John Duncan

John Duncan is an American multi-platform 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 a form of existential research, often confrontational in nature.

Duncan currently lives in (and operates out of) Bologna, Italy.

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.

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 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”.

Bus Ride sexually stimulated unsuspecting passengers on a city bus with a liquid poured into the ventilation system in order to observe the results.

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.

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, at once separated from each other and too large to gather in one place.

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 throughout the United States 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.

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.

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.

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.

His first solo recordings with shortwave radio were released in 1982 on the EP Creed which also included the complete broadcast of Happy Homes.

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.

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), at moments of absentminded contemplation.

The Close Radio archive was donated to the Getty Center in 2007.