"An Eight Day Passage": A Lecture by Dominic Johnson

“On the morning of the 25th October 1977 I shall be incarcerated within the confines of a concrete cell and the entrance sealed behind me […]. [My] task within the eight day duration of this work will be to attempt to free myself from the isolation of these chosen limits of time and space.” So reads in part a statement of intent by the late British artist Kerry Trengove, ahead of his endurance performance An Eight Day Passage (1977), in which he dug his way out of a gallery, through foundations and walls. The action received extensive coverage in the national press, and was iconic among fellow artists and their audiences, yet it has since slipped into obscurity. In this lecture, I “recover” the action and situate it in relation to better-known works of durational endurance in the period, in order to ask critical questions about political, class and masculine struggle in the 1970s.

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the Department of Performance Studies.