Self Portrait. Who of?
Dialogues: Anne Bean and Paul Burwell, 2010.
Debut showing at Cooper Gallery, Dundee The programming focus of Cooper Gallery, Collaboration and Collectivity, culminated in a new video work by Anne Bean entitled Self Portrait. Who of? This work included archival footage as well as drawings and texts from Paul Burwell’s notebooks stretching over 35 years. Anne Bean worked with these to make a portrait of a time and an ethos, exploring the nature of collaborative actions and artists’ collectives,
COLLECTIVE THOUGHTS from Paul’s notebooks:
As a simple human being, as well as a musician, researcher, social
animal and anthropologist, I cleave to a sense of identification and loss
of ego. BUT there is another part —the more separate part, the part
that sees life as a strange dream-like adventure and by dreamlike I
mean vivid, intense and sometimes frightening that makes me question
everything and doesn’t allow satisfaction with anything. Commonality
becomes a constraining cliché, a place of lack of imagination, the
sheeplike quality of human thought against which you must hurl
yourself to create something new, no matter how paltry of your own.……
THE WAY FORWARD: (or if not forward, at least SOMEWHERE ELSE) Thinking of Art as a kind of lateral thinking skill, art as intervention, of
approaching the notion of changing the rules, standing things on their
head, re-examining the basic tenets of any arena of enquiry or
discipline. Being able to put not only pre-conceived notions in their
place, but to be prepared to tamper with the most dearly held tenets of
any discipline. (PB 1976)
This duality, his recognition of collective works and actions as an empathetic social diagram versus his awareness of his solo practice as a space in which he was answerable to no-one, where he could both fly and crash, haunted him.
This debut showing of Self-Portrait. Who of? concluded with an in-conversation event in which Anne Bean and Richard Wilson conversed ‘with’ Paul Burwell