Info & History

Cowboys (1st Performance Work)

Artist as ... (Cowboys: "We are Cowboys")


The Artist as Cowboy: The Hoy pub on Creek Rd, then on to New Cross and all the bars on a Friday night (high alcohol consumption). Toy guns, cowboy costumes.
Random person: “What are you supposed to be? This isn’t fancy dress you know.”
neone: “What do you mean?”
Random person: “You’re dressed as a cowboy.”
neone: “I am a cowboy!”


“The art object had become a slave to the institution of art. All acts of creativity had been reduced to a material monetary value. The artist themselves had become a puppet of solidifying capitalist ideology. How could art be for and about the people, a pastoral art of contemporary society?

Art, commodity. Institutions, free market. Gallery, Shopping Centre. Concept, advertising. Artist, brand.

We wished to escape the gallery, the institution, the market. We began to act, not create. We used the streets, we reclaimed the arena. Performance became our brush and palette, our chisel.”


“Romantic, idolised, mythical notions of the artist, were clashed against the harsh reality outside the shelter of the art world. In 1997 the south east of London was hit by interventions.”

Arton Lang