This week, Rebecca met with Robin Hall and David Hurn.
Robin came to Swansea to work with the Open Cast Theatre, and later worked for the Swansea Fringe Festival for several years during the 1980s. The festival brought many performers to the city, including the then-unknown comedians Paul Merton and Arthur Smith. He worked closely with the performance artist Rob Con who was also the festival administrator in its first year.
David is a member of Magnum, the photographers cooperative, and founded the photography course at Newport College of Art nearly forty years ago. He was also a colleague of the artist Keith Arnatt and taught Arnatt photography, and later curated an exhibition of Arnatt's work called 'I'm A Real Photographer'.
We would like to thank David and Robin for their time and contributing to our research.
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.