Ian Hinchliffe
This is currently a very brief summary of the life and work of Ian Hinchliffe. It is utterly inadequate, but as there is very little about him on the web it is better than nothing.
English performance artist. Getting on in years when I met him in 1999. He seems to have been most active during the seventies and early eighties. He has performed, among other places, at the Western Front.
Born and raised in Sheffield. No formal art training. Worked in a steel mill. Came to performance art through trad jazz.
In a retrospective of his work (which I have mislaid—otherwise this article would be better than it is) he was described by Jeff Nuttall as “astray between art and reality”. This was crossed out by Ian Hinchliffe himself and replaced with the handwritten words “The working class is the ashtray between art and reality”.
Hinchliffe was a pioneer of the trash aesthetic playing on the unacknowledged revulsion of his art crowd audience for the smoking drinking pork-pie-eating working class. He once famously accepted a grant from the Arts Council of England and then took his trousers down outside Marks and Spencer.
A good deal of his work could be considered “acting”, but he would drift in and out of character in a disconcerting way. For instance during a talk about his work at the art school I attended he drifted into the character of a nervously laughing old man and drifted back a very short while later to being once again an artist talking about his work. On the other hand in a short film he made at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff in the late 70s or early 80s, a kind of grotesque comedy, the (conventional) actress over whom his character is lusting very obviously begins to realise that this grubby middle aged man wasn’t faking it.
There is an Ian Hinchliffe listed in IMDB and a host of similar databases for some extremely minor roles in a one or two British films and TV series. I strongly this is the same Ian Hinchcliffe.
I’ve no idea what he is doing now, or even if he is still with us.
