100-Year-Old Performance Artist Ken Turner Reflects on a Life of Rebellion

‘Life is short, art long,” says Ken Turner, reading from a book of aphorisms by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. And he’s half right, really, because at 100 years old – and very possibly the world’s oldest performance artist – art might have been long, but life hasn’t been all that short for him, either. And he has filled those years to the brim with radicalism, experimentalism and a singular dedication to pushing ideas as far as he can make them go.

In the 1960s, Turner moved from painting towards a socially conscious form of public art, creating giant inflatable sculptures that visitors could inhabit and interact with decades before immersive art became a thing. He was taught by Fernand Léger, he was mates with John Berger, he made frames for Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Last year, he drove a tank over a Tesla in a performance meant as a damning indictment of corporate greed and rising fascism. His has been a life of rebellion and revolution, of obstinately following his own artistic path no matter what obstacles he encounters, no matter how much easier it would have been to walk down a more well-trodden one.

He’s written two books: Crashing Culture and the brilliantly named A Life Being Ken Turner. Those two titles sum him up perfectly; he smashes art conventions to bits, all while being uniquely, resolutely and utterly himself. And he’s still at it: still performing, still painting, still making. Ahead of an exhibition of new work at Wharfside Arts Hub in Penzance, he sits in his kitchen talking about his life and work, dressed in a blue work shirt and cap. A Michael Eavis-esque moustache-less beard makes him look every inch the Cornwall creative that he is. We’re joined by his son, the film-maker Huw Wahl, whose tender, grainy filmic portrait of his father plays on a loop in the show. “I think his painting is getting better and better, in a way, because he’s becoming more and more playful,” says Wahl. “But Ken’s always been childish, in the best sense.”

“I was always interested in imaginative ideas, and the idea of play as an education in itself,” Turner says. “The more you go through education into university, the more you forget to play, and playing is incredibly important.”

Turner has a lot to say, a lot of stories to tell, as you’d expect after 80 years of art-making. Dates and names may escape him now, but the anecdotes tumble out in an endless stream. He struggles to talk about the emotions and reasoning behind most of the work, but perhaps even at 100 years old he’s still processing it all. His art isn’t a fait accompli. He doesn’t seem comfortable looking backwards when there’s so much still to look forward to.

Turner was drafted into the mines at the outbreak of the second world war, and eventually into the Royal Engineers. He emerged desperate to make art, but deeply suspicious of the art establishment and turned down a place at London’s Slade School of Fine Art because he didn’t like the colour of the walls. “If they can’t get the colour of the walls right, how can they teach people?” he says. Later, he refused to do his final exam at Regent Street Polytechnic because they expected him to paint in an impressionist style, and turned down invites to show in the art galleries of the West End. “I didn’t like the dealers, I thought they smelled foul, they looked crooked, and they were monsters in their own right.” At every stage, Turner has pushed back against expectations: “I’m not a revolutionary, I’m a simple rebel, really.”

Instead, Turner worked as a framer before taking a position as a teacher at Barnet College and eventually Central Saint Martins. In the late 1960s, an encounter with a public project by radical theatre director Joan Littlewood inspired him to form Action Space, an art collective hellbent on taking art out of the galleries and putting it where the public could actually reach it. They described themselves as “an association of artists working in the community, through education and play, developing art forms relevant to a wider public”. They created vast inflatable sculptures you could walk through and perform in, they used light, sound, movement and drama, they put on events for children. This was socially conscious, community-engaged art well ahead of its time.

“Well, that’s the social conscience I have,” Turner says when asked about making art for a wider public. “I almost cry about the inequality that’s happening.” Action Space was about finding ways of connecting with people outside traditional, conservative art contexts. But rejecting the established gallery model to work in disadvantaged urban areas was also a continuation of his rebellious streak. “It was something intuitive, it was in my bones to reject institutional thinking.” Action Space still exists today, in another guise, as a charity working with learning-disabled artists, including Turner prize-winner Nnena Kalu.

It was also around this time that Turner discovered his love of performance art, a passion that peaked last year when he drove that 15-tonne tank over a Tesla in a project coordinated by guerrilla art provocateurs Led By Donkeys. “There’s no difference between performance and painting for me,” he states. “I perform when I’m painting, and I’m painting when I perform.” And age is no barrier to that – he’ll be performing at the opening of the new exhibition alongside his daughter.

Turner moved to Cornwall in the 1990s and rediscovered his love of playing around with brushes and oils, rekindling his passion for painting. It’s still his main form of creative output, though that comes with its own pressures: “I’m still at that point where I need to sell paintings, but I don’t want to go into the West End to sell them. That’s the art industry. I just intensely dislike the critics, and you’re not an art critic, are you?”

He looks disappointed at my response. That old suspicion of the art establishment rearing its head again. “Well, have a look at the paintings, and then decide who should buy them,” he says. So I do. They’re big, grandiose, semi-abstract things, often chaotic, sometimes violent, deeply emotional and overwrought. They deal with the destruction of Gaza, the impact of the climate emergency; they don’t make for easy viewing. “I think museums should buy them,” Turner says. “They instruct people, they’re about the sadness of the planet, the development of cruelty and inequality that’s happening.”

He cares deeply about the world, and he genuinely thinks art can help change things for the better. Is it that belief in art’s power that pushes him forward? “Even though I’m 100, I’ll get to about 110 and I’ll still go on painting, because it’s signposted: ‘This is the way, this is where you should go.’ It’s a voice inside.”