1972/1986

Since, I opened letters in 1971, that I had written to my older self since 1962,  I made several performances using the texts, often in combinations of recorded and live sound. At Reading University, I did a similar performance twice, in 1973 and 1983, aware of talking across time as they both dealt with a sense of forwards and backwards observations. Each used recordings from extracts of these letters, in which I was concerned with the ’osmosis’ of being through time, of what constitutes ‘who’ one is and ‘who’ one becomes. I made several performances where both my own voice on cassette players and my body are subjected to similar assaults of paint and sometimes water from hosepipes resulting in visual and sonic layering’s and ‘distortions,’ the cassette players and myself ending up silent.

I have never seen Anne Bean perform, … she was doing a different piece at each venue, responding to the previous night’s performance, or the course of the day’s events……..  She read an extract about painting from her adolescent diary, and to a tape loop of a phrase about ‘the painter and painted being one’ proceeded to dip her hair in blue paint and flick it back over the surrounding bay of rolls of paper. What may sound passé was carried out with irresistible conviction and honesty without reserve, temporarily closing the performance/audience gap to a millimetre breath. I was riveted and so was almost everyone else.

Performance magazine (Projects UK tour) 1986

‘I can invent you, hope for you, search for you, want for you, gain knowledge for you, experience for you. For me, you can love me, you can remember me, you can hear me, you can answer me’
AB 1966

The posters made for both these Reading performances were monoprints of my face.

In ‘Flight from Gondwanaland’ 1982, I began the performance standing underneath a bright light bulb as the only lighting in the room. I read out on a video recording, the words below, from my teenage writings. Paul Burwell, using an air pistol shot the light bulb so that it shattered over my head and the room went dark, apart from the video:

The tyrannical heat, the strident light, the low rumbling sound that seemed to be the sun itself, all breaking into free-fall, so my eyes weren’t seeing but were what they saw, my ears weren’t hearing but were what they heard. Particles simultaneously possessed and dispossessed.

My face in the video carried on saying these words whilst I bound up the monitor with black ribbon until the whole room was dark

I then used slide projection with images of my mouth in the position of each word I was saying so that language broke apart into syllables. I also attached small clamps with strings on to my lips and used my mouth as one might use a string puppet to manipulate my words, a device of manipulating my lips first used in Ventriloquist and Dummy, 1971 and used in various manifestations.