“'It was forty years ago today…': Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965-1979”

Performance art scholarship and practice are currently experiencing a resurgence of interest in the origins and early years of the art form in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great artistic creativity and political radicalism. This urges us to re-examine our conventional understanding of this crucial period. Traditionally, histories of performance art have tended to concentrate on a well-documented (mostly US-based) canon of works, neglecting local scenes outside of the centres of art production. This project aims to chart the manner in which performance art as an international artistic movement was negotiated in response to the particularities of specific cultural situations during its formative years - here examined in the context of Wales between 1965 and 1979.

The emergence in Wales of what came to be called 'performance art' dates back to the mid-1960s, when artists joined in the international movement away from the production of art objects toward the creation of events. In 1965 art instructors at Barry Summer School staged happenings to test new teaching approaches; one of the first festivals of Fluxus art in Britain occurred in Aberystwyth in 1968, six months after Fluxus' most famous artist, Yoko Ono, had made a piece for Cardiff; that same year Ivor Davies brought destruction in art to Wales by responding to the era's violence with timed explosions; throughout the 1970s, from their base in Swansea, sculptor Shirley Cameron and drama-graduate Roland Miller explored the field between fine art and experimental theatre; and the National Eisteddfod, the major Welsh-speaking cultural festival, in Wrexham 1977 included a controversial performance art programme involving European artists such as Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz, whose contributions were overshadowed by local artist Paul Davies' performative protests against the suppression of the Welsh language. A context characterized by traditions of political radicalism, a lack of art institutions, a small and multidisciplinary artistic scene and a growing activism around issues of language and identity became a model breeding ground for an art form that was ephemeral, interdisciplinary, engaged and direct in its address to audiences. In this, Wales both mirrored and refracted developments elsewhere in the art world.

The project proposes to reveal this hitherto neglected aspect of performance art history by compiling as comprehensive a record as possible of events that were created in Wales by local and visiting artists between 1965 and 1979. It will undertake extensive research into extant documentary material held in institutional archives and scattered across the private collections of artists and organisations. Complementing this research, the project will draw on oral history approaches to solicit the recollections of key figures who shaped the development of performance art in Wales during this period, a generation that is slowly disappearing. Analysing the documents and testimonials alongside one other, the project will also examine the complex manner in which memory interacts with documentary remains to constitute our knowledge of past performance events.

The project will make freely available to other researchers in the field not just the analysis of the research findings (published in journal articles and conference papers) but these additional resources: a fully searchable online database of performance art events in Wales 1965-1979, which also indexes the current location of available documentation on these events; and a range of oral history recordings and transcripts, to be deposited in key archives. The resources will be accessible also to a non-academic audience interested in performance art, among them the current community of performance artists, for whom the project hopes to provide a sense of its history - the now over forty year long tradition of an art form that once originated through a forcefully asserted break with tradition.

The project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Grant.
Each year the AHRC provides funding from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. Only applications of the highest quality and excellence are funded and the range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk.

Research Assistant on the Project: Dr Rebecca Edward