In the early sixties at the Royal College of Art in London,
three extraordinary personalities collided to reshape
contemporary art and literature. In late 1962, New
Zealander Barrie Bates looked in a mirror one evening
and disappeared forever – transforming himself into
Billy Apple, moving to New York two years later to
develop pop art and exhibit alongside Andy Warhol,
Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Fellow pop art
pioneer David Hockney – young, Northern and openly
gay – had a close friendship with Bates: travelling
together, making work together, bleaching their hair
together, almost being expelled together. And in the
middle of it all was Ann Quin. Working as a secretary for the
Head of the Royal College’s Painting Department, sleeping
with Bates, ghost-writing his thesis, soon to publish her
experimental novel Berg and then commit suicide.

Taking us back to London, 1962, award-wining writer
Anthony Byrt illuminates a key moment in cultural
history and tackles big questions: How did a group of
outsiders transform British art? Where did pop and
conceptual art come from? What was the relationship
between revolutions in personal and sexual identities
and these major shifts in contemporary art?

Anthony Byrt

Anthony Byrt writes about art for New Statesman,
frieze, Art Forum and the Guardian. In 2013 he was
Critical Studies Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art,
Michigan, and in 2015 was New Zealand’s Reviewer of
the Year. He is the author of a book about New Zealand
contemporary art, This Model World: Travels to the Edge
of Contemporary Art (2016), finalist in the 2017 Ockham
New Zealand Book Awards.