Stuart brisley biography

Histories and practices of live art. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN Artist Stuart Brisley: shutting up shop on the old politics. The Guardian. Accessed March Further reading [ edit ]. Authority control databases. Germany United States Netherlands. Although often hailed as the 'godfather of British performance art', Brisley is a more complex figure, Emeritus professor at the Slade and enfant terrible of the art world since the s [2] [3], whose seminal practice extends to painting, sculpture, community projects, pseudo-curatorial installations,sound, video, films and teaching.

Uniting all these working methods is a concern for the everyday and for things that have fallen down detritus on the streets, human excrement and the marginalised miners, bin men, homeless. His probing subjects and continuous engagement with the disposessed, the vernacular and the absurd together with the examination of landscape through a political prism has been compared to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

He has been influential on many of the present generation of Young British Artists and his radical practice has been an important stuart brisley biography to British art, playing a fundamental role in the development of installation and performance art as well as layering mediums. At the centre of this diverse practice lies his exploration of the essential qualities of what it means to be human.

He has challenged the human body in physical, psychological and emotional ways. Vulnerable, exposed, Brisley's 'body in struggle' dramatized the conflict between human autonomy and the instrumental forces of bureaucratic and state power. Influenced by Marxist cultural appraisal of the s and it's critical afterlife, he adopted performance as the democratic basis for a new relationship between artist and audience.

Brisley first achieved notoriety in the s and '70s and is perhaps best known for his disturbing physical performances. Clark as the first modernist painting, for "the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it". Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number.

Related Content. Reference entries. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. He was more like a mirror, reflecting back to the audience the social structures that existed within them.

Stuart brisley biography

However, Brisley the performance artist and Brisley the social being were not always interchangeable. He also worked with mining communities in Peterlee to set up an oral history project, and with the homeless people in his street for The Georgiana Collection But these projects ran parallel to the performance persona. They were not extensions of it.

They were practical interventions, and not in themselves art projects. Throughout the s Stuart Brisley performed over 30 major works. It was an important decade for him, offering a critique of the norms and mores of society, while simultaneously redefining the boundaries between performer, audience and gallery. In the s Brisley continued to create new works, including Leaching Out at the Intersection ICA, London,which was at the time part of the uncompleted larger project, The Georgiana Collection.

This piece lasted 30 days and commented on institutional order, material goods and objects used in life. From the s to the present day, Brisley continued his impetus for performance with several key works being formed, but he also returned to painting, mixed-media and sculpture with many pieces now in the British Museum Collection.

These are the very parts of the performance that can never be shown, only spoken. With Stuart Brisley the mute encounters of performance art have performed their own strange alchemy, and resurrected something many thought to be altogether long dead.