![]() ![]() “There’s a real sense of meditation and connection. With all the distractions afforded by the internet, do people have the concentration for a 10-hour performance? “One can still go into that other space,” she says. Communicating only through reflections, 1970. “Art is always that sense of sharpening one’s antennae.”Ī heightened sense of connection. Once live art was finally accepted by the big orthodox institutions, people became more accepting of it.” It’s in some ways less groundbreaking in 2021, but, Bean says, still has something to offer. “In the 60s and 70s it was very pioneering. “When you look at the history of performance, these 50 years have been so fertile,” she says. I ask her whether perceptions of performance art have changed over the years, and whether she had to be mindful of that when selecting her work for a new generation. It gives a heightened sense of connection,” she says. “There’s an intimacy with the person who comes up, but not directly. This time there will be 10 mirrors, creating encounters between Bean and the audience. We communicated only through our reflections.” It is grounded in Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, with the mirror being, Bean says, a “placeless place”: “simultaneously real, relating with the real space surrounding it, and unreal, creating a virtual image”. “In 1970, for a durational performance, I set up a mirror and whoever came in the door could immediately see me in reflection and likewise I could see them. This latest work, Bean says, will be based on the idea of mirrors. Moody and the Menstruators was supposed to be anti all that.” “Ultimately it just wasn’t that interesting to me, or not as interesting as other work I could be doing. ![]() “I can’t remember exactly what I said but something like ‘We’re unmanageable’ … being manageable would exactly contradict the spirit of the group.” Then Malcolm McLaren said he wanted to manage us and put us in an open-topped pink Cadillac.” She wasn’t keen, and told him so. “We got a huge amount of media attention. “Moody and the Menstruators was just something that started at an art department party ,” Bean says, but the music marketing machine cranked into gear, and it all got a bit out of hand. Moody and the Menstruators, Berlin, 1974. Bean has often used sound in her work and loves music – her father was a classical and jazz musician – but Moody was never supposed to be a real band, more “a subversive exploration of the boundaries between art and music”.Īnti all that. She even opened for Roxy Music as part of the pseudo-pop band Moody and the Menstruators, an avant garde performance covers group she founded in 1971. Many artists at the time, including Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, squatted in warehouses there, and in her time Bean has worked with everyone from slapstick clowns the Kipper Kids to artists such as Paul McCarthy and Rose English, as well as sharing bills with Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Not only did this require her to look back on five decades of practice – her past work, she tells me, is “intimately linked” to her present – but it’s taking place at Bermondsey’s Ugly Duck, a stone’s throw from the Butler’s Wharf studio in London in which she worked from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. On 21 August the pioneering performance artist is taking part in a 10-hour “durational live event” as part of PSX: A Decade of Performance Art in the UK. ![]()
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