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We’re delighted to announce the release of Anne Bean: Self Etc.

Anne Bean is a hugely significant international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Her art makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through solo and collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.

The first substantial survey of its kind, Anne Bean: Self Etc. brings together documentation of her performances, drawings, videos, installations, and sculptures, as well as writings, interviews and visual essays by the artist. A series of commissioned critical essays show her to be a prolific maker of acts, objects, and multiple ‘selves’.

• Anne was a member of pseudo pop-band Moody and the Menstruators (1971–74), of whom Michael Bracewell said: “Referencing the artistic/musical cabarets of the Dadaists and Futurists, the group take their place on a musical timeline somewhere between the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and The Sex Pistols.”
• She was a founding member of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Anne Bean, Paul Burwell, Richard Wilson), whose work included an epic pyrotechnic and drumming display on top of Bankside Power Station in 1993 for the launch of London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), a year before Tate announced that Bankside was to be the site for the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art. Cooper Gallery, Dundee, is currently staging Great Noises that Fill the Air, the first retrospective of Bow Gamelan Ensemble.
• Anne has explored the concept of multiple personalities in her work, including setting up residence in 2012 in Newark-on-Trent, a small town in the Midlands, where she lived for 16 months as Chana Dubinski.

Edited by the writer and curator Rob La Frenais the book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, essays by and interviews with Anne Bean, Guy Brett, Dominic Johnson, Poshya Kakl, Rob La Frenais, Lynn MacRitchie, Ezra Rubenstein, and Richard Wilson, and a series of new visual essays by the artist. 

Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean: Self Etc. explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

This publication is the sixth in the Intellect Live book series. Intellect Live is a collaboration between Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency. The series is characterised by lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed books that are created through close collaborations between artists and writers, and that are the first substantial publication dedicated to the artists' work. Other titles in the series are on the artists Raimund Hoghe, Ron Athey, Kira O’Reilly, Adrian Howells, and Lois Weaver.