NU Performance Festival II:
STUART BRISLEY /UK/
´Two Last Breaths´

Duration approx 45`
Ticket: 100/150
NB! The Performance is English

Two Last Breaths approaches the dilemma of the end of life, using the age old means of humour/horror. It is a response to the title of "The Long Breath" of the event at the Maschinenhaus in Essen where the work was first performed.

Stuart Brisley is an english artist and sculptor, born in Haslemere, 19 Oct 1933. Lives and works in London. He studied at Guildford School of Art (1949-54) and the Royal College of Art in London (1956-9), as well as at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1959-60) and Florida State University in Tallahassee (1960-62). Influenced by Marxist counter-cultural politics in the 1960s, he adopted performance as the democratic basis for a new relationship between artist and audience. Working solely within public spaces in the 1970s, Brisley developed a series of solo and collaborative works, such as ZL 65 63 95C, Ten Days (1978; London, ICA) and Between (1979; London, ICA), that pushed the body through various extended tasks or rituals. Vulnerable, exposed, Brisley's ‘body in struggle' dramatized the conflict between human autonomy and the instrumental forces of bureaucratic and state power. His work dealt with challenging the human body in a physical, psychological and emotional manner, and often used (Solid excretory product evacuated from the bowels) faeces as the subject or a material in the construction of his work. In the 1980s, in the face of both changing conceptions of the political in art and the increasing implausibility of performance as avant-garde interventionist activity, Brisley moved from performance to installations, tape-slide work and object-making. His critical motivations remained unchanged: the production of a political art that in its richness of metaphor and range of expressive resources is capable of capturing the ‘morbid symptoms' of capitalist culture. He has been a prolific writer, painter,  educator and contributor to the British arts scene and has recently helped form the UK Museum of Ordure. Over the last years he has started performing again.