Notes on Bob & Bob

Bob & Bob
“Who Are Bob & Bob?”
Los Angeles, 1980

Kurcfeld, Michael, “Bob & Bob Get Serious: Be Straight with Bob & Bob & Bob & Bob Will Be Straight With you,” High Performance, no. 6, v.2, June 1979, pp18-22. Excerpt:

DB: We did a piece called [at LAICA] called “The School of Painting.” I called Bob, who was planted in the audience, up to the stage, where I immediately taught him to be an artist. There were two canvases set up, and I was demonstrating a still life on one. He eventually got frustrated and just taped the real fruit to his canvas. I critiqued it, saying that it was just spectacular, the way it looked like it was coming right off the canvas…

LB: The LAICA performance was our greatest performance. It was like Meet The Beatles all over again. We had a terrible rock band that was loud, rambunctious, and off-key. Our microphones distorted our voices, and we danced around like Pop-Tarts. We had a tape of screaming girls running at full blast, and the surgical women carried around big poster blow-ups of Bob & Bob. It was pandemonium, just like a Beatle concert there in the little art gallery. We even had autograph hounds at the end.

DB: We closed it with fifteen minutes of chanting “Live your own Life.”

Performance Anthology: Sourcebook of California Performance Art, 1989