Today’s program is a conversation and absolutely not a documentary… as the sheer longevity and variety of Anne’s practice utterly defies that within a 55 minute radio slot…
We are in a walking conversation in annes recent exhibition in a temporary west end gallery space where England and Co, whom anne is working with are presently residing…
Taken from anne’s website annebeanarchive.com which has a page for every year of her practice from 1970 to the present day there is this delicious guiding text which I realised rather beautifully encapsulates the way conversational programs on isotopica tend to operate
An ongoing Autobituary
The content of this website is not the work.
Nor is it a document of the work.
It is a physical manifestation of certain intersecting circumstances
More organised but no more significant than any others.
My work is a continuum.
Right now it is a collaboration with you.
No work attributed to me is copyrighted.
Anne Bean’s work is wonderfully difficult to classify or even pin down,
Reading Anne’s CV is like following a continuous performance,
a continuous response to the world stretching from 1970 to the present day.
The variety and specifics of time, space and location,
interiors, exteriors, seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools,
is simply astonishing: Noted materials include fire and pyrotechnics, weather balloons, explosives, wind, steam, honey, slide projections, drawing, photography, video and of course sound.
Yet throughout this bewildering meta interest there is an absolute unity
Together with Richard Wilson and Paul Burwell they formed now legendary Bow Gamelan in 1983 which was an anarchic industrial sculptural performance collective, with roots firmly in the world of free improvisation, situationist spectacle and the collaborative squat aesthetic that informed the more dynamic artistic threads in the pre neoliberal world…… and one I’m finding, personally, more and more missed..
Paul Burwell was also the founding member of the London musician collective, member number one in fact, a phenomena from which this this experimental radio station resonance fm was born……
