Next week US artist Clifford Owens is a guest in the department as a visiting professor. On the evening of Wednesday 9 October at 18:00 he will be showing a performance in the Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre, room G42 in the Armstrong building (University map ref:22). This is a rare opportunity to see performance art live and thoroughly recommended for all students.
Clifford’s work brings the significance of liveness and presence into dialogue with the photograph. It acknowledges the complexities that come with a compulsion to record events and asks questions about the existential anxieties that accompany the camera. His own body is a crucial player in this. His practice takes the legacies of emergent performance art making from the ‘60s and ‘70s in which we see the artist’s body as the site of the work and pulls it into a conceptual dynamic with themes of race, masculinity, class and the fragility of social structures.
His project Anthology features performances scores—written or graphical instructions for actions—that Owens solicited from a multigenerational group of African-American artists. Twenty-six major artists have contributed scores — including Pope.l, Kara Walker and Senga Nengudi — many of whom composed new works specifically for Owens and his project.
TALKER is a self-published interview zine about performance by Giles Bailey. Each issue features a long-form interview with an artist who works in an innovative way with live practice.
We hope to see you there,
Giles.