I have always admired Perry’s work and had never really looked in depth at his past or how he came to be who he is today. I found the book an essential part in giving me his background and providing a context to his work which I now feel I understand better. I think this feeds into the documentary practise as it’s a true narrative, just in written form as oppose to photographic. I also find Perry’s ceramics and drawings to be documentary fine art pieces.
The book is extremely telling of his past and illustrates an interesting and unpredictable journey, as I had no idea about his tough and turbulent time living at home and his poverty towards the end and after art school, leaving him living in the basement of a squat and on the dole.
Each chapter had a reflective passage at the end, which brought the writing full circle and reflected Perry’s thoughts from today and how these experiences have shaped him and his work. The biography reminded me of Tracey Emin’s autobiography titled ‘Strangeland’, both containing short, brutally honest anecdotes with no fear of judgment, something rare to find today.
The date range of the book spans from birth to just before he created his first main piece of art, illustrating how he got to where he is and allowing us to savor that before leaping into his now prolific career. it helps us to view the different chapters of life and their relevance and necessity to be explored individually.
I also discovered more about his transexuality, which I have no real knowledge of and was so intrigued to discover how the act of wearing a dress triggers a sexual desire in him and others. I enjoy his candidness about the male dressing as a female and never really passing for a woman, that being the point. This helped me understand the different between transvestites, drag queens and transgendered people, which I think is something we need to understand and learn more about.
The final chapter concerns his practice and how it’s ever changing, although people put him into the box of being a ceramics enthusiast and potter and I feel this is so relatable. In the art world people are constantly questioning your medium and asking you to define yourself by juts one or two, but there’s so much out there, how can you limit yourself to just one? Art is meant to be experimental and have no limits, its supposed to be the definition of freedom and Perry helps viewers to understand this and stay outside these boxes of conformity.
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