Roland Miller is a self-taught performance artist of over thirty years' standing. He is currently senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield. He has taught in the Fine Art departments of many of the former polytechnics. Below is a transcribed version of the conversational lecture he gave at the Independent Art School Conference, October 2000.

Quite recently I have begun to set up Performance Art projects. In the past I used to just want to make the work and my partner and myself have managed to earn a living through this for the past thirty years. Recently, I get a salary with a University and have gained quite an interesting position whereby I can present the work I do as a performance artist as a form of research. Because of the mechanisms for funding in the universities today in this country, there is definitely a financial gain for the Universities, which is why this is possible. Although the gain is primarily for the University, I get a small amount back, which has made it possible for me to fund my own projects. I will talk about one of these today. It is a project which involved some of the people in this room and many people not in this room and which I called Wond'rous Life.

Wond'rous Life is a phrase taken from a poem by Andrew Marvel. Marvel was a 17th century metaphysical poet who was the MP for Hull during the Cromwellian parliament. During the previous discussions I have become aware that certain people feel that there is something about romanticism, which needs knocking. There seems to be the feeling that anybody who is figured as a romantic is wrong and has got to that position under false pretences. That romanticism, to put it another way, is not relevant to the 21st century - romanticism is passed it, it went out long before modernism.

I think I understand why this attitude has come about. My own education at Oxford in the 1950's was set in the traditional path through which culture and the arts were viewed at that time. Everything that I learnt from my parents, my whole background in fact, placed poetry and art and their sources and imagery in a very conventional representational form to which one should aspire. I understand very well that this carries a huge political baggage. We were told that this was something we must aspire to because the Establishment was able to control what was going on in society through the projection of a romantic image.

If you move away from that and try to set up different things you come across movements and ideas such as Situationism and all the things that were going on in the 60's. This is where my naivety comes through. I used to work a lot with a group called The People Show (and still do today). We used to do what were very situationist types of street theatre. I don't think we knew that it was called situationism and I certainly didn't learn about situationism until very recently. This may be just my inability to pick up on what's going on but I don't think it is. Situationism wasn't theorised then. Now it's been theorised. It's been contextualised. It's been fitted into all these categories and related to Derrida, to Kristeva, to Cicoux and so on.

This all relates back to my own practice. To the thing I have always returned to and always found strategies to do. I am going to talk about the Wond'rous Life project and how I feel that this method of working can be relevant to the Independent Art School. Wond'rous Life is the kind of project where older artists can pass things on to developing ones and where each artist learns from the others. It may seem very far from some of the discussions you've been having; however, it is a practical example of how an educational situation can be set up and developed which is primarily about art making, in a low-budget, non-institutionalised way.

The title of 'Wond'rous Life' istaken from a poem by Andrew Marvel called The Garden, which has the wonderful line in it What Wond'rous life is this I lead, ripe apples fall about my head. I took this as my "motto" and did a performance at the Red Gallery in Hull last year that represented this image. For August this year, I invited several artists to take part in a project of the same title that was located in four different places with different histories and atmospheres. I set up a series of locations that represent a curving line, a journey. It runs from Sheffield, through a place out in the country near Worksop, through Hull and ends at the point where the zero meridian enters the north sea. It doesn't land again until the North Pole, but of course it isn't there because it is an imaginary line.

This took 10 days. We started on the 19th of August. A total of 20 artists took part, some performing at each place, others arriving for one or two particular dates. We went in various ways from one point to the other.

In Sheffield we worked in a building called the Garden Rooms which is an artist run complex of studio spaces and music rehearsal rooms. It is a very interesting building because it's an old building which was occupied by little mesters who were cutlery workers in the 19th and 18th Century in Sheffield. There are very small, unsanitary, primitive workshops where they used to work, above which they would live with their families. There was a lot of political activity around and there was a lot of conflict with the police. It's a very rich environment, now run by artists.

The next event took place at a place called Lindrick Dale, actually Fanfield Curve which is the name of a railway line, no longer there. A friend of mine came into some money through selling a website and bought what is left of this railway line. It takes the shape of a long curved wood. By arrangement we made performances there.

The third event took place in Grosvenor Mill in Hull which is owned and lived in by a Hull based artist.

We finished up on the beach on late August bank holiday next to a caravan park and in a very, I would say, abject place. It was a rainy holiday place which seemed quite a fitting place to have come to the end of the zero meridian.

Now what I think may be of interest to you and which I in retrospect find the most interesting part of this is the way in which artists responded to the project.

Finances: I paid everyone's expenses but I couldn't pay fees. I got the money from Huddersfield University, so essentially, it's a work of research. It becomes a bit of academia. Nobody who sees the events knows or need to know that. I don't think that the artists had a problem with it. I'm the one who's doing the research, so it's up to me to re-present it as research. How do I do that? Partly by making it contextual, by providing the theoretical background to what I do and why I do it, partly by writing at some length about the contexts and partly by providing a series of still photographs which I sent out to the artists.

The Garden Rooms: On the face of it, it looks like a bit of a grotty place and it is a grotty place but there is a great deal of creative activity going on there. There are people who do sound systems for raves set up in a room at the side, there's a jeweller, a blacksmith, a painter, a sculptor, and there are people who are in a sense trying to find out what to do next, having just finished from the art school in Sheffield which is part of Hallam University. It is very much a sort of halfway house. You can rent rent studio spaces quite cheaply there. You can be creative there and nobody is going to say to you "what are your sales this week?" or "your rent is going to be put up because you use too much electricity". It's a very free space and it isn't part of an academy.

One thing I have learned to be very wary of, through sometimes getting arts council grants, is instrumentality. It is a great barrier. If the work you are doing is for the purpose of something else, like urban regeneration, or community coherence, it becomes instrumental. It is just an instrument to pursue social or economic policy. I think then it begins to have problems because the instrumentality gets in the way of the creativity. I can expand on that, if anybody wants me to, later. It's a bit of an off the cuff response, but I think it's true and I think you can see how it works to the detriment of the artist quite easily in lots of situations. Sometimes it works to their advantage, sometimes artists learn how to be instrumental. They learn how to tailor all their projects to the latest social policy of the borough in which they're working and some make a living from it. That's fine, but I don't think it should ever become a rule as some people do.

Tunstall: The fourth and final location. The road is broken off because the cliffs are falling down. In fact that bit of coastline, like a lot of the east coast, is gradually falling into the sea and there are a lot of strangenesses there. There is an area which was a boat yard which was destroyed by a fire. Burnt bits of boat are still there two years later and nobody's got the heart or the courage to clean them away. There's still a boat yard there and they still launch boats and do fishing. This is just a very small part of what goes on in this location as mainly it's a caravan park. It's called Sand-Le-Mere.

This was the information that I sent to artists. They arrived and we set off on a journey. As I have mentioned before, the journey wasn't continuous. Some people would come up and take part and then go away again. Some people came at the end and some at the beginning. It was very unstructured, deliberately so, but actually very structured in my mind because I'd set it up and I'd picked the places. Now that may seem like an indulgence, but I think it is actually in a way a paradigm for a form of research. I think that my form of research is to me acceptable on the academic level. If I can get money to do it, I will go and do it and I think that is an interesting and worthwhile way of working.

Some of the people who took part on the day were not people I'd originally invited, they were people who'd turned up and wanted to take part. So in a sense it was as if I'd collected more students. I know that the artists present wouldn't like to be called 'students', I'm only using that name for the purpose of this talk. So there were people who as it were had enrolled, had agreed to go along with the idea, had accepted the premise that I'd set up, and there were other people who perhaps didn't know what was going to happen. There was one participant who made her first performance in the course of Wond'rous Life having been an artist already and didn't, I think really understand or perhaps anticipate what performance art was about but hopefully learned from that experience.