Bill Beckley, Deirdre’s Lip (1978)

Beckley’s narrative artworks

Bill Beckley was an American artist who was born in 1946 in Pennsylvania. He studied art at two nearby universities, and in 1970 his work was included in the conceptual art exhibition “Art in the Mind.” The same year, he moved to NYC, and began to meet other artists that all made works that could loosely be described as narrative art. On his website, you can see all the works he made in the ‘70s: photographs that could be pristinely sharp and clear, almost like advertising images; or photographs that were more oblique and evocative. They were paired with texts, printed on white paper in a sober black sans serif, that felt like short, flash fiction–style stories.

Beckley wanted the images and text to have equal weight. Of the artwork above, he said,

Deirdre’s Lip ...is a culmination of my so-called Story or Narrative works of the late sixties. In 1969, I began writing texts and simultaneously imagined images to make works that were both image and text—neither one having precedent over the other. The images do not illustrate the text and the texts do not explain the images—or at least I hope they don’t. They float together in undetermined space and function like a kiss. The Lip is fiction, not a documentation of an act performed elsewhere. With respect to scale, I wanted the piece to have a photographic presence compatible to painting and sculpture of that time. Conceptual art was a refreshing departure from the prison of Minimalism, a movement that many of us escaped from in the very late sixties. But the escape for me was like jumping from frying pan into fire. I was uncomfortable with Minimalism’s regiments and Conceptualism’s self-consciousness, seriousness, and sexlessness. I knew I could not go back to 19th century Romanticism, but I didn’t want to divorce myself from its pathos. A moral of the story, but not the only one: if you want a kiss, it’s good to give some lip.

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