Bob Parks

Bob Parks

(United Kingdom)

In the 60's I developed a self abandonment from John Cage's Indeterminacy album. This involved making as much noise as would come out of my mouth while moving my body as violently as it would go. I got it up to about 14 minutes. I later identified this persona as Bignose.

Wearing a tunic made from a painting with many colours and carrying a 14' No Parking Sign on my head in the early 70's I walked around Leicester for 2 weeks. This was my first Walking Art experience evolving from my self-abandonment and taking my practice into the world outside. The choices in Performance Art in the 70's were self-mutilation or sex. I took the latter which at the time seemed like the safer one. Thus my persona became erotic and I painted a self-portrait over a year in a Dadaist pose with the cheapest art materials. To inform this process, addressing the hypocrisy of male Renaissance artists painting female models behind closed doors, from time to time (dressed only in a jock stap/ G-string) I walked round LA getting thrown out of Art Museums and screamed at in MacDonald's living out my self-portrait.

In the 80's and the following 30 years, back in England and living at home, this evolved as a persona (Bignose) from something external into something internal and manifested itself as 1000 psychotic murderous rages addressed at mum - psychotic Walking Art if you like.

In the 2020's I have fused all these elements, with the help of a network of 40 like-minded souls (The No Name Now Collective) as a group process to combine our skills and ResonanceFM, into using my early morning 5-mile jogs as Walking Art to inform my studio practice in the afternoon which I call "The Return of Bignose".