John Duncan is an American artist whose body of work includes performance art, installations, contemporary music, video art and experimental film, often involving the extensive use of recorded sound. His music is composed mainly of recordings from shortwave radio, field recordings and voice. His events and installations are often confrontational in nature.Haynes, Jim "Shock Treatment: John Duncan", The Wire, Number 208, May 2001 Duncan currently lives in and operates out of Bologna, Italy.
Early years Duncan was born in Wichita, Kansas, to parents of English and Scottish ancestry. He was raised with a strict Calvinist upbringing where self-reliance, hard work, and the suppression of emotional suffering were considered virtues. Questioning authority was severely punished.John Duncan in conversation with Thomas Bailey, published in MicroBionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century; Creation Books 2009 In his teens he studied figure drawing and painting together with psychology and the physics of light. His first contact with experimental music was the Jacques Lasry LP Chronophagie, discovered in the record bins of the Wichita Public Library. In 1971 he applied for and received Conscientious Objector status. At 19 he left for Los Angeles to attend CalArts, where he studied under Allan Kaprow.
Los Angeles In the mid-1970s, his Los Angeles performances, events and installations were influenced by the 'Poor Theatre' of Jerzy Grotowski, as well as the cathartic exposure of personal experiences seen in the work of Viennese actionist artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler and early feminist performance art. Several of his early events were held in private or in front of a small number of witnesses. Scare was an encouragement to examine the physical effects of fear. Duncan donned a disguise and fired a blank-loaded pistol at point-blank range at two carefully selected participants, Tom Recchion and Paul McCarthy, chosen “...because they were close friends who would not expect anything like this to happen to them and who would be able to appreciate the event as I intended it”.John Duncan lecture, John Duncan: on psychic research, Bergen, Norway 2007 Bus Ride sexually stimulated unsuspecting passengers on a city bus with a liquid poured into the ventilation system in order to observe the results.John Duncan: Work 1975-2005 p. 27 Blind Date, involving intercourse with a female corpse followed by a vasectomy, both conducted in private, was presented as an audio-only event to an audience in a darkened warehouse, a demonstration of how men are conditioned to turn emotional suffering into rage.Kristine Stiles, Uncorrupted Joy included in "Out of Actions: between performance and the object 1948-1979" (1998) p. 240-241 An untitled character-exchange event with McCarthy was held in private in McCarthy's studio, where Duncan recorded actions to video that McCarthy immediately erased.
Other events were presented to radio audiences.In 1978, KPFK FM radio estimated their listening audience for the time slots given to broadcast these works at between 15,000 and 20,000 listeners. No was Duncan's first public performance of a Reichian exercise (later known as bioenergetic analysis) broadcast live over Close Radio. Happy Homes, his last performance before leaving Los Angeles, was a telephone exchange with radio therapist Dr. Toni Grant, broadcast live over the ABC radio network.Dr. Toni Grant's program was produced by Los Angeles radio station KABC and syndicated nationwide over the ABC radio network Duncan described several child-abuse cases he had personally witnessed as a Los Angeles city bus driver as he asked the therapist for advice.
His first films were shot in Super-8, silent or with separate audio, intended either as stand-alone works or as elements used in live events. The performance For Women Only is centered around a film intended to erotically arouse the all-woman audience, who were then invited to enter a back room and abuse Duncan sexually. The Secret Film was screened individually to eight viewers before the film itself and the room where it was shown were both destroyed by fire.
Together with McCarthy he co-produced Close Radio, a weekly series of live radio broadcasts over KPFK that provided airtime to artists working in sound, many of them for the first time. The Close Radio archive was donated to the Getty Center in 2007.Close Radio - Getty Center
In 1978 he became closely associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), working on collaborations with Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen and Joe Potts. His earliest recorded audio experiments were also made at this time, including work with Michael LeDonne-Bhennet, McCarthy, Recchion and Nilsen. His first solo LP Organic was released in 1979. His first solo recordings with shortwave radio were released in 1982 on the EP Creed which also included the complete broadcast of Happy Homes.
Tokyo Duncan left the United States for Tokyo in 1982, where he continued his performance work, and expanded his experiments with recorded shortwave broadcasts and film. The music he produced in this period, including Kokka (National Anthem) with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter, the solo LP Riot and Dark Market Broadcast, led to collaborations with a number of Japanese noise music artists, including Masami Akita, Keiji Haino and Hijokaidan. His solo recordings and live concerts from this period establish him as one of the early pioneers of Japanese noise; the first non-Japanese to work in the genre in Japan.Dr. Takuya Sakaguchi, in conversation with John Duncan 1985
It was also here that he began to deliberately limit the exhibition of his visual art to public arenas, outside of established art galleries and institutions. His performances centered on Reichian breath exercises conducted onstage and in public, including Cast performed on the floor of the women's public toilet at the 'Second Annual Alternative Media Conference' in Tokyo in 1986. The collage series that he produced for display in strategically selected public men's toilets called The Toilet Exhibition combined graphic war-damage images from world events with commercial pornography to emphasize links between them, in private stalls frequented by men from government offices (Kokkai-gijidomae), the banking sector (Hibia) and the fashion industry (Shibuya).
In the mid-1980s he began pirate radio and television broadcasts with portable custom-made transmitters built by Duncan himself, operating illegally from apartment block roofs in central Tokyo and an abandoned US Army hospital near Sagamihara, as well as periodic broadcasts made from his own home. Radio Code broadcasts featured the early live work of musician Keiji Haino and Butoh soloist Hisako Horikawa, which were also relayed throughout Tokyo via other pirate radio stations, particularly Radio Homerun in Shimokitazawa. TVC-1 television broadcasts were transmitted from central Tokyo rooftops, over the frequency assigned to NHK 1 after the station had concluded its broadcast day, limited to 12 minutes in order to avoid contact with Tokyo police.Source: Tokyo spokesman for Dempakanrikyoku, quoted in a 1985 Asahi Evening News article reporting the arrest of the owner of Our House recording studio who also ran a network of Tokyo pirate radio transmitters. The spokesman described a triangulating network of sensors that could detect a pirate signal within 30 seconds and transmit the location to the nearest police box. Officers would then report to the scene with a handheld signal detector to verify the pirate transmission, confiscate the equipment and make the arrest.
His work in film and video included the Super-8 films Trigger with a solo soundtrack, Brutal Birthday with a live soundtrack performed by Duncan's group C.V. Massage, and a support film for the performance event Move Forward that included images from hardcore pornography and animated technical drawings of nuclear attack strategies.
He also directed a series of commercial adult videos for Kuki Inc. under the name John See, for which he also wrote the scripts, edited, composed soundtracks and occasionally acted in incidental roles. Several re-edited versions of John See videos were broadcast over TVC-1, also appearing in the 2003 video installation See.
Amsterdam In 1988 Duncan moved to Amsterdam. The Kick performance series of Reichian exercises was conducted before live audiences throughout Europe, from 1989 at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, to 1993. The final event was held on the altar of the Parochiale Kirche in Berlin, concluding a live solo concert.
His audio installation Stress Chamber consists of three independent motors vibrating the walls of a shipping container at its resonant frequency, remote-controlled from outside. Participants enter one at a time, nude, to be locked inside, allowing the vibrations to move at random around and through the participant's body. Stress Chamber was premiered in Amsterdam at the Absolute Threshold Machine Festival. Initially the festival organizers threatened to cancel the work due to its tendency to vibrate the grounds of the surrounding area to a 90-meter radius, concerned that it would become a 'torture device'. Finally the work was allowed, and the queue it created kept the entire festival open several hours longer than anticipated.Absolute Threshold Machine Festival, Amsterdam, 1993. The festival, due to close at midnight, was kept open until 02:30 to allow time for people in queue to participate.John Duncan, interview by Daniela Cascella published in Blow Up, November 2000
In 1988 and 1989 several of his films were broadcast over Rabotnik TV along with Anthem, a Reichian exercise performed for the Rabotnik TV camera in a derelict building used by heroin addicts. Location sound for Anthem was recorded by Andrew M. McKenzie. Between 1990 and 1993, Radio Code FM broadcasts continued as weekly programs which he produced and hosted over pirate stations Radio 100 and Radio Patapoe.
The Maze event in June 1995 involved a group of seven volunteer participants, including Duncan and an infant child, locked naked and blind overnight in an Amsterdam cellar in order to directly experience workings of the mind in a situation of unexpected sensory deprivation. The event ended when several participants pried open the exit door with their fingernails and broke it down. The infant child slept through the entire event. A video created from infrared photos taken during the event was produced later that year at Contained in Linz, Austria.
Music from this period includes CD releases Contact with Andrew M. McKenzie, Send with tracks by McKenzie and Zbigniew Karkowski and The Crackling, composed with Max P. Springer in 1996 from field recordings made by Duncan at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. A 1997 review by Rob Young claimed The Crackling rendered the Stanford research facility '...perhaps the largest musical instrument ever created'.Rob Young, “Exotic Audio Research”; The Wire, March 1997
Scrutto di San Leonardo
In 1996 he met Giuliana Stefani when she posed as a model for Duncan's photo project Icons. Her academic training in mathematics, work in photography and practice of meditation quickly catalyzed a bond between them. In autumn 1996 they left Amsterdam and set up a studio in Scrutto di San Leonardo, a village of fewer than 100 inhabitants in the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia province of Italy at the border with Slovenia. They were married in Scrutto di San Leonardo in 1998. Their collaborations include Charge Field and Palace of Mind. They agreed to separate amicably in 2005.