Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Grayson Perry is contemplating robbery. And no, the esteemed artist and broadcaster has not gone to rack and ruin. We’re at the Wallace Collection in London, where an exhibition of his newest works is mid-install. A dependably sharp-witted response to the old mansion’s holdings, Delusions of Grandeur is three years and “at least 20” visits in the making, so it’s fair to say he is on intimate terms with its every silk-papered nook. This is how he came to be deliberating his fantasy heist of an item from the collection.“I think about this a lot,” Perry says. “I can be really tasteful and say the Velázquez or the big Gainsborough; the stuff with gold-standard academic credentials — ‘good choice, Grayson!’ — but I dunno, some of the guns are amazing. When you think they are handmade, from an era before machine tools; as a person who makes things, I find that so beautiful.”We have met in the museum’s glass-roofed courtyard, a tranquil space of potted trees and swag curtains that, in the days when the omnivorous collector Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890) called the building home, was a sculpture garden. It is early March, the weather turning, the sky two storeys above our heads crystalline blue.Perry, who became a household name on winning the Turner Prize in 2003, will be 65 next week. He is celebrating the milestone roué-style, he tells me, with a grand glittery party at which he will perform songs about his life and wear the dress he has designed with Liberty as one of the objects in the new exhibition. It’s a silk, piecrust-collared pinafore — part Victorian child, part 1970s Laura Ashley garden party.Perry has been cross-dressing since the age of 13, but he has come as himself today rather than his alter ego Claire, in baggy cords, a fleece and a T-shirt that has seen better days. His nails are rimed with glaze or paint and his gossamer curls sleep-mussed. He has the wan cast of someone who has done recent battle with a deadline. Half a century into his career, does he still get nervous before an opening? “Yeah unconsciously, I think I do. I put on a good front, but I always feel slightly like I’m standing on a flagpole and everybody is looking up, waiting for me to fall off.” He laughs. “Very British.”Inviting Perry, an artist known for tackling the absurdities of class and taste into a museum whose collection cants heavily towards gilt-garlanded knick-knackery and fandangles, might seem a bold choice. But he has always been interested in clichés and strange cultural connections, and arguably his pots and tapestries, his shrines, maps and Bafta-winning TV programmes thrive on just this sort of dissonance. Still, he stumbled: “I liked it. I enjoyed my visits. But I didn’t love it, and I knew I needed to love it to make work from it.” His solution was to create “someone to love the collection for me”. Enter Shirley Smith, a Barking-born, self-taught outsider artist who believes herself the Wallaces’ lost heir. “Her” works, which are inspired by her favourite pieces in the collection, will be shown beside Perry’s. “I like those shifting layers of reality, where you’re not sure she’s not real.” As with his previous fictional personas — Julie Cope for the 2012-15 multiwork “A House of Essex”; Tim Rakewell in the tapestry “The Vanity of Small Differences” (2012) — Perry has given Shirley a rich back-story. She is “a kind of amalgam” of real outsider artists Madge Gill (British, 1882-1961) and Aloïse Corbaz (Swiss, 1886-1964), but also a favourite aunt and his mother, Jean; “intelligent working-class women who were thwarted by their circumstances”.While looking for objects in the Wallace that he or Shirley could respond to, Perry tells me, he happened on a truth. “One of the things we all do when we come to a museum, unconsciously or otherwise, is to look for ourselves,” he explains. “Things that shout out to us. It’s the same with people. When people say they fall in love at first sight, what they really mean is transference at first sight — it reminds you of something deep within you; some other relationship.”The tapestry “Story of My Life”, for instance, collages swooning women from the sentimental genre paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Louis-Léopold Boilly, whose works Richard Wallace collected with abandon and to which Perry found himself irresistibly drawn. “Am I somehow admitting to being a bit of a drama queen?” he writes in the catalogue. “Or is it a reflection of the turbulence of my (and Shirley’s) early life?”Sentimental, shiny and showy, it’s true this corner of art can be hard to love. Perhaps Perry’s chief beef, though, is its polite, “structured fun” quality, “because politeness is the enemy of authentic communication, and I suppose I try always to operate in a visual language that communicates what I think of as authentic.” He explains this by comparing it to the way “we all immediately know when what we are hearing isn’t spontaneous thought, don’t we? Reading is too regular, it has no hesitations or filler words or gaps.” He has long been interested in authenticity’s flip side, too — fakes. “I love patina, rust and the look of old objects,” he says, “because they suggest the authority of history and I enjoy faking that. He does it “really well”, he adds — and it’s true. For his 2011 exhibition The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum, he placed a helmet he had made while studying fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1981 and left in the garden for 20 years, next to a genuine one from the Asante empire (modern-day Ghana). “The guess was which one was real, and people always chose the corroded one. Next to it, the real one looked like it had been knocked up for the local panto production of Star Wars. Hah! I loved that.”He thinks that “playing with Shirley”, as he describes it, has a lot to do with that. “I’m not expecting anybody to be fooled, but I quite want them to have the opportunity to be fooled if they want to be. To look at a thing and think: is that really a piece of outsider art?”I wonder if the appeal of outsider art — an inspiration on Perry’s practice since the very beginning — has to do with his yen for authenticity. “I suppose there’s a romance to it, and a purity, in that it’s uncluttered by the isms and agendas of the art world. Historically, outsider artists would’ve been isolated from all that, but we live in an age now where nothing germinates naturally any more; there’s no culture still uninfluenced by the ‘great blender’. That for me is one of the bugbears of the modern age, that authenticity doesn’t have a chance. Everything becomes a ‘thing’ really quickly, and that’s the end of that.”What’s the answer, I ask. “Deep cynicism,” he says, with what can only be described as a cackle. “I’ve got an impenetrable carapace of cynicism.”March 28-October 26, wallacecollection.org
