2017 | Single Channel HD Video | 7'28''

Barbara Cleveland (Diana Baker Smith Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley)

Video editing: Kate Blackmore
Original music: Andrew McLellan

Bad Timing is the fifth in a series of works exploring the life and legacy of the mythic performance artist Barbara Cleveland. In 1977 Cleveland undertook a 24-hour performance based on a score of absurd and provocative instructions, bringing together her interests in humour and endurance. This score, when read as a whole, formed an embodied manifesto that enacted the idea of ‘bad timing’ as a feminist political strategy. Four decades later, the art collective Barbara Cleveland, revisit this score to forge their own sense of bad timing. As serious as it is absurd, this work foregrounds humour as part of their collective feminist methodology and seeks to draw attention to the lineage of humour throughout feminist performance practice over the past 40 years.

Commissioned by Hannah Matthews for The Humours, MUMA 2017.

Installation images: Andrew Curtis