Abstract

Saturday June 4, 2022 @10am - 11:30am CT

A Panel Discussion

This is the most comprehensive study of Alastair MacLennan’s extensive performance practice, nationally and internationally renowned for its contribution to the field of performance art. The essays in this collection explore MacLennan’s art practice, its influence on the Belfast art scene, and its relationships with wider art histories.
The book places MacLennan’s work in its proper historical context, featuring outstanding archival visual documentation alongside new commissioned essays and interviews, none of which have been previously published. The essays range from descriptive to interpre- tive: some set the work in historical context while others provide pertinent biography. This variety is appropriate—and perhaps even necessary—in looking at the work of a living artist whose work is particularly complex and challenging. Each writer addresses the art on their own terms, and the resulting essays provide an approachable presentation of a multilayered body of work.
Alastair MacLennan is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art, School of Art and Design, Ulster University in Belfast. He is one of Britain’s major practitioners in live art, and travels extensively in Eastern and Western Europe, also America and Canada, presenting "Actuations’"(his term for Performance/ Installations). MacLennan is a founding member of
Belfast's Art and Research Exchange, of Belfast's Bbeyond performance collective and is a member of the performance art entity Black Market International. He has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale (1997) and is an Honorary Associate of the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland.
The panel will discuss the process of developing this publication over a 4 year period, and the intricacies of responding to MacLennan's profoundly temporal practice through its documentation, artifacts, and especially the acts of witnessing that underpin each chapter.