sessions with Gustav drafting the letter, until reality broke through again and I abandoned the task.
Sometimes these meetings generated a moment of drama, a twinge of paranoia or spark of violence. I attended one in a London art school, where forty or fifty artists were assembled in a lecture hall to discuss our relevance or irrelevance to the affairs of the world. At one point of the tedious day I spent some time in a corridor outside the lecture room telling an art critic what an image of bureaucracy the conceptual artists were unwittingly projecting, with their filing cabinets of documentation and their printed notices directing one to do this or attend to that. Then I went to rejoin the main debate, and the instant I opened the door I heard Gustav cry out ‘Tim! He’s attacking me!’ and saw him in the grips of a wild-looking young man, surrounded by apparently paralyzed observers. Having had no time to think, I was not paralyzed, and dashed to the rescue. Fortunately as soon as I grappled with him the wild man crumpled like a cardboard box and sat down apologetically , explaining that he was terrified of going to prison; it appeared that Gustav had been listing the names of those present, and this person had panicked at the thought that the list might fall into the hands of the police.
The only occasion on which I myself precipitated a jot of physical aggression was during one of Joseph Beuys’s day-long performances at the Tate. On entering the gallery I found a dense throng at the far end of the main hall, with a disembodied, prophetic booming alternating with weedy squeakings arising from its midst. A disgusted leftist heading for the exit said to me: ‘Beuys is in there explaining the Liberal Party manifesto!’ By degrees I worked my way forward till I could see what was going on: a question-and-answer session, in which Beuys took care to retain control of the hand-held microphone, which he would point towards his interlocutor from a distance that made any voice but his own sound feeble. Two assistants on a platform were filming his every move. When I felt my hour had come, I stepped forward and held out my hand so purposefully for the microphone that he had to hand it over. I asked if he thought that every work of art implied a vision of society. That was a proposition he couldhardly disagree with, given his own philosophy. I pointed out the impression of exclusion given by the present work of art (for these performances were supposed to be such), the wall of backs one encountered on entering. I can’t remember his replies, but he was rattled, and at each interchange I made him give me back the microphone. I explained how oppressive it is to feel oneself part of someone else’s work of art; I pressed on with uncharacteristically confrontational intent, until some more demonstrative radical than I was moved to leap into the arena, grab the microphone from Beuys and fling it aside crying ‘Let’s get rid of the technology anyway!’, at which point I retired triumphant into obscurity. In the coffee shop someone said to me, ‘You went on so long I thought you were in charge of the event.’ And towards the end of the afternoon I heard a well-known critic feeding Beuys a string of fawning questions agreeable to the expected answers; so my intervention had hardly perturbed the proceedings. It would perhaps be salutary to see what the film camera made of it.
‘Outside the Gallery System’ was the title of an article Peter Joseph and I published in Studio International in 1969, partly as manifesto, partly as prelude to the installation of two outdoor works in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood on Hampstead Heath. Both of us were moving away from paintings on canvas at that time; we wanted to use wider dimensions that would implicate the viewer’s or participant’s own location and movement. The Heath, and Kenwood in particular with its fine art collection and its eighteenth-century parkland,
Sometimes these meetings generated a moment of drama, a twinge of paranoia or spark of violence. I attended one in a London art school, where forty or fifty artists were assembled in a lecture hall to discuss our relevance or irrelevance to the affairs of the world. At one point of the tedious day I spent some time in a corridor outside the lecture room telling an art critic what an image of bureaucracy the conceptual artists were unwittingly projecting, with their filing cabinets of documentation and their printed notices directing one to do this or attend to that. Then I went to rejoin the main debate, and the instant I opened the door I heard Gustav cry out ‘Tim! He’s attacking me!’ and saw him in the grips of a wild-looking young man, surrounded by apparently paralyzed observers. Having had no time to think, I was not paralyzed, and dashed to the rescue. Fortunately as soon as I grappled with him the wild man crumpled like a cardboard box and sat down apologetically , explaining that he was terrified of going to prison; it appeared that Gustav had been listing the names of those present, and this person had panicked at the thought that the list might fall into the hands of the police.
The only occasion on which I myself precipitated a jot of physical aggression was during one of Joseph Beuys’s day-long performances at the Tate. On entering the gallery I found a dense throng at the far end of the main hall, with a disembodied, prophetic booming alternating with weedy squeakings arising from its midst. A disgusted leftist heading for the exit said to me: ‘Beuys is in there explaining the Liberal Party manifesto!’ By degrees I worked my way forward till I could see what was going on: a question-and-answer session, in which Beuys took care to retain control of the hand-held microphone, which he would point towards his interlocutor from a distance that made any voice but his own sound feeble. Two assistants on a platform were filming his every move. When I felt my hour had come, I stepped forward and held out my hand so purposefully for the microphone that he had to hand it over. I asked if he thought that every work of art implied a vision of society. That was a proposition he couldhardly disagree with, given his own philosophy. I pointed out the impression of exclusion given by the present work of art (for these performances were supposed to be such), the wall of backs one encountered on entering. I can’t remember his replies, but he was rattled, and at each interchange I made him give me back the microphone. I explained how oppressive it is to feel oneself part of someone else’s work of art; I pressed on with uncharacteristically confrontational intent, until some more demonstrative radical than I was moved to leap into the arena, grab the microphone from Beuys and fling it aside crying ‘Let’s get rid of the technology anyway!’, at which point I retired triumphant into obscurity. In the coffee shop someone said to me, ‘You went on so long I thought you were in charge of the event.’ And towards the end of the afternoon I heard a well-known critic feeding Beuys a string of fawning questions agreeable to the expected answers; so my intervention had hardly perturbed the proceedings. It would perhaps be salutary to see what the film camera made of it.
‘Outside the Gallery System’ was the title of an article Peter Joseph and I published in Studio International in 1969, partly as manifesto, partly as prelude to the installation of two outdoor works in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood on Hampstead Heath. Both of us were moving away from paintings on canvas at that time; we wanted to use wider dimensions that would implicate the viewer’s or participant’s own location and movement. The Heath, and Kenwood in particular with its fine art collection and its eighteenth-century parkland,
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