About Simon Herbert
Simon Herbert has put a little spoor about, here and there, as he has pursued his love affair between high and low culture.
He used to actually be an artist himself – back in the ‘80s when performance art was considered almost still radical and not just another lava lamp (because the lava lamp that burns the brightest is one that congeals the quickest) on the mantelpiece of exhausted tropes. He was run out of the town of Winnipeg, while on tour, by the Police Department for tying two thousand toy soldiers to his genitals.
He returned to that fair Canadian city (where he first met PODgallery founder Kevin Mutch) a few years later posing as Bono, en route to recording a sweat lodge concept album meant to heal the bad vibes.
In truth, Herbert made less than an imposing dent on the mahogany facade of the UK art world (too much time spent on curating other artist’s projects and writing about art) but he got to travel a bit and get pissed on the taxpayer’s purse, which makes him marginally less sad than abstract painters who give up the ghost a year after leaving art college (and despite his knee-jerk cynicism he still adores performance art and acknowledges that it still has power “in the moment.” That there are lots of amazing practitioners still out there, both old and new, who still have the conviction to produce incredible work. And that we should all get together at the next Sex Pistols reunion.).
As a critic, editor and reviewer he has written countless international articles on installation, comics, gender politics, philanthropy, why graffiti sucks, art paradigms, Shirley Eaton’s golden ass and the politics of cultural democracy for numerous journals including: Art Monthly, High Performance, Creative Camera, Contemporary Magazine and various catalogue essays for the Singapore and Sydney Biennales and the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust Foundation among others. He has presented keynote lectures around the world, and engaged artists and curators in “in-conversations” from the ICA in London to the Madrid Art Fair.
As a curator (he prefers the term “producer”) he has commissioned live artworks, radical public art commissions and site-specific projects since 1985; most recently as Co-Director of Locus+ from 1992 to 2002 (but nothing after that, let it be noted). These included Mark Wallinger’s Duchampian project to run a racehorse as A Real Work of Art in the 1994 Flat Season: Stefan Gec’s Trace Elements smelting of Russian submarines into bells: and comic book writer (Swamp Thing, Watchmen) Alan Moore’s live performance of The Birth Caul. Herbert was the curator of Burning the Flag? in 1991, a landmark anti-censorship festival which featured works by six American performance artists, including Karen Finley, Tim Miller and Annie Sprinkle (pictured with Herbert, mid-public-funded-event, below).
He has also co-edited and produced many catalogues and books.
He moved from the UK to Los Angeles in 2002 to undertake a new piece of conceptual art: getting married to his lovely wife Ellen and reinventing himself as a screenwriter during a mid life crisis. He intends this new work to be a long duration piece.
He is currently fortunate enough to work as Development Director of PODgallery, identifying new content for audiences to be made available as high-quality prints. And now he does this blog.
