Description
Through her work, artist Mel Brimfield explores the history of twentieth century performance, using humour and storytelling to skew our understanding of the artistic forms and histories that inform her own practice.
This offer combines the DVD containing first two episodes of Mel Brimfield’s multi-part fictional television documentary series This Is Performance Art, and the accompanying book, which takes an in-depth look at Brimfield and her works. Together, they give a comprehensive picture of Brimfield’s practice.
Both the book and the DVD can be purchased together for a special price of £25 (RRP £32.50).
DVD:
This is Performance Art
Part One – Performed Sculpture and Dance
Part Two – Experimental Theatre and Cabaret
The first two episodes of Mel Brimfield’s multi-part fictional television documentary series mark the fragmentary and unreliable nature of performance art’s historical record. Low-end showbiz memoirs, sensationalist biographical documentaries and cheap-to-make TV clip programmes compiling lists of ‘The 100 Top/Best/Greatest’ are referenced alongside the faulty mechanics of museological, archival and curatorial approaches to assimilating live art. The result is a comedic performative critique of performance art historiographies.
Contains booklet with an introduction by Sir Francis Spalding and excerpts from Genital Panic.
“With her hilarious but affectionate deflation of performative pomposity, Brimfield has done for the history of performance art what Henry Reed’s fictional composer Hilda Tablet did for modern music on theThird Programme in the 1950s, what the inimitable entertainers Anna Russell and Joan Turner did for opera, and what the comedian Billy Dainty did for classical ballet.”– David Briers, Art Monthly
Performance Matters, 2013, DVD, 34 minutes and 29 minutes.
Book:
ISBN 9781907317354
