In a blog post written for the publisher Unbound, Anne Bean recounts that she had scribbled out about fifty titles for the book on the back of an envelope, including Sold Out, Souled Out, By the Book, Don't Buy This Book, ABook, This Is Not a Book, This Book Troubles Me, Un Cover, Uncover, OPEN, A Closed Book (www.thisisunbound.co.uk/blogs/blog-1/entitled-by-anne-bean-guest-editor, accessed 10 January 2020). This sample of abandoned possibilities gestures towards Bean's confessed anxiety over sanctioning, in her words, ‘a conventional book’ that will lead to an ‘inevitable commodification’ of her body of artwork, as well as adding another ‘object to an askew economic system’. Although this may be a significant trade for an artist who has dedicated the last five decades (and counting) to ephemeral creation, the resulting book, ultimately titled Self Etc., is an antidote for an art world constructed upon an individualistic neo-liberal model focused on fame and material wealth.
Bean's work flows through visual art, poetry, performance, sound art, photography, theatre and music with a consistent flagrant disregard for their supposed rules or disciplinary restrictions. 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.
Bean cannot be held in any established frame and defies categorization into cultural and historical movements. Her work spans mediums, tones, locations and intents with both clear documentation and vague whispers of countless acts of ‘art-cum-mayhem’. There are vivid accounts of unrepeatable and now-iconic art moments, particularly Bean, Paul Burwell and Paul McCarthy (as Two P's and a Bean) performing the destruction of a derelict house in Bow, London, in 1983. Other actions reoccur in manifold combinations across the book's chapters, and seemingly infinitely in Bean's work over decades, including death-defying physical feats, words repurposed through the treatment of letters as sculptural forms, and disappearances into new identities. Many performances have never been witnessed (and are delightfully unprovable), only brought into being part of art history by their printed retelling. 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.
In his contribution, Ezra Rubenstein writes that Bean's ‘art-life’ is ‘characterized above all by a generous, courageous and uncompromising openness to co-creation’ (p. 288). This is most apparent in a profoundly moving account by Lynn MacRitchie, who writes of Bean's seeking out of a commonality which defies the generally held understanding of linear time, singularity and individual consciousness in order to explore, as she quotes in the artist's words, ‘the turbulent space one must cross to reach oneself, let alone to truly contact another human being’ (p. 74). MacRitchie discusses how, particularly in the last two decades, Bean extends this embodiment of multiplicity into attempts to continue her extensive collaboration with other artists past their deaths. This does not just reveal Bean's profound engagement with mysticism but considers art as an intrinsic process of being that bonds people together in and with the universe.
In the introduction to Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s, Dominic Johnson quotes the performance artist Ulay as stating that it is not possible to go ‘over the limits’ (p. 16) as such an action would result in death. In doing so, there is a suggestion that life is limited by death, or that a barrier marks these states which it is not possible to move between. However, refusing to abide by the accepted wisdom that death is the limit of life, and that time and space are the limits of performance art, is some of the crucial creative material from which Bean shapes her work, venturing into unknown spheres which are often tantalizingly unfeasible to fully witness or comprehend and therefore worm their way into the imagination to continuously bloom.
The essay that Johnson contributes to Self Etc. is extracted from the chapter on Bean in his monograph Unlimited Action, which dedicates a chapter each to five case studies on significant practitioners during the 1970s who were invested in expanding and challenging notions of art-making. In addition to Bean, this includes Kerry Trengrove, Ulay, COUM transmissions (with a focus on Genesis P-Orridge) and the Kipper Kids, whilst the conclusion gives a substantial overview to the brilliant and influential Stephen Cripps. While recognizing its theoretical relation to the authoritative accounts of performance art that have preceded it, Unlimited Action is the most comprehensive and illuminating volume published on this era to focus predominantly on practice in Britain (held in relation to an international context). The volume offers an entirely convincing argument for the importance of the artists and the works discussed and provides a frame through which we can understand the significance of performance art to the field of cultural production, without putting any constrictions on its possibilities.
Johnson describes his extensive archival research as an experience that left him ‘wide-eyed, gripped by laughter or alarm’ (p. 188) and he skilfully replicates this for the reader throughout. The sheer energy of these artists is conveyed with finesse, with evocative details of their capacity to manifest creative acts that prodded the underbelly of 1970s cultural norms, almost broke their bodies and irrefutably broke every regulation of the new Health and Safety Act (introduced in 1974 – suddenly unlimited actions risked unlimited fines). Each of these accounts is arresting without resorting to the vapid sensationalism that so often plagues discussions of performance art in general and some of these artists in particular. The huge sense of joy, mischief and ‘recklessness’ which forms the thrust of Johnson's conclusion is concerned with the intertwined limits of legality, art and humanity in order to think about how the limits of time, space, light, sound, life and death which form performance itself are pushed at by works that seem to exist impossibly.
Despite the depth and reach of his analysis, Johnson can only identify, but not fully overcome, the methodological challenges posed to scholarship by the transgressive ethos of the artists he writes about. This review is faced with the same problem. The conventions of academic form and language appear too conformist when faced with the expansive, experimental, slippery and challenging nature of the material considered. Johnson gently pushes against prosaicness with asides and observations that enliven the book. However, academics of countercultural art practice are faced with the significant problem of how to invent and advocate for a mode of publication that does not negate the rigour of their scholarship but can be an accomplice to the radical intentions of the artwork discussed.
To return to an exploration of death as a ‘limit’ to be defied by many artists, transgressed by those such as Bean, but ultimately adhered to (in physical form at the very least), emphasizes the vital work of Johnson's research on artists working during this period. Since beginning the work for this book three of his key subjects have passed over this limit, Brian Routh (aka Harry Kipper) in August 2018, Ulay and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge both in March 2020. Johnson's writing makes the case for these artists’ importance, not just as historical subjects, as the producers of great works of art, or as infamous figures of tabloid notoriety (although these labels are not negated), but as inventors of radically different methodologies of creation which have the ability to alter the fabric of society, culture and reality itself.
