Artist and performer Bruce Lacey, whose multi-faceted life and career included touring theatres with musical duo The Alberts in the 1950s, making props for Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, organising community art events, performing shamanistic rituals and playing George Harrison’s gardener in the Beatles 1965 film, Help!, has died aged 88.
Born in Southeast London Lacey graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1954 with a slapstick and playfully surreal sensibility that meant he was always more at home in the counterculture than the art establishment. One of his many self-created robots, assembled from salvaged objects, Rosa Bosom (standing for Radio Operated Simulated Actress Battery Or Standby Operated Machine), not only won the Alternative Miss World contest in 1985 but was also best man at the artist’s second wedding.
The artist had something of a resurgence in 2012 with the release, by the BFI, of a DVD of films made by and about Lacey, The Lacey Rituals, including a documentary made by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams and an exhibition at London’s Camden Arts Centre, co-curated by Deller, both titled, The Bruce Lacey Experience.
22 February 2016
