry's works. Conceived on a computer, and put together by highly-skilled professionals, edited and narrated into a compelling hour's viewing, structured around a personal take on national and individual identity, the 'House for Essex' merely takes further the works Perry has made in recent television programmes 'In the best possible taste' and 'Who are you?'. He has become the modern Kenneth Clark.
The house has been made for Living Architecture, an initiative to get artists and architects to design unique innovative buildings that are then available for rent. Perry's conceit is to bring what could normally be seen as an incredibly middle-class project back to his roots in Essex, and to produce the home of an ordinary local woman, Julie. The house embodies her history - the sort of past that might be part of any Essex woman's life, according to Perry - through its exterior design, decoration, and interior artefacts. All have been designed, and some personally made, by Perry.
Of course the house is, therefore, anything but ordinary. It is a complex and intricate object, which resembles a Russian Orthodox Church or German gingerbread house, dropped into the Essex landscape. The walls are covered with green and white ceramic tiles showing a relief of Julie like an ancient fertility goddess, a silver weather vane of her finishes the roof. Tapestries and large ceramic vessels (the latter made by Perry himself) fill the house, telling the story of Julie's multiple marriages, hopes and fears and struggles to live a happy life. One real oddity is that absolutely no landscaping has been done around the house. It sits as if it has fallen from space into a piece of scrubland at the end of a gravel drive.
The Channel 4 programme shows you the genesis of the house from idea to finished structure. Perry talks engagingly about the enjoyment and challenges of working in a new discipline. You see his conversations with FAT Architecture as they develop his sketch designs into a functional building, and with the specialist ceramics firm that make his tile designs into a mass-producible object. Most appealing is the slow affection that you see the construction team develop for this wacky concept, the foreman shedding tears as the weathervane is finally installed. The programme ends with Perry taking a group of real Essex Julies on a bicycle tour to the house and a scene where many of them are overcome by how his space has captured their lived experience.
It currently costs £750-1800 per night to stay in the House for Essex, and you have to enter a ballot to have the chance. It is therefore an object that few people will see or experience outside of the television programme, except perhaps from creeping down the gravel drive to have a peek. One tapestry of Julie and Rob (her second husband) was in the RA summer show this year and, if the rest of the house matches its beauty and subtlety, we are really missing something. I wish I could afford to spend a night as Julie.
But I think that is also missing the point. The project is as much about the television programme as the object; about Perry's personal story and interpretation as a means of thinking about British identity today, through the eyes of an artist and his art. In many ways the creation of a site-specific object escapes the disappointment of his previous pieces made out of television programmes. The Vanity of Small Differences and Who Are You? featured some undeniably beautiful objects, which struggled to contain the rich stories and ideas developed in the related series. They became incomplete without Perry's filmed experience.
I'm left wondering if this is his new medium: a different kind of fragile vessel and detailed tapestry. Does Perry need to create physical art anymore at all?