Anne Bean

Description

Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols.

 

Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

Introduction

Rob La Frenais

Impossible Things: The Life Art of Anne Bean in the 1970s

Dominic Johnson

Memento Mori: Secret Conversations we didn't know we were having

Lynne MacRitchie

Is Possessed: The Artist, the Critic, the Pirate and the Messenger

Rob La Frenais

The Audience as Battery: Interview with Anne Bean

Rob La Frenais

TAPS: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Within Living Memory: Shadow Deeds

Guy Brett

Today's the Day: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Unask the Question: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Erasing Distances: Forging PAVES

Poshya Kakl

Disbelief Systems: Interview with Bow Gamelan Ensemble 

Rob La Frenais

Disbelief Systems: An Afterword – The Threshold

Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal

The Entangled Self: The Art of Life in the Open Air 

Ezra Rubenstein

Conversation Portraits

Anne Bean

Lines and Threads: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Contributor Biographies

 

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Dancers
• Años 1970
• Life Art
• Harry Kipper
• Karen Finley
• Live Art
• Choreography
• Performance art
• General officer
• 1970s
• Art
• General
• Kim Jones
• Evan Parker
• Paul McCarthy
• Performance

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209804
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Anne Bean, untitled performance with the Kipper Kids, Los Angeles, 1979. Photo: Elisa Leonelli
First published in the UK in 2018 by
Live Art Development Agency The Garrett Centre 117 Mansford Street London, E2 6LX, UK www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk
and
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK www.intellectbooks.com
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Edited by Rob La Frenais, 2018
Contributions © the individual contributors, 2018
Front cover image: Anne Bean, Self Etc. , 2017 Photos: Hugo Glendinning
Designed by David Caines Unlimited www.davidcaines.co.uk
Printed and bound by Gomer Press, UK
ISBN 978–1–78320–946–0 ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-947-7 epub ISBN 978-1-78320-980-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publishers.
All opinions expressed in the material contained within this publication are those of the artists and authors and not necessarily those of the editors, publishers or the publishers’ partners.
The editors and publishers have endeavoured to source accurate information about reproductions and image copyrights. In the case of incomplete or inaccurate information in image captions, upon request the editors will make every effort to correct subsequent editions where possible.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
INTELLECT LIVE
Anne Bean: Self Etc. is part of Intellect Live – a series of publications on influential artists working at the edges of performance. Intellect Live is a collaboration between Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency. The series is characterised by lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed books, each of which is the first substantial publication dedicated to an artist’s work.
Series Editors: Dominic Johnson, Lois Keidan and CJ Mitchell
ISSN 2052-0913
Photo: Sarah Faraday at CAMP, Pyrenees
BECAME THOSE WHO BECAME THOSE WHO BECAME THOSE WHO BECAME THOSE WHO RAN FROM THE THOUGHT OF THE LOST AND CAME FINALLY TO THE PLACE WHERE THE WATER MEETS THE BANKS AND THE PLACE WHERE THE SKY MEETS THE CLOUDS AND THE PLACE WHERE THE SKIN MEETS THE AIR AND THE BOOK MEETS THE TABLE AND INHABITED THE SPACES
ADVENTURES IN THE HOUSE OF MEMORY PULp MUSIC, 1982
CONTENTS
Introduction
Rob La Frenais
Impossible Things: The Life Art of Anne Bean in the 1970s
Dominic Johnson
Memento Mori: Secret Conversations We Didn’t Know We Were Having
Lynn MacRitchie
Is Possessed: The Artist, the Critic, the Pirate and the Messenger
Rob La Frenais
The Audience As Battery: Interview with Anne Bean
Rob La Frenais
TAPS: A Visual Essay
Anne Bean
Within Living Memory: Shadow Deeds
Guy Brett
Today’s The Day: A Visual Essay
Anne Bean
Unask the Question: A Visual Essay
Anne Bean
Erasing Distances: Forging PAVES
Poshya Kakl
Disbelief Systems: Interview with Bow Gamelan Ensemble
Rob La Frenais
Disbelief Systems: An Afterword – The Threshold
Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal
The Entangled Self: The Art of Life in the Open Air
Ezra Rubenstein
Conversation Portraits
Anne Bean
Lines and Threads: A Visual Essay
Anne Bean
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
ROB LA FRENAIS
‘Now all you artists don’t rack your brains what it’s all about’, the showgirl in Union Jack sequins said as she left (described in an email from Anne Bean about her recent event MoCa to Mega in 2018 while we were compiling this book). Anne Bean: Self Etc. was meant to be a monograph about the massive body of work that is Anne Bean’s artistic activity since the 1960s but that would imply that it has finished. The artist, like me, born in the very early 1950s, seems to have just started, not finished.
Nearly all of these essays – mainly, newly commissioned – seem to follow a theme of stripping back the art: the un-paintings, un-art, un-performances, and anti-art aspects of the life-art of Anne Bean. A running thread concerns her various selves, not only her embodied self who emerged in the last years – Chana Dubinski – but also the ‘self and the others’, the now dead and not-yet-dead ones, the micro-selves contained within Bean’s consciousness. Bean is insistent that the ‘self’ is fluid, that the ‘etc’ is as significant as the ‘self’ it multiplies. She lives the lives as others walk the walk in her ‘wilfully untenable acts’, as Dominic Johnson puts it in his opening essay.
‘Nothing is True – All is Permitted’, reportedly uttered by the Master of the Assassins, Hassan-i Sabbah, could be the motto of her venturings – except for the fact that despite her apparent ability to put herself in sometimes physical, if not psychic danger in the random circumstances she finds herself in, she is also a regular, vulnerable human, who – as she says in ‘The Audience as Battery’, our interview in this book – ‘does not want to be an art sacrificial lamb’.
These essays, then, explore the various selves of Anne Bean. Like Gurdjieff’s exercise of ‘self-re-membering’, referred to in Dominic Johnson’s essay, we are indeed ‘racking our brains’ wondering what the ‘self’ is all about. Lynn MacRitchie explores the ‘self and the others’ in her juxtaposition of Anne Bean’s work and a group of influential female artists who are no longer alive but live on in our lives and in Bean’s. I have tried, in my essay, to assemble the mischievous versions of memory that were created by moments of collaboration with her, where the ‘critic’ – which I am – becomes fuel for creation and destruction. In two interviews, the voices of Bean and her long-term collaborators, Richard Wilson and Paul Burwell can be heard, Burwell being also one of Anne’s many ‘selves’ beyond his death.
Voices can be heard from elsewhere – the artist Poshya Kakl describes how meeting Bean in Iraqi Kurdistan changed her life and gave her permission to make performance art in a place of danger. Guy Brett invokes the spirit of Ana Mendieta in a comparison with Anne Bean’s later work. Finally physicist and philosopher Ezra Rubinstein makes the important point that the many selves of Bean align pretty appositely with our current understanding of quantum entanglement and cosmology.
These texts are all tied together by visual essays and interventions composed by the artist herself, to ultimately freeze-frame a moment in the complex construct that is the life and work of Anne Bean. It is there, hopefully to be enjoyed, to enliven, to disturb, to tease, to scare, to amuse and finally challenge the notion of the many et ceteras that seem to define the ‘self’.
Anne Bean, MoCa to Mega, an installation at Moments of Consciousness and..., Trowbridge, alongside Trow Vegas tour with local artist Meg Mosley. Photo: Peter Fink
Anne Bean, She Perceiving Her with Manuel Vason, River Thames, 2016
Low Flying Aircraft (1979), a single by PULp MUSIC (Anne Bean and Paul Burwell)
SELF ETC APPEARED IN REFLECT
TIME WENT BACKWARDS FOR EMIT
TAPS SCRAMBLED PAST
A YEAR BECAME A YEARNING
A DRESS BECAME A REDRESS
ANXTIONS HELD ANXIOUS ACTIONS WAR REVERSED TO RAW
A WOUND UNWOUND
A LEAD MAN IS ALSO A LEAD MAN
WAKE AWOKE , TRACKING TURBULENCE AND VIGILS
AUTOBITUARY AND ORBITUARIES
RABBITEARS FUSED RABBI TEARS AND RABBIT EARS
A TEAR IS A TEAR
LIVE IS ALSO LIVE
A TRANSPECTIVE
DISC COVER
EMIT exhibition, Coleman Project Space, London, 2017. Photo: Anne Bean
Anne Bean, LIVE LIVE , Live Art Development Agency, launch of new space, 2017. Photo: Alpay Beler
Anne Bean, Reading Water , under Forbury Bridge, Reading, 2016
Anne Bean, annotated image of Reading Water . I saw ‘SELFETC’emerging as I contemplated an upside-down ‘REFLECT’
Anne Bean, The ABCD ness of it All: Ceci n’est pas une performance (by chance with Dominic Johnson and Elyssa Livergant). Part of Aaron Williamson and Kate Mahony’s season Sculpture-Performance: Acme Artists Now , Purfleet, 2014. Photo: Hugo Glendinning
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS: THE LIFE ART OF ANNE BEAN IN THE 1970S
DOMINIC JOHNSON
You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.
— Eileen Myles
The Whitechapel Gallery Archive holds a letter to Anne Bean from the curators of A Short History of Performance Vol. 1 (2002) a major retrospective of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. 1 In the form letter – also sent to Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, Vito Acconci, Stuart Brisley, Gilbert & George and others – Andrea Tarsia and Iwona Blazwick invited Bean to ‘re-live a small number of pivotal performances, once again bringing them in direct relation with an audience.’ Bean replied with a postcard to Tarsia to politely decline, writing: ‘I have to be honest and say that I don’t consider any of my work either renowned or pivotal in the sense of this “season”.’ 2 More than mere humility, Bean’s refusal signals a conviction about the status of her performances, the nature of the relationship between her performances as a continuum, and the role of the continuum as an anchor for the broader edifice of a life.
In Anne Bean’s practice since the late 1970s, the principles of her work and their attendant values have remained more or less consistent: her performances are never scripted in advance beyond a basic score, never repeated or re-performed (though sometimes ‘reformed’, or returned to and reinterpreted anew), and inconsistently documented. Working principles include her refusal or emphatic side-lining of photographic and audio-visual documentation; practices of differing durations, from the very short to the very long, necessitating a definite refusal of the convention of theatrical or cinematic time; the use of povera (‘poor’) or pedestrian materials, including found or pre-loved objects; and the disavowal of a signature style. Bean often refrains from making k