Towards a Prehistory of Live Art in the UK

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Notes

Nick Kaye, ‘Introduction – Live Art: Definition and Documentation’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 2.2 (1994), 1–7.

Ibid., p. 2.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 3.

Ibid.

The British roots of the term ‘performance art’ are difficult to locate. Jeff Nuttall credits himself and Roland Miller (when members of The People Show) as having invented it ‘to differentiate between what we were doing and what had always been called theatre’ and cites modernist traditions of poetry and painting as inspirations (Jeff Nuttall, without title, Studio International, 195.991–2 (1981), 54–55 (p. 54)). The fact is that in 1973 the Arts Council of Great Britain had a Performance Art Committee (a subcommittee of its Art Panel), consisting of Miller, Adrian Henri, Gavin Henderson and Ted Little (The Arts Council of Great Britain, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report and Accounts 1973–1974 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974)) and that from the mid-1970s on the name was firmly established in Britain (if not always appreciated by all the artists it labelled), appearing in the titles of funding schemes, festivals and publications.

The genealogy of the term in the USA is even less certain. RoseLee Goldberg suggests that the term ‘was first used very loosely by artists in the early 1960s in the USA’ but does not provide a source (RoseLee Goldberg, ‘Performance Art’, in From Expressionism to Post-Modernism (The Grove Dictionary of Art), ed. by Jane Turner (London: Macmillan Reference, 2000), pp. 294–302 (p. 294). For an account of the history of the term see Bruce Barber, ‘Indexing: Conditionalism and its Heretical Equivalents', in Al Bronson and Peggy Gale (eds), Performance by Artists (Toronto: Art Metropole), pp. 183–204.

Amelia Jones has proposed that the term ‘performance art’ is also inappropriate for a description of the body art practices of the early 1970s (which are often only accessible through documentation) as the term encompasses ‘any kind of theatricalized production on the part of a visual artist’ and presupposes a live event. Amelia Jones, ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal, 56.4 (Winter 1997), 11–18 (p. 18).

Early accounts of performance activities in Britain have tended to be more inclusive: see, for example, Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974); Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968); and Jeff Nuttall, Performance Art: Memoirs Vol. 1 (London: John Calder, 1979). Henri and Nuttall both locate performance within an expanded field of new forms of artistic practice, arising from painting, sculpture, poetry and music, connected in Henri's case through an address to the totality of the work's environmental dimension, in Nuttall's case through strategies of juxtaposition and the use of found objects.

Sandy Craig, for example, refers to 1960s performance activities as precursors of the ‘alternative theatre’ that flourished in 1970s Britain, but proposes that they are ‘more representative as the final flings of a European tradition of the avant-garde than as the first gestures of a full-blooded radical alternative’ (Sandy Craig, ‘Reflexes of the Future’, in Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain, ed. by Sandy Craig (Ambergate: Amber Lane Press, 1980), pp. 9–29 (p. 15)). Similarly, Catherine Itzin considers Jim Hayne's work in Edinburgh in the 1960s as fertilizing a radical theatre tradition in Britain whose proper beginning she locates, like Craig, in 1968. Catherine Itzin, Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain since 1968 (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 9.

Kaye, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

Research on the Cardiff Happening of 1965 has emerged from our current research project: ‘“It Was Forty Years Ago Today”: Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965–1979’, <www.performance-wales.org> [accessed 12 November 2011]. The research has been supported by a research grant from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (2009–11). Principal Investigator: Heike Roms, Research Assistant: Rebecca Edwards, <www.ahrc.ac.uk> [accessed 12 November 2011].

Indeed, Henri proposes that the experimental performance work in the UK came ‘from a provincial rather than a London context’. Henri, Environments, p. 111.

Henri cites earlier Happenings being created in Liverpool in 1962, ‘as a result of my reading an article by Allan Kaprow earlier that year’. Henri, Environments, p. 116.

In January of the same year Jim Haynes, Calder and Richard Demarco had founded the influential Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which together with the International Festival (and later the Demarco Gallery) made the Scottish capital an important location for new approaches to performance.

Including critic Kenneth Tynan (as chair), actor Laurence Olivier, playwrights John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Max Frisch and Eugene Ionesco, academic Martin Esslin, and others.

Ken Dewey, ‘X-ings’, Tulane Drama Review, 10.2 (Winter 1965), 216–23 (p. 222).

Ken Dewey as cited in Charles Marowitz, Burnt Bridges: A Souvenir of the Swinging Sixties and Beyond (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), pp. 59–60.

Allan Kaprow staged a Happening entitled Exit Piece (also known as Out) on the same day in the courtyard of the McEwan Hall; see Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 93–95. There are reports that another Happening planned by Kaprow (to be entitled Sea) was cancelled at the insistence of conference chair, Kenneth Tynan; see Hanns Sohm, happening & fluxus (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970), n. p.

Kesselaar and Calder were subsequently charged with indecency, but Kesselaar was acquitted and charges against Calder were dropped.

Dewey's title for the event appears in some publications as In Memory of Big Ed; see Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966), pp. 281–84.

Beth Hoffmann, ‘Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art’, Performance Research, 14.1 (Spring 2009), 95–105.

Ibid., p. 96.

Ibid. In his account of the event Dewey seems far more concerned with notions of form than Marowitz, considering the Happening as having ‘freed’ text, which he identifies as one of the three ‘frames’ of theatre (the others being space and time). See Dewey, ‘X-ings’, p. 221).

Hoffmann, ‘Radicalism’, pp. 100–2.

Kaye, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

Cardiff Commonwealth Arts Festival 1965, Programme (Cardiff: Cardiff Commonwealth Arts Festival, 1965), n. p.

Ian Hunter, ‘A Unique Festival of Commonwealth Culture’, Commonwealth Journal, 8.3 (May/June 1965), 107–10 (p. 107).

Festival Directors in Cardiff were Bill and Wendy Harpe, later founders of Liverpool's Great Georges Community Cultural Project.

‘Fringe Events Give Funds a Boost. Third Week Begins “in Black”’, by Western Mail Reporter, Western Mail (25 September 1965), p. 4. The newspaper here uses a remark by conference participant, poet T. Wignesan.

The event has been referred to under two different titles: as Assembly Line (by Tom Hudson) and as Welsh Automative Salad with Yogurt (by Jean-Jacques Lebel). (The original score by Lebel calls the event Welsh Automotive Salad with Yougurt; see Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Welsh Automative Salad with Yogurt’, in Jean-Jaques Lebel and Androula Michaël (eds), happenings de jean-jacques lebel ou l'insoumission radicale (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2009), pp. 172–75.) These appear to have been two different contributions to the same work. We have decided therefore to refer to the overall event as the ‘Cardiff Happening of 1965’.

Michael Lloyd-Williams, ‘Poetry, Paint and Toilet Seats’, Western Mail (25 September 1965), p. 4.

Michael Lloyd-Williams, ‘Girls Offer to Dance in Nude. Edinburgh-Style “Happening” Is Out’, Western Mail (23 September 1965), p. 5.

Henri, Environments, p. 86.

Lloyd-Williams, ‘Girls Offer’.

See, for example, Nuttall, Bomb Culture, pp. 230–32.

Action painting's influence on Happenings is well documented, not least through Kaprow's seminal essay on Jackson Pollock (1958): Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. by Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–9.

Lebel, happenings, p. 172.

Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, The Something Else Newsletter, 1.1 (February 1966), n. p.

Such posturing was certainly a part of the event, and other participants at the conference duly condemned the Happening as ‘nonsense’ and its organizers as ‘degenerate freaks’. See Harri Webb in A Militant Muse: Selected Literary Journalism 1948–80, ed. by Meic Stephens (Bridgend: Seren, 1998 (1965; 1977)), pp. 80, 200. Yet the Cardiff Beats also aimed at wider political targets than those represented by the art establishment. A letter written to ‘fellow poet’ Chairman Mao (initiated by Michael Horovitz and Michael de Freitas), a petition to the Queen (authored by Paolo Leonni), a pig in lament of the Vietnam war were all part of the performative protest repertoire in Cardiff. The other poets present also represented a very different kind of establishment than Tynan or Olivier (then newly designated director of the National Theatre) had stood for in Edinburgh: the poetic orthodoxy against whom the Beats protested was represented largely by poets from Asia and Africa, which made the conflict between tradition and experimentation run along complex cultural, racial and religious lines.

Lebel, happenings, p. 172.

We have not been able to find any details about this work, and it is possible that Lebel misremembers the title.

Philip Corner, ‘Memory of the First Happening in Cardiff in 1964 [sic] – Or at least what i remember of my part in it’, unpublished event score, 2009.

For conceptual writings on Happenings see Happenings and Other Acts, ed. by Mariellen R. Sandford (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

Josette Féral, ‘Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified’, Modern Drama, 25 (Spring 1982), 170–81.

Kaye, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

James Morrison, ‘The Beat Goes On’, The Independent (22 September 2005), p. 44–45.

The Western Mail reported from the preliminary talks to establish an agenda for the Cardiff Poetry Conference: ‘[I]t soon became apparent that there were plenty of ideas for discussion, including the topically pertinent one of whether happenings were necessary for poets’. Beata Lipman, ‘“Decadent” European Poetry Criticised’, Western Mail (21 September 1965), p. 5.

See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1986).

Reiterations of this kind have appeared a lot in our interviews with artists of the period, see Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards, ‘It Was Forty Years Ago Today’. Interviews with artists, administrators and audience members, accessible at the British Library Sound Archive.

RoseLee Goldberg, ‘Performance: A Hidden History’, in The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (New York: Dutton, 1984), pp. 24–36 (p. 26).

See Goldberg, Performance: Live Art.

Hoffmann, ‘Radicalism’, p. 102.

Kaye, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

Ibid., p. 3.

Kristine Stiles, ‘The Story of the Destruction in Art Symposium and the “DIAS Affect”’, in Gustav Metzger: History History, ed. by Sabine Breitwieser (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), pp. 41–65 (p. 54).

Sandy Craig has analysed the rapid establishment of an infrastructure for experimental performance practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the UK, including new venues, new publications (e.g. Time Out) and the Arts Council's New Activities funding schemes, initiated in 1968; Craig, ‘Reflexes', pp. 15–17.

A parallel history could be developed through Jeff Nuttall, another participant in the Cardiff Happening, and his involvement in Leeds College of Art, which became an equally important site for the training of performance artists in the 1970s. Rose English, Roger Ely, Dave Stephens, Geraldine Pilgrim and others were Nuttall's students at Leeds.

See Clive Ashwin, A Century of Art Education 1882–1982 (London: Middlesex Polytechnic, 1982).

Mark Hudson, ‘Obituaries: Tom Hudson’, Independent (8 January 1998).

The ‘Basic Design’ approach eventually became the basis for the new Foundation Course provision in the UK in the 1960s. Its suggestion of an organic development that would take the artists from 2D to 3D to 4D, its emphasis on materials and skills and the underlying notion that there are universally applicable ‘foundational’ principles for art making have since been widely criticized. See David Thistlewood, ‘A Continuing Process: The New Creativity in British Art Education 1955–1965’, in Histories of Art and Design Education: Cole to Coldstream, ed. by David Thistlewood (Harlow: Longman, 1992), pp. 152–68.

Hudson later re-engaged with performance work in the context of the performative ‘symposia’ that were regularly held by Cardiff College of Art in the early 1970s.

The move from two- to three- to four-dimensionality mirrored that of the development from painting to assemblage to happening undertaken by Kaprow and others.

The Tom Hudson Collection at the National Arts Education Archive, West Bretton, Wakefield, UK.

The workshops were held under different titles: Action and Ideas, or Action/Ideas, or Myself and Others. They were devised by Gingell in close collaboration with fellow teachers Di Setch and Chris Orr and former students, Andrew Walton and, in particular, John Danvers.

Tom Hudson too at the time increasingly conceptualized his teaching practice as a mode of performance, creating a series of lecture performances (or what he termed ‘Academic Performances’), which were presented in the framework of the symposia.

Other art schools that influenced the development of performance in Britain, besides Cardiff and Leeds, included Bradford, Croydon, Maidstone, Newcastle and Reading.

Anthony Howell, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999).

Peggy Phelan, ‘Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth through a Glass, Darkly’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 499–512 (p. 500).

See Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards, Interview with John Danvers, Charles Garrad and Ken Hickman, Cardiff, 4 March 2010 as part of ‘It Was Forty Years Ago Today’. Interviews with artists, administrators and audience members, accessible at the British Library Sound Archive.

There are, of course, a number of scholars who have evaluated performance work in Britain within the context of fine art discourses; see, for example, the work of Guy Brett.

British performance art's musical genealogy is less well known but equally important. See, for example, the Cage-influenced performance works of Gavin Bryars in the 1970s.

Goldberg, Performance: Live Art; Nuttall's Memoirs was published in the same year; Craig, Dreams and Itzin, Stages followed a year later.