The project will be focussing its research primarily around the following themes:
1. Performance and Pedagogy - the emergence of performance art in the context of new approaches to art education at Cardiff College of Art, Newport School of Art, the Barry Summer School etc in the 1960s. Of special interest here is the work of Tom Hudson and John Gingell at Cardiff.
2. Networks, Internationalism and Student Politics - the role of student-run university art festivals in Swansea, Aberystwyth, Cardiff and Bangor in the late 1960s
3. New Infrastructures – the emergence of art centres at Cardiff (Chapter and Sherman), Aberystwyth and Swansea (Taliesin) and their role in the development of performance art in the early 1970s
4. British Performance Art between Theatre and Art in the early-mid 1970s. This will include a closer look at the work of Shirley Cameron, Roland Miller, Rob Con, Ian Hinchcliffe, Welfare State and others.
5. Performance Cymraeg - the emergence of Welsh identity as a theme in performance art in the late 1970s, including a discussion of the influence of the performance art pavilion at the Wrexham Eisteddfod 1977 and the work of Paul Davies.
If you have information to offer on any of these themes or the events mentioned we would be pleased to hear from you!
Locating the early history of performance art in Wales, 1965-1979 www.performance-wales.org
- It was forty years ago today
- The project aims to 1. compile a comprehensive record of performance art events that were created in Wales between 1965 and 1979, and reveal an important but hitherto neglected aspect of Welsh art history. 2. chart the manner in which performance art as an international artistic movement was negotiated in response to a specific localized cultural context during its formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, and advance our knowledge and understanding of the origins and early developments of this art form. 3. trace the ways in which knowledge of past performance events is transmitted in both documentation and verbal recollections, and examine the evidential potential of documents and testimonials for the construction of performance art histories. 4. make freely available to other researchers in the field not just the analysis of the research findings but the following additional resources: a comprehensive, 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 related oral history recordings and transcripts, deposited in key archives in the field.