Jeff Perkins

#JeffPerkins

Born in New York City, USA.

Lives and works in New York, USA.

Also known as “the ultimate Fluxus underdog”, Jeff Perkins met Yoko Ono and Tony Cox by chance, in 1963, while doing his military service in Japan. Through them he was introduced to the Fluxus movement, to which he contributed discreetly though regularly. He created performances, but also Endless Column, a sculpture that is a kind of totemic piece made as a tribute to the artists of the movement, as well as several films with Yoko Ono and Tony Cox for the Anthology Film Archives and the New York Underground Film Festival.

Perkins was also friends with Guy de Cointet and the painter Sam Francis. In contact with Francis, he developed in Los Angeles a pictorial and existential research about “waking dreams”, the unconscious and abstraction. While there, he also founded a psychedelic lightshow band, the Single Wing Turquoise Bird, who performed for many bands, including The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, The Yardbirds… He also started a film about Sam Francis, shooting the one and only interview of the artist, which he completed in 2008.

When the West Coast art scene took off, he decided to return to New York for personal reasons and worked as a taxi driver. After an encounter in his cab, once again by chance, with Nam June Paik (who at that time nicknamed him “the ultimate Fluxus underdog”), he decided to record his conversations with his passengers, with their agreement. He worked on the project from 1995 to 2002, accumulating a huge collection of audio tapes containing more than 400 hours of interviews with strangers inside his taxi.