Keith Arnatt Biography

Keith Arnatt was born in Oxford in 1930. He studied art at the Oxford School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Though he initially had an interest in figure and portrait painting, after graduating in 1958 Arnatt began experimenting with photography and video, which were then unfashionable media.

In the mid 1960s Arnatt exhibited widely as a conceptual artist. His photography skills were employed to document his otherwise ephemeral work, which often included performance. In 1967 he made his first ‘situation’, which allowed him to record human behavior with his camera. One of most successful projects was Self-Burial-TV Interference Project, which was aired on a public television network in Germany in 1969. For one week, regular programming was interrupted to show this photo-series of Arnatt burying himself into the earth. Each successive photograph shows Arnatt buried further into the ground, so that when presented in sequence it looks as if the earth has swallowed him.

Arnatt became increasingly interested in the tradition of photography starting in the 1970s. Though he shifted his focus to the craft, he managed to maintain a conceptual element in his work. For example, Notes from Jo is a photographic series he produced between 1990 and 1994 which records post-it note messages left for him by his wife. Notes like ‘Pies in oven. Press down thing that says START to Start’ vibrate between the categories of image and text and invite the viewer to reflect on the minutia of daily communication.

Since the 1990s he has worked on projects in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Rheims, Rotterdam, and many other locations around the world. He has taught in the Fine Art Departments at Liverpool College of Art (1962-65), Manchester College of Art (1965-69) and Gwent College of Higher Education (1969-90), and continues to work as photographer and conceptual artist in Wales.