The performance artist on her new 10-hour work, rethinking her distance from feminism, and why she told Malcolm McLaren her avant garde covers band was ‘unmanageable’
Anne Bean has been revisiting her past. On 21 August the pioneering performance artist is taking part in a 10-hour “durational live event” as part of PSX: A Decade of Performance Art in the UK. Not only did this require her to look back on five decades of practice – her past work, she tells me, is “intimately linked” to her present – but it’s taking place at Bermondsey’s Ugly Duck, a stone’s throw from the Butler’s Wharf studio in London in which she worked from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.
Many artists at the time, including Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, squatted in warehouses there, and in her time Bean has worked with everyone from slapstick clowns the Kipper Kids to artists such as Paul McCarthy and Rose English, as well as sharing bills with Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. She even opened for Roxy Music as part of the pseudo-pop band Moody and the Menstruators, an avant garde performance covers group she founded in 1971. Bean has often used sound in her work and loves music – her father was a classical and jazz musician – but Moody was never supposed to be a real band, more “a subversive exploration of the boundaries between art and music”.
