Rainbows

Rainbows

Real & Imaginary Rainbows in MY life.

This one is a few days old when I photo’d it emanating from ma chimbley early one morning.

This was about the year I got borned, it was released c.Dec 1949, I wer popped oot Oct1950.

I love old comic books. Tiger Tim was great but my personal fave was Toby Twirl. The illustrators were the first great artists I was ever aware of. I was lucky as my parents could not afford to buy me them so I yearned so much to have them that nowadays, when I see them in various shops, I try to buy them. I keep on forlornly hoping that the skills will rub off on me, am still waiting. Of course I’d never do a ‘comic’ comic like they were but I do intend to re-visit my 1976 ‘graphic-novel’ Applehead Lives during 2017 and re-do it using the skills and technologies am still picking up along my merry way.

 

Performance Art Life Changer a year ago now:

 

Today I want to take you back a year to 2015 from 12 to 24^th of October when I was on a lifetime best experience in any form of art that I have ever involved with.

Workshops run by Jurgen Fritz (‘JFr’) alongside others by Vest & Page (‘VanP’), which ran simultaneously, changed my approach to my Performance Art (PA). I doubt I shall ever come across such good quality inspiration again in this life. JFr and VanP were great team leaders and their respective teams were packed with people from around the world, many of whom had considerably good PA to bring to the 12 days of intensive workshops and actual PA gigs around Bristol; market, harbour and art gallery. I was privileged to both witness and participate in it and what I learned there fed into my PA part in Firstsite’s PA Day in November 2015.

The sessions gave me confidence to pick up my PA from where it had arrived and lift it to new height. It’s not for me to say how good or bad my output is, that I’ll leave for you & others to decide, but my 3 mentors gave me a will to carry on and carry out my PA with a renewed determination to be original, different and also to pay tribute to others who have gone before inspiring my work.

So today I am going to talk and show about some of the performance art I saw there done by some of my fellow participants. Altho’ I love all three of them I’m not going to talk about JFr and V&P cos you can find their work by just googling em. See- http://www.veniceperformanceart.org/index.php?page=255&lang=en

I’d like to go into some detail on Anna Kosarewska, Jamie Burr & Carol Montealegre, (I’ll get round to doing a blArt on Debbie Guinan and Robert Hardaker a little further in the future. )

All the photos were taken by and © Jurgen Fritz 2015 unless otherwise stated.

 

Anna Kosarewska,

Anna did some real beautiful PA during our time doing the course. Her best piece brought us all to tears as she commemorated several friends who had been killed during the invasion of her home country recently. PA can be a most powerful way of bringing issues into the public domain. Everything she did she did with consummate grace and care often covering her face with cloth or some other material.

I loved the piece she did in the harbour on the rail track in which she used little toy soldiers. At one time her presence nearly caused some of the local workmen to have heart attacks when she refused to move from the track and a train was approaching albeit at a very slow pace, but it didn’t seem ready to halt, and she was lifted to safety by two of IPA’s organisers Eva & Fay.

On Saturday evening she did some acts balancing glasses filled with water and walking dreamlike around the stairs.

Jamie Burr,

Jamie did some very moving pieces. His gig with bales of hay and a pitchfork on the harbour was gripping but best of all was his one done in the garden at Dunden where he covered himself in sloshy mud and threw water on himself from glass jars. I know that sounds stupid but it was quite incredible. Reality was suspended and I became one with a strange world Jamie established between the field and a willow den. He had set up about seven jars filled with water. About 200 metres from the den he had buckets with mud paste in them which he applied liberally to his naked body. Then he ran, followed by the whole lot of PA participants and leaders, to the den.

He entered it and sat inside a few minutes, then picked up one jar, walked out of the den and doused himself and walked back in and sat again and did it again and again until the jars were empty and steam was rising from his limbs when he ran into the building to shower and dress himself again.

Carol Montealegre,

Thursday 22nd October 14:00-16:00, Castle Park Artists Alba Murcia (Spain) Nicole Murmann (Switzerland) Oozing Gloop Ye Olde (UK) Taz Burns (UK) Bojana Videkanic (Canada) Pete Kennedy (UK) Andrea Greenwood (UK) Jolanda Jansen (Netherlands) Carol Andrea Montealegre Pinzón (Colombia)

Carol at Castle Park

Carol comes from Colombia, she brought some exquisitely lovely PA ideas with her. She had these ideas like using twigs which I have seen being used by some of the big names but Carol had a special touch of her own. I loved her use of black face paint, lace on garments, leather so much so that I began to use it myself- face paint that is and my first use happened to be black (it would have been gold if I’d not first painted a Zorro mask on!) in my Zorro & Beuys+Dead Woodpecker-poem PA at Firstsite last November.

This photo were taken by Priscila Buschinelli (look at the eyes!)

Photo by Pete Kennedy

But I didn’t look as good as Carol, no way. I loved the piece she did one evening as it turned dark where she blacked up and that made her teeth and eyes really stand out. She used black balloons too

(like Alastair MacLennan did, see

http://www.veniceperformanceart.org/index.php?page=186&lang=en )

but with much more beauty. Carol had brought along small props which she would drop into each of her pieces with aplomb.writing in Arnolfini lift

 Influencers of my own work.

Alfred Jarry, G I Gurdjieff, e e cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Ken Campbell are some of my biggest influences, if I can call them that. Then there’s dances by Michael Stipe of REM and Tim Booth of James, plus Samuel T Herring of Future Islands, all of which I love.

I love the way Picasso, Topolski and Japanese Zen Masters draw in front of folk.

Masks from other cultures and my own creations in the past. These are a few of my favourite tings which you’ll see pop up in ma new PA gigs. I have been told I can do 10 minutes at the next BABE book fair in Bristol’s Arnolfini gallery in April 2017 so watch this space for development.

I shall be:entering with attitude, dancing like an Idiot wearing a Tea Cosy, drawing on the zen master’s, wearing a new Shrewd Apulhed mask and costume and, if yez aks him nice & kindly he, may do a gentle, meditative dance and do an Apul-zen* drawing himself. I am going to ask some of my friends at Benton Hall to help with the choreography.

I like the possibilities! I have also gotten a new take on my old frend Apulhed. Someone in Ghana has ‘borrowed’ the idea of Apulhed and produced lots of T shirts and tings thus illegally tampering with my copyrights. I created Apulhed way back and reserve the right to call it mine. Similarly I am now creating new ideas to play with in my ‘Apul’zone, so leaf them alone.

APULZeD

&

APULRah to Yah

©pete kennedy 2016

 Finally I saw more rainbows on my horizons:

1. I received a (for this blArty Space) very rare ‘comment’ – see below.
2. My previous blArty bit was my 200th.
3. wordpress kindly informed me I have now had 200 ‘likes’, that, even with my simple math brain, is an average of one per blArt! I have always loved coincidence & synchronistic occurence and the conjunction of the fact that I had posted 200 and had exactly 200 likes is just too much.

It’s For The People.

 

Going back to thoughts https://apulhed.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/a-lifelong-friend/ on my old friend for 60 years Trev*, initially it would trouble me that my words don’t reach people like him but, on consideration, I have spent 48 years developing my words & ideas which he neither followed nor kept up with my path, why should he? I don’t understand his zone either, he was an accountant, I don’t do money, ask HMRC they’d confirm that. *Good news is Trev got in touch and said he enjoyed my last blArt.

Here’s the first viewing of one of the Apulhed Comix c.1977 that never got published in the 1970s. By 1979 I had created Happy Apulhed, a much more friendly, less eerie character.

When I was doing Apulhed comics at college in the early 1970s my old mates back in Burnley could explain my work was beyond their experience by saying, “Pete’s gone off to college and is full of new-fangled ideas, he’s just a bit strange but we can tolerate that because he’s…” Now nearly 50 years later I have further widened the gap. Not vindictively, just by osmosis, as a result of my endeavours but it still begs the question- If my art cannot reach ‘normal’ folk, am I missing the mark?

Nonetheless folk from all over the world do find my art interesting. yesterday I had hits from Vietnam and Sweden and my total views is fast approaching 10K. Some write and say I write well or the blog is good. But more, I feel that when I do any more Performance Art (PA) I’d need to be able to communicate or ‘get’ to the public’s minds whilst neither condescending them, nor demeaning my ideas of course. There would always be an elephant of surprise and an unsettling feeling in the outcomes I produce to keep the onlookers’ attention. Don’t want youse all falling asleep now do we?

I have been looking again at Verena & Andrea’s (Vest & Page) stuff in the vids on their website. http://www.vest-and-page.de/#!selected-works/caf0 They show by their astounding work that by comparison my work is a mere blot on the floor left by a PA Baby in his swaddling bands. (‘Swaddling’ is an age-old practice of wrapping infants tightly in blankets or similar cloths so that movement of the limbs is tightly restricted. Swaddling bands were often used to further restrict the infant. At the moment I feel constrained as if by swaddling bands and only by ‘getting’ my work out there’ will I change my garment, or maybe relinquish [most of] them.) The good news is I’ve been invited onto the Book Arts Day for The Society of Bookbinders on Sat 5th March 2016 in little old London town to do some Performance Art. Right now I’m working on a new piece, ‘Brush’, using words from Colin Lloyd Tucker’s beautiful song ‘Brush’. My friends, the Townsend Twins are helping choreograph the movement. I may also include a new rendition of Clay Jug after the beautiful poem by Kabir.

And ‘PA Baby‘ is maybe another pseudonym for me as it cover the fact that I’m old enough in calendar years to be their grandpa yet in terms of my experience in the field of PA I’m just a baby. In fact whilst at IPA in October a lot of my work brought me, and indeed some observers, to tears. In my case because I was going back into my early experiences and re-living them and also seeing that at 64 years old I weren’t about to have certain experiences again and indeed the inevitability of the changes old age will bring also weighed down on me. I got my crying in first. Some watchers cried in sympathy, some because I touched a chord and others just cried cos they were incredibly tired after 8 days of full-on PA practice with a group of strangers to start with who fast became close bonds. I still find it so daunting to think of what is out there in the Performance Art field. But it’s silly to compare. It’s like comparing a little village’s pub band to the Rolling Stones but there again the greats do look at the new stuff coming thru and like V&P are very encouraging. My mate IEPW told me that David Bowie liked Arcade Fire so much that he requested to sing with them and they accepted his offer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6c9Ejfu-iU

Also he did this with them uploaded 2 Feb 2006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkCc_qiI7UA well now, David had another 10 years.

Deathday instead of Birthday celebrations?

A Big Cloud of Unknowing.

When I heard of the death of David Bowie I thought to myself, they should have a day each year to celebrate him, maybe his day of dying would be the best day for an annual remembering of his creative, original and inspirational, trend-setting (in its purest form) life. Undoubtedly he did set trends.

OM

The Dalai Lama has said, “Usually I don’t consider birthdays something important. In Tibet we consider the death anniversary more important. I think that’s quite wise. A person who made good contributions in life, then after [their] death, remember them in some anniversaries…as a Buddhist monk I believe every day is a new day, every day is birthday. The particles of our body momentarily changing, always become something new. Mental thinking, because of new knowledge & experience, also changes. So every day is a birthday. [If] we use our day in a proper way then the months & decades, whole life becomes meaningful. If you can help other, do it as much as you can. If you cannot do it, at least, restrain from harming others. That’s the essential of meaningful life.”

I’ll drink to that, nowadays my chosen drink is water.

 

Let’s Do It, Live Art…

‘Whilst Live Art remains elusive to most mainstream commentators its influence is pervasive, and intriguingly the concept of performativity – its central tenet’ from an article by LADA (Live Art Development Agency) Director Lois Keidan that appeared in Guardian Online on 22 October 2015 when I was half way thru the two week course led by Jurgen Fritz which has totally re-aligned my thinking on what my art is, was and forever more will BE. I am so determined to do Performance Art in my future and have just come across a conversation involving a friend I made (Andrea Pagnes http://www.vest-and-page.de/ ) at the IPA fortnight with a man whose work totally blew me away when I discovered it in a book that I saw at the bookshop in the National Theatre (I’ve yet to see anything other than photos of the man), Ron Athey. Their conversation gets to the hub of the issues in PA and altho I am a novice by comparison I felt so privileged that both Vest & Page said such wonderfully constructive things to me about my efforts. I received so much encouragement to carry on. Recently I have heard it said that ‘art’ is a minority interest (but today on Anglia BBC morning news they tell me “Creative Industries are worth £76 billion per annum to the ‘Economy’- why don’t i see any o that?), well it may be a minority interest to some but it’s been my obsession now for 48 years. I still have some more to say and it will be thru PA/Live Art which is so much more demonstrative in its appreciation than the ‘art world’ [sorry art-world but I been trying to make a dent on you fer 48 years and the door won’t budge! At least when I do Live Art they clap and cheer (when I get off)]Hee Hee.

That’s Andrea in the mask on right hand side.

Some words from Andrea Pagnes in conversation with Ron Athey,

AP‘… the richness and uniqueness that can emanate from personal experience, lived life and the consequent artistic research which arises directly from the deepest inclinations and existential urgencies of an individual.’

‘…when performance art intersects life directly and uncompromisingly, and draws on the most basic instincts, processes and transforms the deeper reasons and urgencies of Man’s presence in the world … it is revelatory: a sincere, transformative experience on human scale.’

RA says, ‘…How, in any medium, to bring something esoteric to

life, how to disturb a given, how to represent the super natural.’

AP you have … challenged conventional bourgeois mores, tastes and expectations

…by addressing viscerally emerging social hypocritical worries…’

RA performance art today… is not populist. Why not do benefits/write for funds/self produce in an amazing site-specific place? Cuz it is so much work but so worth it!

 I love the bit about ‘the richness and uniqueness that can emanate from personal experience’ and that underpinned what 3 of my course leaders said to me. Andrea saw the natural clown/fool in me in two settings which he commented on. I see from the vids on V&P website that he has done much work with clowns.http://www.vest-and-page.de/#!the-smile-at-the-top-of-the-ladder/c1orh

They all encouraged me to use my life experience in my PA, something which comes easy to me I must say as I’ve reached a point in my life where I treasure every moment I have lived and I am ready to go out there and bring my stuff to folks in a variety of settings. At IPA I used some of my Ashtanga Yoga practice in some of my pieces, particularly the Jug Dance but there were other ‘moves’ and references too. Ashtanga Yoga is a fairly vigourous form which emanated from the teachings of T. Krishnamacharya thru his pupil K. Pattabhi Jois. Another of his students B K S Iyengar popularised his Iyengar form in Britain from the 1960s. The main difference as far as I can see is that Iyengar encourages the use of aids like cushions to ease the new student into the forms that can be somewhat excrutiating for a long time for starters. I for one have massive difficulty trying to do a lotus position but no matter, you do what you can and you gradually move towards perfection.The good thing is people do yoga into their 90’s which is fortunate cos I never started til I were in ma 60’s!Photo by Nicole Murmann (thanks!)

This is not Yoga it is Performance Art, why? cos PA is what the artis says it is, Jurgen told us that, didn’t he?

I discovered a book on yoga which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to know its benefits, it’s called, The Reluctant Yogi by Carla McKay http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15000943-the-reluctant-yogi

I have been doing yoga once or twice a week and now I am so glad I began as it’s obvious it has so many astounding benefits.

Namaste.

My German ‘gHosts’.

All of a sudden my life is beginning to happen. ‘It’s almost as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider’s web. The whole network is beginning to glow, to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive…’ (p. 166, Tom Wolfe in Cool Aid Acid Test).

I spent 65 years ‘trying’ to ‘get there’ and suddenly somehow I arrive! Like Clementine, I’m on tea & croissants. On Friday night last when I turned on the Mercury prize I discovered a man/voice which was as big a revelation to me as hearing Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on vinyl way back in 1968 on an old Dancette record player exactly like this one.

Benjamin Clementine was chosen as the top album (?) and what a phenomenon!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a68KJWe_Tfk

Although I am not a phenomenon I did surprise a few folk at the IPA fortnight (http://www.ipapress.i-pa.org/official-news/ipa-autumn-2015-official-news/great-blog-from-pete-kennedy-about-ipa-autumn-2015/  recently but I been a long time gestating. During the time of my ‘working life’ I never ‘made it’, that’s for sure, partly cos I were too busy working for a living. But I never gave up my pursuit of the goal which was to make a mark on the consciousness of the era in which I have lived.

It was a long hard battle. I wrote, I painted, I did graphics (‘comic’, caricature and stuff) and I drew. I drew cos I could. I actually draw because of the battle I had to fight to acquire the ability to draw. It wasn’t easy cos as a 16 year old I was cack-handed (kakˈhandɪd; ‘clumsy, awkward or inept way of doing something; originally meaning left handed’, in other words I couldn’t draw for toffee but now I’m ambidextrous and am proud of that. Although I perform across a number of media it was the ability to draw which I chased hard until I achieved a certain skill which allowed me to draw the likes of Feliks Topolski, Miriam Patchen and more recently Vest & Page.

When Richard Morphet, the then Keeper of the Modern Collection at Tate, said to me in c. 1994, ‘Your work has a very German feel’, I think he was referring to the new breed from Germany like ‘upside down man’ Baselitz, yes there was a similarity but it stemmed from our all having the same influences in art history. Here’s one of my portraits (of Michael McKell actually) showing the similarity in technique. This is one of the illustrations which are reproduced beautifully in my article in JAB38 but here I am showing it in colour, it needs colour as does much of my oeuvre.

When Brad Freeman gave the go ahead on my article for the Journal of Artists Books (JAB http://www.journalofartistsbooks.org/current/) and I pondered on being asked to feature my own work, mainly in book and print but also in paint, and those who had inspired, directed and influenced it. It soon became apparent that many of them were of German origin. My father and his father’s generation had been embroiled in war with Germany yet I was inspired by so many German artists and writers. Significantly many of my influences had been on the Nazi regime’s list of ‘degenerate art’. The writer, artist and mountain walker Hermann Hesse, significantly, even stood up against the First World War. Anselm Keifer, Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys all had to cope in their various ways with having been born in Germany and the aftermath stigma of the Third Reich.

my portrait of Anselm Kiefer

Luckily my embroilment has been with the positive creative side of the German spirit. The list is long and the work they did will give insight into my own output, about which the article will further inform you. Beneath German military imperialism lays a deeper current, German humanism as manifested in the work of writers like Hesse, Walser and Klee, each has had a profound effect on my work/output which I shall be linking to the work of the following artists showing how they have had an impact on my thinking:

Expressionists; Shmidt-Rotluf, Franz Marc (Post Card To Prince Jussuf), Kokoshka with his very literature base and liberal brush.

Dada etc; Max Ernst Collage books (La Femme 100 tetes) and his Livres d’artists,

Bauhaus; Klee, Schlemmer

Post war; Anselm Keifer, Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys

Add to these Munch and Soutine, both of whom have a similar ‘feel’ and indeed the former certainly influenced the Expressionists. https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=expressionist+painters

*Kokoshka was born in Austria but was associated with German Expressionism and dada.

Wikipedia says that Kokoschka (who became involved with Performance Art) was a master of ‘innovative oil painting techniques anchored in earlier traditions’ which resonates with my lifelong observation  about ‘art’ or rather  ‘the creative process’ passing down a (transcendent) chain or  down a line/ lineage.

I see my portraits as descendent from the work of Rembrandt or El Greco, then Van Gogh and Soutine yet it never lamely mimics any of them. They set the example but I always looked to move it on. I was born into a generation which experimented with and pushed the barriers, sometimes too far, too quickly. I have always looked over my shoulder or down to see my feet standing on the shoulders of giants. I fought hard with my own inadequacies to overcome my incompetence in various media. I did find my way to doing some oil paintings which had considerable skill. All of the time I heard Max Ernst whispering in my ear that ‘painting is dead’, yet I refused to allow that to happen, I love the push of the wet gooey brush across the dry canvas surface and my attempts to make a difference. I was aware that so many great artists had (before I began) created a great legacy of amazing works which I could hardly hope to match, so I would push off in another direction. To find that direction I would look intensively into the history of ‘art’ and into the practice which was going on around me from the time of my first successful paintings and prints until today.

In the early 1970’s I was lucky to see the work of Soutine, de Kooning, Barnet Newman and Dieter Roth all of whom did what I considered to be ground-breaking work which itself was keeping to the lineage of the greats that went before them. I wanted to create new and original work which proved ever so difficult when the art market only really wanted to have the work of established masters or people who were following in their footsteps. They wouldn’t look at my work because I was not in the canon or established or I didn’t have the right track record or had not been vetted by the right colleges. And who can blame them when so many artists were being produced, choosing who to back and add to the canon must have been difficult. But I carried on making my art regardless, for 48 years now. Now it can be seen that I have created a large oeuvre which has a wide variety of differing styles and ways of working, yet another taboo in the ‘art-world’ where they like it if you concentrate on a small area then you can be boxed up and sold.

I was inspired by Ernst. I saw Roth as an oasis on my starving journey. And later I saw Beuys and Keifer doing things I had done as a result of pursuing my own star only they did them more than I ever could with my limited time and resources.

‘Beuys never made a painting on canvas; he explicitly rejected this traditional artistic production.’ P68 JB-A Colourful World, pubr. Schellmann Art, Munich 2011. Here is a difference because I did do paintings and other things onto canvas, I wouldn’t stop because Beuys did not choose this medium, but I would be able to consider many materials for use in my own work having been given permission so to do by Beuys having used them either before I did or without my knowing that he had and my later finding out he had used materials I had chosen, except before me. What Beuys, Ernst and Roth did was encourage my daring when it came to which materials could be used to make my work with. Had I stuck to the limited media which my educators and many British artists before the sixties had stuck to my output would have been severely limited. Even today many of my pieces are frowned upon by people from all walks of life because many have little idea as to the way art and its use or abuse of materials has moved for better or worse in the past 50 years.

On 23.7.14 I got a note from David Jury about our collaboration for an artists book Inside This Clay Vessel http://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780950426716/BATCH-Introduction-Thoughts-Clay-Jug-0950426717/plp :

‘I did a lot of work on Vessel page 2 (V2) today but had to make quite a few changes from yesterday’s efforts. I expect to get a printed result tomorrow. It was Braunschweig University that I visited, but they have no link to Beuys. The permanent exhibition of Beuys I mentioned is kept at a fantastic gallery in Berlin, the Hamburger Bahnhof. They have a couple of fabulous Keifer pieces too, but they are not always on display.’

I had been asking him about his visit to Braunschweig and the artists that he’d told me about with a view to me going there one day(?). In 2015 I produced a book about the making of my picture called Venus Stairs which was inspired by Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Staircase. The more I see of Schlemmer’s oeuvre the more I love it, especially the stuff he did related to performance, especially now that I am so involved with Performance Art.

Two weeks ago I recited my Beuys poem at firstsite Gallery in Colchester. The poem pokes fun at Beuys and his ways but it’s also an homage to him. When I spent 2 weeks in the company of Performance Artist Jurgen Fritz I was aware that I am still a novice in the field of Performance Art but Jurgen said encouraging things about my efforts. I have been eating, sleeping & dreaming up Performance Art pieces since then and my next blog will be about the IPA fortnight.

Here’s me reciting my Beuys poem. He had gold on his face, I couldn’t afford gold so I used black.

 

Now I have begun.

Stop Press

I am doing a 20 minute performance art at Firstsite Gallery in Colchester on Saturday 7^th November which has now been re-scheduled for 15.00 hrs that’s 3pm, kick off time for Outlaw Pete who will be getting on Jurgen Fritz’s horse! It’s part of Firstsite’s first ever day of performance art with 11 other PA people doing their bits between 12.00 to 18.00hrs. It should be great fun.

Fancy that, I began my art trajectory in 1968 with little or no idea where it would lead me.47 years of nothing doing and THEN in just one week I get 3 such big breakthroughs; IPA, JAB & OAK.

IPA.

At IPA Bristol I got accepted into the Performance Artist community. To quote Anthony Hopkins on last night’s incredible BBC play The Dresser, “The whole event has been one of the best times in my life.” (Radio Times p22, 31Oct-6Nov 2015) and I must admit I was the most senior player but by no means the most experienced. I cried a lot (along with others when they watched my stuff!) I felt strong emotions and a deep nostalgic looking back on my life which was better than any psycho- therapy.

Here’s Hopkins and Jurgen Fritz, my mentor on the IPA fortnight.

jurgen on the horse dinging a bell

Hopkins on his horse (ctsy Radio Times) 

if Anthony can do it Jurgen does it too!

Check out my pals Robert Hardaker and Debbie Guinnane from IPA at this week’s SPILL Festival in London http://spillfestival.com/brochure2015/ .

Rob Hardaker on his horse

A colleague on the IPA course, Carol Montealegre,  sent this which Kabbalah Centre International originally shared these words, love ‘em, “We create change by seeing the spark of Light rather than the Darkness in everyone with whom we interact.” ~Karen Berg. Here she is in one of my sketches doing her ting

Carol reigning in her horse

JAB has just published an article I wrote for them about the influence of some German artists on my work. (We can now add Jurgen to Max, Anselm, Kurt, Dieter and all the rest now!) http://www.journalofartistsbooks.org/current/ It’s great to see my work in a prestigious journal from across the big pond. Thanks Brad for publishing me in the company of such greats.

 OAK Knoll is a pretty prestigious fine press publishing house and a little bird has told me that they are interested to stock the poems I did for my artist’s book ‘Inside This Clay Jug’ that David Jury printed as a letterpress set of pages which we collaborated in the making of in 2014. It’s wonderful to see David’s hard graft getting recognition and that more people may be able to see the work we did. Let’s celebrate with this beautiful song by Richard Hawley

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06h3274/later-with-jools-holland-series-47-episode-4

Pete doing the Jug Dance outside the Arnolfini in October 2015

Looking back over my two weeks at International Performance Association (http://ipabristol.co.uk/about-ipa/ ) which were so fulfilling and formative I’d love to share my rapid sketches with you. Normally I detest it when you’re not allowed to take photos of artworks & performances but in this case I saw the merit of leaving the photo-taking to Jurgen so we could concentrate on our P A. By the way, feel free to take as many snaps as you wish of any of my PA works. Don’t feel concerned about flashing and I might just flash you too!

So here’s the sketches.

Okhu dances for the horse

Sam outwits the horse by going blindfold, in a big coat

2 weeks doing performance art.

I’m on fire!bonfire at earth spirit centre

I just spent 2 weeks doing performance art with some TOP TOP people. Jurgen Fritz (JuF)  set up IPA 10 years ago. His fellow leaders were Vest & Page (VaP) amazing, they work as a dyad and Jurgen works alone. 20 of us were split into 2 groups for intensive training over 8 days 10am -10pm each day. Am well knackered now. Especially after staying on for the second week:

“Pop Up Performances

International Performance Association (IPA) Bristol comes to the Arnolfini to present a series of innovative ‘pop-up performances’ by 16 international performance artists;

Alba Murcia (Spain)

Nicole Murmann (Switzerland)

Oozing Gloop Ye Olde (UK) 

Taz Burns (UK)

Bojana Videkanic (Canada)

Pete Kennedy (UK)

Andrea Greenwood (UK) 

Jolanda Jansen (Netherlands)

Carol Andrea Montealegre Pinzón (Colombia) 

Sam Ford (UK) 

Robert Hardaker (UK)

Anna Kosarewska (Ukraine) 

Öykü Aras (Turkey)

Debbie Guinnane (Ireland)

Amruta Mapuskar (India)

Jamie Burr (UK)

Leo Kay (UK) not in popups. These will take place over three days (22-24 Oct 2015) in the foyer, stairwell and landing areas of Arnolfini, as well as outdoor locations of Castle Park, St Nicholas Market and Bristol Harbour.” This was one inspiring bunch who worked on Performance Art (PA) workshops for 10 hours on 8 days together under the guidance of Vest & Page aka Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes  and IPA instigator Jurgen Fritz http://www.fritz-performance.de/.

And boy did they do some good stuff in the streets of Bristol. Jurgen took over 1000 photos which when I get access to I shall be putting some onto this post. Right now however am just notifying yez that ‘AM BACK AND AM DIFFRUNT!’

I played my part as the old fart but they didn‘t seem to mind, in fact they kept saying nice tings and that only encouraged me to do more. I learned that I am a player and so as of this moment my work begins.

And it’ll take more than one blog to describe some of the wonder-full things that occurred down at the Earth Spirit Centre near Glastonbury then in Bristol. For me it was a life-shifting insight into possibilities around the edge of which I have tampered since my first PA piece at St Lukes in Exeter 1973. All of my life has been a preparation for my future PA outputs. My books will tell the story of that life from college days to now and of the old works I did in the visual arts and writing of books then. My future books will reflect my movement into PA. I’m going to move my blArt name on to PArt, no longer blArtin but PArting. Good time to change on the last day of my ‘When I’m 64 period’ and on 27^th October I reach my OAPs; the Old Age Pensioner who does Occurring Art Performing.