The artist who left no physical record of her work

While locked-down galleries compete to keep their artists in the public eye — or ear — by uploading interview podcasts, a treasure trove of earlier recordings is being overlooked. Artists’ Lives, part of the British Library’s oral history archive, is a collection of interviews with 370 artists, 200 of which are available on the British Library Sounds website. As an account of British art of the past century they are more comprehensive than Vasari’s Lives and more reliable, coming as they do from the horse’s mouth. They are also exhaustive. But for those who haven’t got all day to follow the fascinating career of Guyanese-born Frank Bowling RA through 17 hours of recordings, edited extracts are now available as Voices of art.

What makes Voices of art so refreshing is its refusal to focus only on the famous. One of its star turns, Barbara Steveni, who died in February, never had a gallery and is not represented in any public collection. Part of the 1960s happenings movement that defined art by actions rather than objects, she left no physical record of her work — and from one interview clip, we understand why.

In 1965 Steveni’s husband John Latham was exhibiting kinetic suitcases with engines, and she and the activist Phil Cohen went to a Paddington Lost Property auction to buy more. Being inexperienced bidders, they found themselves landed with hundreds of cases and nowhere to put them, until Steveni dreamed up an event to welcome Latham home from abroad. Driving the cases to Paddington Station, they bribed a porter to load them on a trolley and wheel it on to the platform where they met Latham. Armed with a saw and matches supplied by Steveni, Latham started chopping up cases and setting them alight.