Kembra Pfahler, the transgressive performance artist and frontwoman of punk outfit The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, was still in the earliest phase of an idiosyncratic career when she debuted The Manual of Action, at ABC No Rio on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. ‘It’s essentially a document, I call it nonfiction illustration – it's got drawings and performances and writings about each decade of the artwork I've done,’ she explains today, clarifying the work’s various forms. ‘I'm 62 now, so it’s been four decades, and essentially it’s a directive and a reminder, a way I can share with others my vocabulary of images.’
In its latest guise, The Manual of Action is a big screen-cum-workshop-led project organised in collaboration with the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA). Over three months, through 30 June 2024, Pfahler will lead a series of classes in person and online; each week a new class is introduced with a short film streamed from Piccadilly Circus in London, as well as in Berlin, Milan and Seoul, daily at 20:24 local time.
