Lately
analogue video has been in the public psyche because of the analogue switch off
in the UK as we move solely to digital transmission (I believe the last to
switch will be Northern Ireland in October 2012). I have attended a few events in
March and April and noticed the miss-information flowing around the subject
which differs from my experience of my time making ‘video art’.
What
follows are some discursive notes for a proposal to celebrate through a series
of screenings, Analogue Video and its transition into Digital Video during the
late seventies, the eighties and the early 90’s. This is not meant to be
exhaustive, nor in fact researched – it’s my off the cuff memory at this moment
of writing. I may return to this and actually research it thoroughly and create
an academic and more scholarly work. For the moment though I am involved (as
usual) in making work rather than writing about it, but here, for what it’s
worth are some thoughts.
There are
some video links in here but do let me know of other works online and I'll
connect the dots... So basically this is personal history, told from a personal
perspective that differs sometimes from published histories – and of those I
have to say that the research hasn’t been the best: for instance my own 5 part
series on UK and European Video Art is said to have been selected by myself and
Sean Cubitt. Though Sean was interviewed by myself, he did not select any of
the work. It was selected by Rod Stoneman and Triple Vision together. In a
recent panel event the entire ‘On Video’ series was misattributed to Analogue
Productions – though I like Anna Ridley of Analogue – I draw the line at that
ownership (it was done by a new curator quoting an old history). Here I hope to
address these inconsistencies. But this is currently a partial history and so
there needs to be a thorough and methodical revision of the history as it is
currently told in the published works – there’s a PhD thesis to be done here.
I may have
misremembered some facts and would welcome correction on anything I’ve said
during these notes - also healthy disagreement. Meanwhile however, you are
going to see some details that differ from the books on the subject that have
been published since 1980. There are many incorrect ‘facts’ stated in most of
the UK output in the area because they have been coloured by a remediatory
thinking that this history sets out to redress.
The
question then arises: What else is incorrect in these histories? Also The
further question arises concerning whether or not they leave out much of the
‘intent’ of the period under review and concentrate instead, on a history that
fits a world view that was then dominant. For my money of course, the last
question is its own answer. This history no longer needs to be as dominant as
it was (and to some of us this history is destructive). As a documentarist as
well as artist at the time, I found myself described in one book as a
‘sometimes psychedelic artist’ - a case of being belittled by faint praise.
One more
point, lately (April 2012) there have been public events and conferences set up
to examine the 70’s and 80’s and there has been an air of decay – a sort of
Miss Haversham type feeling around the generation of nostalgia for an area that
might have had import at one time, but has very little import now. But of
course all the excitement generated around developments now will suffer this
same decay – in the 70’s and ‘80’s when the excitement levels were also high –
they were just as important in influencing the developments of the present
time. That’s a little bit tautological but you know what I mean.
ARGUMENT
Though the
Seventies and Eighties many makers dealt with the question of ‘ubiquity’ that
analogue video had presented them with by engaging with the television form.
Following on from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay these makers celebrated the fact
that the aura of art could neither adhere to the original nor the replication
of the original. If all were ubiquitous and re-producible where could the aura
of the art object lie? Therefore the strategy became how to adduce value in
other areas - in the aesthetics of the work itself. This was the earliest
gesture toward the digital which itself has no material, only a set of
processes to describe itself.
Two ideas
that concerned the makers of the time were the realization that Television was
the first form where the means of dissemination preceded the means of
inscription and that all other media were formulate the other way around.
Secondly,
we had better celebrate the fact that the work existed only whilst the
electricity was turned on. No electricity, no work. No electricity, only the
traces of the work in the form of the accouterment of the works: video cameras,
edit machines, monitors etc.
From the
beginning makers decided to intervene in the dominant hegemony which was the
central value system of society: Television. Given this, there was an
intellectual allegiance with situationism and its predecessor, dada.
Within this
there were two kinds of makers – those who came to video direct (more or less
like myself though I had used film in the past but importantly was not totally
fascinated by it so that it became my sole medium) and secondly: people who had
come from film in the delight that the image was instant and didn’t need
several weeks before it came to their sight (and these makers of course
remediated the nature of the new media through seeing it in terms of film.
Given the
above experiments had gone on in various countries including Stan Vanderbeek’s
extraordinary prescient use of two whole channels to deliver a live video
interruption in 1970 entitled: Violence Sonata.
But in the
UK, one of the earliest engagements of the recorded image – albeit on 16mm, was
David Hall’s Television Interruptions in 1971.
For me
these were the products of a film understanding and derived from an attitude
evinced from the modernist project of truth to materials and remediated the new
form in the shape of film and its working practices. Hall engages with the TV
set in the sense that he occupies it with elements such as water – however,
like the rest oi television at the time, his interruptions are constructed in
the film medium with sensibilities derived from prior experiments in that
medium).
In one
intervention he focuses on a tap dripping and eventually the TV set is filled
with another medium. This is reminiscent of Viola’s more spiritual installation
where a camera looks at the drip on the end of a tap as it forms - a Buddhist
statement of impermanence as the image is projected on a wall and the world
comes into being and out of being periodically. The British material reading of
the form at the time was more concerned with the material of the medium itself
- in my opinion, a lesser study. Later taken up by conceptualists like Hirst
and co with their evaporation out of art into concept. True, Viola had a
material concern too - but over-ridden by the act of the artist concerned with
our place in the world as opposed to the artist concerned with his or her
materials.
The
excitement these makers felt was limited as many film practitioners were bound
by a love and loyalty to and of the material of film and therefore their
excitement was derived from the fact that some of videos process were
‘improvements’ on the problems of film. With video you didn’t have to wait for
development and printing; with video you could shoot for longer than a standard
roll of 16 mm which lasted 10 minutes at most and 4 minutes if you used a Bolex
16 mm camera; with video you could erase what was unsatisfactory aesthetically
and marvelously, re-record over that to make a new recording. But these virtues
were not the aesthetics of the new medium, they were simply improvements over
an old medium and therefore constituted a re-mediation of the new medium. The
film-makers were busy re-inventing themselves in their own image.
What came
next was a new generation of makers that were not bound by the aesthetics of
the material of film or busy with an anti-establishment view on a material
level. However they were intensely political and carried with them
antiestablishment political views.
THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EARLY ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL MEDIUMS
Prior to
describing the history of what came between 1976 and 1992, the period where the
exploration and investigation of a set of ideas that amounted to the birth of
the digital age via aesthetic concerns it is important to situate what the
author believes to be the actual condition of the digital realm as it currently
stands. On element that can be identified about the digital is its dependence
on electricity in some form. When the power is turned off, the digital ceases
to exist. Another condition of the digital is its requirement that everything
that enters its continuum is first encoded into some form of data. Also, the
use of a term like ‘continuum’ identifies something about its state and its
material condition - or rather its lack of a material condition.
If the
digital is not a medium, or has no medium then one must describe it in other
terms, that of process. Lev Manovich described this in ‘The Operations’ which
are basically threefold in nature: to gather, to compose, to publish. One
gathers on the net via software; one composes on a ‘site’ like on the computer
via software; then one publish on the net via software. To extrapolate
backwards into a prior art form such as sculpture, one conceives the work, chops
the wood, sculpts the wood, display the wooden sculpture - now substitute any
object of art and its materials. The is a description of various material
mediums via the processes that describe their operations form inception into
materiality. Loosely though, the project is the same: gather, compose, publish.
The difference is the prior conception and origination of the work in the mind.
The process
begun by Duchamp where he argued that the patron no longer should determine the
nature of art by commission, but the artist should choose what the work should
be. Magritte question notions of representation in a prior representational
medium - ‘ceci n’est pas un pipe’ - the use of text under a picture of a pipe
to demonstrate a loosening of pictorial form in relation to concept. Mid 20th
century art recognised that one could begin with the material (or the process)
such as with Jackson Pollocks' paintings and then eventually came Warhols'
project, that of demonstrating that not only anything in our world is art if
the artist so chooses, but all of us, artist or audience member should open our
eyes to see with this understanding.
With
Digitality we now transcend and end the conceptualists project. Hirsts final
statement about form and value, the platinum skull, demonstrates the end of the
material project and also the end of the artist as selector. An Absurdist
gesture prior to the ubiquitous event of everyone as artist maker which is
demonstrated daily on utube. But again, current Digitality is simply in a moment
of change toward what Digitality will eventually become, so even these
articulations and insights are remediated by what has gone before and do not
fully describe what is truly happening. That will only come when time has
revealed what the birth of Digitality truly was.
Where we
currently stand is as ‘flatlanders’, the Victorian 2 dimensional creature that
when witnessing the passage of a sphere through their world, first see it as a
point then an expanding circle which then contracts to a point. They have been
in the presence of three dimensions but not understood its nature. Our state of
understanding is remediated by the past, our historicisations are naturally via
the hindsight of the last understood era, our theories are equally derived from
what has past, so the perception of the present is veiled through the absence
of a language that will develop. The mistake is in trying to label it through
the medium of the Victorian project which is about categorising and indexing
each element into a separate part which of course is analytical and part of the
enlightenment project which does not understand that we now have to develop
theories that are underpinned by a gestalt approach, rather than an analytical
approach.
THE DIGITAL
AND ANALOGUE IN PERSPECTIVE
The period
of innovation beginning in 1972 with the first edit that was constituted of a
re-recorded image transposed across portapaks as opposed to that which was
executed by a razor blade and glued together with sticky tape, ended around
1992 - and the world wide web was on the horizon via the early patterns of
encoding of the analogue and now digital video signal. With the advent of
wavelet transforms as opposed to discrete cosign transforms (both originated by
Jean Baptiste Fourier in the early 1800s) a transformative period occurred
during the ’90’s generally referred to by the term ‘convergence’.
This period
was he tail end of a paradigm which began with the descent from the trees of
early anthropoids with their gesture towards standing upright as the essential
use of technicity and other uses of technology eventuating in the use of tools
or implements, the first being the use of flints the last being the use of the
stand alone personal computer.
By 2000 the
modernist project had been superseded by the digital project, which still
leaves many people confused by what it actually is - mostly because they try to
understand it via modernism and its bastard child, post-modernism, a rehash of
the analytical imperative with the bells and whistles of a non-rigorous gung-ho
attitude. But convergence was simply the antecedent of the integrative as
opposed to convergent moment. The integrative is digital, is no longer
concerned with tools and implements to affect the world - the world as we now
know it is digital, is immaterial, is not concerned with tools because the
whole world is both tool and arena of experience: the medium is completely the
message and the message and the medium is the world.
Integrative
technology is the height of technicity where technology is the ontological
state of being of its inhabitants, where the stand alone computer and its
predecessor the flint tool gives way to a complete 3 dimensional real time
mapping of the world inside the grand computer, where the ideal state is
continuously held and updated waiting for perturbations in its fabric, created
by its inhabitants which it intelligently and virally reacts to. The world is
truly the suitcase, the suitcase is truly the world.
To situate
the series of screenings I’m proposing, it is now necessary to elucidate the
history of analogue and digital video with reference to the state of digitality
we find ourselves in. The screenings themselves are intended to lead towards
the propositions I’ve made in a discussion format at the end of the run with
prominent makers (that are still active) from the sector.
HISTORY
It is
important to note that the first gesture towards digitality via the analogue
was accomplished by Frank Zappa using 2 inch video to ‘film’ the feature, 200
motels, in 1972. Here, 2 inch quadraplex machines were taken on site to to the
studio to facilitate the recording of the film in apparently portable mode. The
cameras however were connected to the recording machines via cabling.
In 1972
Hall and Le Grice made their interventions which were undertaken by film makers
who were excited by the specific aspects of the new medium that speeded up the
slower processes of film had coalesced into London Video Arts - this kind of
film remediation of video was to hang around long into the early history of
video.
Other film
makers took an oppositional position and remained engaged with the material of
film and its timeline whilst their colleagues more deeply immersed themselves
into a remediated position with the new video medium. The concerns of that
group and that period were of the academy: a concern with aesthetics of time,
space, location, gaze etc that had developed from the work of the futurists,
Vorticists, Fauves and so on who were a product of the acts of socialism and
marxism at the turn of the 20th century. The influence of Kuleshev, Vertov and
of course Eisenstein could be witnessed daily at the film co-op in the early
seventies as the project continued and the light burned brightly.
The first
portapaks entered the UK around 1967 and were instantly celebrated by a group
of creative people distinct from the film based experimental moving image
community located at the Film Co-Op. These however were more interested in ‘the
happening’ than ‘art’. Yet of course, there were others less bashful about
calling random experiments with light and colour by the term art, as was seen
in the symposium on Expanded Cinema in April 2009 at the Tate. Early portapak
video was a playful form which morphed eventually into ‘Community Video’.
As the middle
of the 70’s passed, the community video makers jumped from out of the back of
their vans in the derelict housing estates, they cried, much the same as that
of the workers on an Agit Prop train during the 1917 revolution in Bolshevik
Russia ‘We have the means of production - workers, let the revolution begin’.
As Tony Dowmunt of Albany Video noted some years later: ‘Not many people came
out to join the revolution and if it were raining then we’d be howling into the
wind and rain’.
This
socially active work was more related in some ways to the aesthetics of the
post marxist experiments at the film co-op due to the simple common fact of a
desire to change the society that the makers found themselves in. However,
instead of examining the medium in a structural way as the filmmakers of the
20’s and 30’s had done, the community video makers were pleased that they
finally had the means of production and it somehow echoed their lives. Film had
to be sent away - video stayed right where you put the portapak and played back
when you pressed ‘play’. This was instant and instantly affecting - it was of
the period of now - a time period made popular in the sixties.
On the
other side of the city however, painterly and sculptural concerns and the
aesthetics that governed the academy and their work as derived from film
practice grew and was sponsored by the Arts Council and became early video art.
Throughout
the next three or four years new makers were engaging with the educational
system and the project as espoused by the arts council sponsored video artists
was falling on deaf ears. Punk was beginning but not necessarily in moving
image terms (that was to happen 5 or 6 years later). But the strength of
passion against the old school academy system was breaking down attitudes
towards what video was and how it should be used. An early group thoroughly
engaged in the struggle was Vida, coined from Video, to see. Vida meant, ‘look
at this’. An imperative cry. Vida cut their teeth on late film style
experiments with colour and flashing and actually shooting some film before
abandoning the older language and engaging in the documentary form. By 1980
Vida had given over 250 shows.
Nothing was
sacred at that point and whilst working through the ‘veracity of documentary’
Antony Cooper a founding member of Vida declared that ‘the only thing
documentary documents, is the attitude of the maker to their subject at the
time of making’. Hence documentary itself was under suspicion as not being
truthful.
Elsewhere
many other experiments were going on via the work of West London Community
Video, Moonshine Community Arts, Fantasy Factory and Oval Video. Their film
equivalents were Four Corner FIlms, Concord Film and Video, Circles Film
Distribution, and the Film Co-op.
So the
landscape held a series of separate and sometimes antagonistic artistic and
political communities, split by aesthetics and intent. But then, with the
advent of basic computers in the latter part of the 70’s, the new medium of
analogue video was instantly in transformation. Mores Law, that stipulated that
there would be an exponential increase in capacity accompanied by an
exponential decrease in size, was having its effect.
By 1981 a
group of interested parties, including London Video Arts. the Berwick street
film collective, Oval Video, the Film Co-op, gathered around London Video Arts
and formulated the idea that video should have a festival and the First
National Video Festival was held at the film co-op in 1981, the second was at
the ICA in 1982 and a dwindling 3rd festival at South Hill Park in Bracknell.
The
altercations between the two media were overcome when the Independent FIlm
Association allowed Video into the hallowed film ranks and the association
became the Independent FIlm and Video Association - mainly because the language
of video spoke to the new CHannel 4 initiative and film production was
struggling both aesthetically, materially and financially with television as a
display and distribution medium. Film sought to engage the video makers as allies
in the cause.
Vida, who
had originated in 1977 were responding to the transformative phase between film
and video, then transmogrified into Triple Vision by 1980. Documentary
experiments were still ongoing but now accompanied by experiments in narrative
and non-narrative work. Some of the members of Vida had joined a commercial
company called Videomakers in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue and the owners turned
a blind eye to the exploits of this small team who then made equipment
available to video artists and documentarists alike and began engaging in
changing industry working practices by employing camera women at a time when
there were only a few professional sound women in the sector.
Many Video
makers had circled around London Video Arts, Oval Community Video, Albany Video
and also Triple Vision who were working within the Framework of the Soho based
company called Video Makers who worked in both the commercial realm and the
arts realm. Videomakers distinguished themselves by engaging camera women and began
to break down traditional working practices directly in the belly of the beast.
Equally Videomakers allowed artists to come and use their equipment such as
George Barber, George Snow and Gorilla Tapes. The Duvet Brothers were working
at Diverse Productions at that time. Founded by Peter Donnebauer who had
eschewed the cause of the Academy and its form of sculptural and painterly arts
practice for the commercial realm. However, Rik Lander as part of the Duvet
Brothers was given access after his working day to high level editing
equipment, which allowed him and Peter Boyd McLean to creative distinctive
forms of editing only glanced upon by traditional avant guarde film making. On
his return form Australia, Jon Dovey who had worked with Oval Video brought back
the australian fast cut form, a kind of montage of attractions on methedrine,
which created a great furore at London’s Cinema Action when shown to a
traditional film making audience. This was an avant garde of the electric
cinema - not photo chemical cinema. The name of this form of editing was
derived from black music experiments: “scratch Video’ named after working with
playing vinyl records in a scratch style.
Whilst with
Triple Vision I unconsciously utilised the form in a work which documented the
arrival of Apple’s Macintosh through being the video crew (with Anthony Coper)
for Apple on Ridley Scott’s famous commercial. I had previously worked with Jon
Dovey on a Ridley Scott Commercial for British Airways. I then ‘stole’ the
footage I shot, which I then used as ‘found footage’ and then scratched this
into “Prisoners’. The act of scratching came about as I had edited this footage
for about 6 or 9 monthds and I wasalways unhappy with the end result. It worked
fine - but not potently enough. One night, about 3 oclock I became angry and
cut the girl hurling the hammer into the television screen against the
skinheads racist talk... I came out of my act and realised that this was how to
cut the whole work. It’s not generally included in scratch anthologies because
it is intensely serious and scratch had a humorous bent to it. C’est las
Guerre.
Meanwhile
due to the advent of Channel 4 and the appointment of Alan Fountain with
Caroline Spry and Rod Stoneman then funded the workshop sector, which was
primarily film based but struggling with the budgets, the sector was engaging
in trying to break down traditional aesthetics, but being mostly film oriented
and having to use video, the struggle became confused because it was primarily
motivated by budgetary concerns. Nevertheless some amazing video works came out
of the cracks of the period. Isaac Julien’s ‘Who Killed Colin Roach’ for
instance.
I and the
other members of Triple Vision then left Video Makers and due to Channel 4
funding managed to operate in a television company form until 1992. This was a
fertile period as television documentaries on various subjects were produced
but long-form narratives such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Bad Sister
(1986) were also made completely on Video as opposed to film - as an artistic
statement and exploration of that mediums suitability in the act of suspension
of disbelief - or its absence due o the effects of the medium. Birmingham Film
and Video Workshop made Out of Order in 1987 for £500,000 - an unheard of
amount in the sector for a video production up until that point. It was also
one of the first ‘films’ produced worldwide on video and then transferred at Moving
Pictures to 35 mm for theatrical release.
And where
may you ask was the representation of the ‘dominant artistic video’ form backed
by the Arts Council ? Absolutely nowhere. Abroad many of us met up at festivals
and our work, the work that was not celebrated in the UK by the Arts Council,
was being celebrated everywhere but in the UK. Only amongst the film/video
coterie that was in its Ivory Tower was there any sense that that was where the
work was happening. We made many connections abroad, set up projects involving
18 groups through ten countries (the State of Europe which connected RTE, TRBF,
Channel 4 and ZDF), had retrospectives at places like the Mill Valley FIlm
Festival in California (Coppola and Lucas had just moved up there and set up a
festival). I found muself one day outside of a screening three people who were
musing on the change from film to video. As I listened it dawned on me that
they were the directors of the three films that were screeing and they were
smoking and talking nervously. They were called Jean, Jim and David. After a
while I reslised that whilst they kidded me about my interest in video, they
were actually Jean Jacques Bienix (Diva) Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law) and David
Drummond (Defense of the Realm). I had a cigarette and proceeded to go back
into the screning and realised the little funhny bloke next to me was the star
of Down by Law, Roberto Begnini.
Meanwhile,
a branch of the academy, barely recognised but too powerful for the academy to
ignore, was publishing the American revolution in the form of John Wyver’s
Illuminations Ghosts in the Machine commissioned by Channel 4’s arts
commissioning editor Michael Kustow. However, this was not the English Academy,
this was the vital, fast, speeding video that video audiences as far back as
the Air and Acme Gallery shows held in 1980 were used to. The Americans had
access to hardware and the British had a less well-endowed access. Chris Meigh
Andrews, Alex Meigh, Dave Critchley and myself had organised a series of shows
where the early works of Gary Hill and Bill Viola, John Sanborn and Kit
Fitzgerald could be seen. Equally shows of the work of LVA were being seen in
the US by exchange. I always had a principle to not put my own work in these
shows seeing that as a corrupt act. Doh!
By 1984 the
Americans had matured and Ghosts in the Machine was an 8 part series of mainly
American Video Art. Countering this Triple Vision had been commissioned by Rod
Stoneman and Alan Fountain at Channel 4 to make a series about UK video art
entitled ‘On Video’. This was originally to be done by Luton 33 but somehow it
hadn’t happened, so we received the phone call to come in and talk about it.
Two sixty
minute programmes and one 90 minute programme were initially made and in
contradistinction to Ghosts in the Machine, interviews filled the silence
between video art works. The difference was context. Many artists work was
shown including Jeremy Welsh, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury.
Eventually
by 1987 Channel 4 commissioned two more 90 minute programmes, ‘TV or not TV’
which was ‘On Video 4’ and ‘Statement of the Art’ which was in fact ‘On Video
5’ which also interviewed and showed the work of European Makers such as
Dalibor Martinez and Robert Cahen and his excellent and ground breaking Just le
Temps which rivaled anything Viola or Hill was doing with the aesthetics of
Video.
At that
time too, there was another television investigation which I directed in
association with John Wyver called ‘In The Belly of the Beast’, which used
Video Positive in Liverpool as a platform to discuss where video might be
going. Ths programme was commissioned by Zanna Northen at Granada.
By 1987 I
had developed a good relationship with Complete Video (a high level commercial
house) at a moment when digital media became available. I gained access to some
of the worlds most advanced digital equipment and this allowed me to
investigate the coming digital realm with works such as ‘The World Within Us’
and later when I became Artist in Residence with them, The Inevitability of
Colour (CH4 and ACE) which went on to be premiered at the Bonn Bienalle and win
some international awards (Montbeliard and Locarno) - ironically I had directed
Channel 4’s On Video series and The World Within Us was commissioned by John
Wyver’s, Illuminations for Series 2 of Ghosts of the Machine. Meanwhile Invisible
Television had been made by Gorilla Tapes (or Vulture Video depending on what
they felt that month), and shown on Channel 4.
There is
much more to say, many details to add but from the earliest experiments by
Fantasy Factory and CAT, Albany Video, West London Community Video, Oval Video,
Vida, Gorilla Tapes, the Duvet Brothers and Triple Vision, an aesthetic of
production grew that was distinct from the academy and film based
understandings of early video artists who’s concerns were those traditionally
evinced in painting and sculpture. Again, there is much to add and as this is
intended to be inclusive of what happened I welcome anyone emailing me to add
to this history - or challenge it.
It is my
contention that the excitement and aesthetics and material experiments of this
time were the seedlings of the digital. We were passing across a boundary.
Through my relationship with Complete video I made the Object of Desire which
was a multi-layered version of Inevitability of Colour - this was deeply
digital in its concepts and constructs and aesthetic. The Americans were
generating works that were slight and lightweight with an aesthetic traceable
to disney on a lot of levels. They were direct and obvious - the UK works were
of a culture that had been around for a long time and one not prepared to be so
simplistic about artistic and aesthetic concerns and therefore not so grabbing
in their visual form - yet, in relation to time passed they stand up more
strongly than the American works, which have of course grabbed the historical
record. On that basis it makes sense to organise screenings of the named works
of the timer against what was going on in the UK to give context and allow the
audience to reflect on just how good the British makers were, who have been
forgotten or written out from history.
These early
investigations were indicative of what was to become digitial media and
embodied concepts that were in contradistinction to the modernist project of
truth to materials and a growing dependence on the concept as being as
important as the material.
ADDENDUM: TURNING
THIS ARGUMENT INTO A SERIES OF SCREENINGS
Screenings
could run for three weeks and the first block could be the Channel 4 On Video
series, 1, 2 (both 60 mins) and 3 (90 mins) and also On Video 4, ‘ TV or not
TV’ and on Video 5, ‘Statement of the Art’ and a series of discussions with
contemporary curators and artists. Screenings could be in the evenings, but
also with agreement with various colleges during the daytime.
For the
second week of screenings I propose to invite the group that chose the work for
the 1st National Independent Video Festival in 1981 to select work from the
’80’s, plus have a series of discussions with artists who were active at the
time the works were made.
The last 5
screenings could be in the form of showing a well known international work from
a particular year that may for instance have originated in the United States -
say the Vasulkas The Art of Memory - and then it could be accompanied by
several works that originated in the UK and Europe. The point being that the US
artists had a full blown push from their own culture on why the work should be
seen as world quality work - the British however had none of this due to the
reasons mentioned above, yet I will seek to demonstrate that the UK works are
at least, as good as, if not better than the work that obtained the publicity.
The screenings could be accompanied by discussions with artists of the time and
contemporary artists and curators.
An
additional fourth week of screenings could seek to demonstrate the nature of
the digital via the works that have been made since 1992 - these works will be
selected by a group formed of those active making work and curating during this
period.
Some names of production companies who enabled motion image art work to be seen on TV:
Luton 33 (later developing into Gorilla Tapes and Vulture Video)
And of course, the entirety of the 1980’s workshop sector who tried in some way to intervene in this are. An early majore gesture was Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey’s shot on video Bad Sister (1983) – and of course Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer’s first ever video feature film made on two inch around 1971. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyViqlFEKUI
