Lee Campbell Artist Curator Writer

Performance Documentation and Interviews

www.youtube.com/leecampbellprojects

Lives and Works in London

Lee Campbell works with public sphere arts participatory practices where he uses humour as a strategy to explore audience participatory art projects. He has been conducting mass performance art spectacles in a variety of locations internationally since 2000 with artists including Tomoko Takahashi, Gary Stevens, Hew Locke, Mark Wallinger, Marcia Farquhar and Ryan Gander. In 2008, he was interviewed by Libby Purves on BBC Radio 4 Midweek about his performance at Whitstable Biennale 2008.

In 2005, he curated All For Show, a presentation of short films described as ʻslapstick theatricsʼ, ʻawkward and macabre sense of humourʼ and ʻcringingly funnyʼ (Lack, 2005:14) shown in various contemporary art spaces in New Zealand,Germany,The Netherlands and the USA. Films by artists such as Harold Offeh, Beagles and Ramsay and Doug Fishbone tested the acceptable limits of humour in the white cube gallery space.ID Magazine critic Jessica Lack (2005:14) wrote ʻthese idiosyncratic films succeed in finding surreal quirks in the banalities of everyday lifeʼ. In March 2012, he organised an international symposium at Mostyn gallery, Llandudno, North Wales entitled With Humorous Intent which explored the deployment of humour within contemporary art practices.

His current PhD research interests explore notions of witnessing, group participation, liveness, visual communication, presence v absence, recording, humour, serendipity, liminality.

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FORTHCOMING.

HOOPLA. ‘A sideways antidote to the 2012 Olympics '
The event will be part of CREATE and takes place on Friday 13th July 2012 at Sugarhouse Studios, an island formed by roads and waterways just south of the Olympic Park. Sugarhouse Studios is run by Assemble who have transformed a disused sign-writers workshop into a 50-seat cinema made from recycled wood, an events space and a bar/café. Curated by Tessa Garland
tessa@garland33.fsnet.co.uk
http://sugarhousestudios.co.uk/home-page/
http://www.bowarts.org/nunnery
http://createlondon.org/
Photo credit: Lee Campbell and Corinne Felgate, False Start, Olympic Visions, The Nunnery Gallery

SUPERNORMAL

Braziers International Artists' Workshop presents SUPERNORMAL. An intimate, non profit event that blurs the boundaries between art and music, performer and audience.

http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/arts/

Braziers International Artists Workshop Alumni

This year we have invited BIAW alumni artists to return to Braziers and engage in the festival to produce new work. For those who don’t know, BIAW took place at Braziers for 15 years until 2010 and in turn led to the conception of Supernormal. We are delighted to welcome them back to Braziers Park and are looking forward to seeing their responses to Supernormal.

Fiona MacDonald & John Holland

Jordan McKenzie & Aaron Williamson

Cool Diabang

Susanne Pillar

Jarek Hubloj

Kay Walsh

John Hughes

Aditi Kulkarni

Lina Hakim

Jarek Hubloj

Juan Pablo Echiverri

Lee Campbell

I have been invited to participate in
The Inquisition: Summer Lodge 2012, Nottingham Trent University

COPY CAT! Five Years gallery publication

Lee Campbell has invited artists Mark Harvey, Alexander Costello, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Duncan McAfee, Sarah Bowker-Jones, Alex Baker and Mike Ryder to create new artworks for a publication as part of FIVE YEARS, London recent THIS IS NOT A SCHOOL programme. Each artist will create a new work responding to the brief of 'copycat'. Publication due Summer 2012.

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RECENT PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS.

THREE ARTISTS WALK INTO A BAR.

13 Apr — 13 May 2012

de Appel Boys' School, Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 59, 1072 BD Amsterdam 

WEBSITE: http://www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com/saturdays/21-april-2012/

"– quite apart from making us laugh – it [humour] has been employed to activate repressed impulses, embody alienation or displacement, disrupt convention, and to explore power relations in terms of gender, sexuality, class, taste or racial and cultural identities."  - Jennifer Higgie -

De Appel Curatorial Programme 2011-2012 preseneted Three Artists Walk into a Bar..., a series of works and interventions that took place outside of the premises of the exhibition space, channelled through discussion, dialogue, and public gatherings at the Appel Boys’ School and on the website of the project, www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com. Using the quality of humour to test the potential of art as a critical instrument for the analysis of social, political and cultural issues, this project aimed to build a community of peers, professionals and a variety of publics. The commitment to humour, stemmed from a belief in its social quality; in its capacity to bring subversive voices and unexpected perspectives to mainstream awareness.

A programme of lectures and workshops by internationally renowned practictioners from the field of art, theory and comedy. by Joost de Bloois, Lee Campbell, Simon Critchley, Dora Garcia, Giselinde Kuipers, VOINA, amongst others www.threeartistswalkintoabar.com  

TaPRA Working Group DOCUMENTING PERFORMANCE Interim event at the University of Hull, Scarborough, March 24th 2012

The symposium entitled Interdiscipinary Approaches to Documenting Performance saw Prof Barry Smith as keynote speaker and included a range of papers from presenters across the UK. Details from Dr Toni Sant. t.sant@hull.ac.uk

WITH HUMOROUS INTENT was a two day symposium interrogating the deployment of humour within contemporary art practices from 2nd-4th March 2012 at Mostyn, Llandudno, North Wales, UK organised by Lee Campbell, PhD researcher, Loughborough University School of the Arts, UK in cooperation with Mostyn and Loughborough University School of the Arts, in conjunction with Politicized Practice Research Group to coincide with ‘Ha Ha Road’, Mostyn, 03 Dec - 11 Mar 2012. http://www.mostyn.org/whats_on/detail/ha_ha_road

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Speakers included Gillian Whiteley (aka bricolagekitchen); Gary Stevens and Dave Ball, curator of Ha Ha Road, Mostyn.

Some of the WITH HUMOROUS INTENDERS.. L to R Dave Ball, Frog Morris, Dean Kelland, Lee Campbell, Alison O'Connor, Waldermar Pranckiewicz.

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NEW PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION ON-LINE
'ON YOUR MARKS' residency July 2011 with Lucy O'Donnell
Video recording of performance at Parfitt Gallery, Croydon
available here
http://www.parfittgallery.croydon.ac.uk/exhibitions/past/onyourmarks/