Anne Bean (Book)

Self Etc.

Edited by Rob La Frenais

Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols.
 
Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

Series: Intellect Live

Edition

Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols.
 
Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

Rob La Frenais is a curator and critic and a regular contributor to Art Monthly.

Introduction

Rob La Frenais

Impossible Things: The Life Art of Anne Bean in the 1970s

Dominic Johnson

Memento Mori: Secret Conversations we didn't know we were having

Lynne MacRitchie

Is Possessed: The Artist, the Critic, the Pirate and the Messenger

Rob La Frenais

The Audience as Battery: Interview with Anne Bean

Rob La Frenais

TAPS: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Within Living Memory: Shadow Deeds

Guy Brett

Today's the Day: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Unask the Question: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Erasing Distances: Forging PAVES

Poshya Kakl

Disbelief Systems: Interview with Bow Gamelan Ensemble 

Rob La Frenais

Disbelief Systems: An Afterword – The Threshold

Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal

The Entangled Self: The Art of Life in the Open Air 

Ezra Rubenstein

Conversation Portraits

Anne Bean

Lines and Threads: A Visual Essay

Anne Bean

Contributor Biographies

 

'The volume has been conceived to actively resist easy narratives or linear timelines, instead combining commissioned critical essays from various academics, artists and accomplices, who each offer a personal and impassioned insight into their encounters with Bean. Between these, Bean’s own collaged visual essays are peppered, each offering short commentaries and reflections on particular projects and themes. [...] Each page demonstrates her unsurpassable energy and ferocity through accounts which crystallize effervescent moments just enough to begin to grasp the enormous scope and intricacy of Bean’s work while preserving the mystery intrinsic to her practice.'

Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, Theatre Research International

'The book represents a significant addition to the history of live art in the UK in general and to the work of Anne Bean in particular. [...] Self Etc. places Bean’s oeuvre into the history of experimental art and performance in the UK in the 1970s and 80s [...] Beautifully illustrated with color photographs and visual essays made by Bean for this book, Self Etc. also provides a critical and conceptual framework for understanding her work.'

Jennie Klein, Contemporary Theatre Review, November 2019

'Anne Bean is a visionary artist who has troubled the boundaries of contemporary art for five decades. This book shows her to be a key and vibrant figure in live art.' 

William Raban, Professor of Film, University of the Arts, London

'But while Bean might challenge fixed ideas of the self and the artist in her performances, this books does not attempt a similar dismantling. Nor does it indicate the disregard for archiving and posterity that Johnson attributed to Bean. A large, square volume made more gallery and library shelves, it is co-published by the Live Art Development Agency as part of a series of surveys of individual artists; posterity is exactly what it aims for, and rightly so, given the lack of any other substantial study of Bean's huge body of work.'

France Morgan, The Wire, 422, April 2019
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