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Anne Bean: Self Etc.

Published by Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books, Autumn 2018

Paperback, 220 x 245 mm,  320 pages with colour images throughout

Trade Orders: Intellect Books, see our Distribution page for more information

Anne Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Bean makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through solo and collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.

The first substantial survey of its kind, Anne Bean: Self Etc. brings together documentation of her performances, drawings, videos, installations, and sculptures, as well as writings, interviews and visual essays by the artist. A series of commissioned critical essays show her to be a prolific maker of acts, objects, and multiple ‘selves’.

This book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, essays by and interviews with Anne Bean, Guy Brett, Dominic Johnson, Poshya Kakl, Rob La Frenais, Lynn MacRitchie, Ezra Rubenstein, and Richard Wilson, and a series of new visual essays by the artist.

Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean: Self Etc. explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

While Bean might challenge fixed ideas of the self and the artist in her performances, this book does not attempt a similar dismantling. Nor does it indicate the disregard for archiving and posterity that Johnson attributes to Bean. A large square volume made for gallery and library shelves, it is co-published by the Live Art Development Agency as part of a series of surveys of individual artists; posterity is exactly what it aims for, and rightly so, given the lack of any other substantial study of Bean’s huge body of work.
Frances Morgan on Anne Bean: Self Etc, for The Wire, March 2019

Launch Event

Self Etc. was launched with a public event at LADA on 29 November 2018, featuring readings, screenings and the physical launch of a transformed copy of the book into the air.

About Intellect Live

This publication is the sixth in the Intellect Live book series. Intellect Live is a collaboration between Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency. The series is characterized by lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed books that are created through close collaborations between artists and writers, and that are the first substantial publication dedicated to the artists’ work.

More about Intellect Live

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