John Duncan (artist)

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John Duncan (1953-) is an artist who has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Amsterdam, currently lives and works in Bologna. His work, viewed by Duncan himself as a form of psychic research, is often viewed as confrontational and involves audiences in ways that call for each participant to spontaneously examine an aspect of him- or herself in the process of an event. His installations usually involve the extensive use of sound. His music is composed mainly of recordings from shortwave radio, field recordings and voice.

[edit] History

In the early 1970's he attended California Institute of the Arts where he studied with Allan Kaprow, first became aware of performance art, the work of theater director Jerzy Grotowsky, Viennese Actionism and experimental music.

In the mid-1970s, his Los Angeles performances (Scare, For Women Only, Every Woman) and installations (Bus Ride, The Black Room) focused largely on urban social situations and were considered by critics as aggressive, at times threatening, at others bordering on self-destructive. His most famous and most extreme work from this time period is Blind Date, a film in which John Duncan has intercourse with a female corpse on camera and then has a vasectomy. It was because of this film that Duncan was forced to flee the U.S. for Japan. Duncan's earliest recorded audio experiments were also made at this time, including his first recordings made with shortwave radio. Together with Paul McCarthy he co-produced Close Radio, a weekly series of radio broadcasts over KPFK that provided airtime to artists working in sound, many of them for the first time.

Duncan moved to Tokyo in 1982, where he continued and expanded his work with recorded shortwave broadcasts. In the mid-1980s he began pirate radio and television broadcasts (Radio Code, TVC 1[1]) with portable hand-soldered transmitters, operating from apartment block roofs and derelict buildings. Duncan also began working in film and video, including a series of commercial adult videos that he directed under the name John See[2].

In 1988 Duncan moved to Amsterdam, where his work gradually became more introspective. Music from this period includes The Crackling[3], composed with Max Springer in 1996 from field recordings made by Duncan at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

In 2006 Duncan recorded Our Telluric Conversation with Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Nine Suggestions with Pan Sonic members Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen.

Currently John Duncan lives in Italy where he is continually releasing new work, mostly on his own label Allquestions[4].