‘Goodbye London: Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies’ at NGBK Berlin

The NGBK (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst / The new Society for Visual Arts) is a grass roots arts organisation that occupies a unique position in Berlin. Based in Kreuzberg it has existed for almost forty years, has 850 members from different professions and backgrounds and still exists today as a counter-model to that of a hierarchical structured institution. The exhibition programme has a social and political dimension rarely found in other institutions.

It was a surprise to see the exhibition “Goodbye London - Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies” in Berlin because it seemed so pertinent to a British public and it was so well researched : set against a backdrop of increasing racism, the Vagrancy Act and the rise of the National Front. It gave a real insight into the grass roots struggle for change, for equality and for the recognition of disenfranchised minorities at the time, and judging by the number of people visiting the exhibition and spending time with the works, it obviously interested a Berlin public.

The introductory text as you enter the exhibition and two short texts by Boris Von Brauchitsch and Jule Reuter in a small accompanying catalogue give an informed and researched background to the social/political climate of Britain in the 1970’s.

A large part of the exhibition “Goodbye London - Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies” is documentary and archival with a deliberate orientation towards political unrest, economic and social upheaval during the 1970’s. It focuses on the beginning of the Gay Rights movement, the squatters movement, feminism, workers’ struggles, collective participation and self organisation, showing a counter-culture with a ’strong desire to re-politicise art practice and find new ways to communicate and participate in social change’. 1

Unlike many exhibitions of a documentary or archival nature that require a lot of reading and wall texts, this one lets the images speak for themselves, conveying a society in turmoil through photography, film & video, and agitprop posters.

The first works you encounter set the tone of the exhibition; a series of black and white photographs of London’s uninhabited West End taken in 1977 by Jon Savage. London looks poor, run down, abandoned and worn out, deserted buildings and warehouses, empty littered streets. On the opposite wall an agitprop poster reads ‘Their Crisis Our jobs - We Demand Employment ‘ printed by the FIlm Poster Collective, a militant poster collective and silkscreen workshop set up in one of the Tolmers Square Squats.

The Tolmers Square squatting community was photographed by Nick Wates; a slide show with a 1970’s reggae and punk soundtrack show the squatting community out in the street in 1975, children included, photographed as if for a family album. Other photographs show the interiors of houses, a bath tub sitting in the living room next to a fireplace, a large plank barricading the front door. As evictions and demolitions multiplied to make way for developers and thousands of people were waiting for Council housing, squatters took over abandoned properties, formed collectives, campaigned against the Vagrancy Act, (a law introduced in 1824 during the Napoleonic Wars) and expressed their solidarity with striking miners, factory and migrant workers. The Tolmers Square squatting movement fought for years on behalf of the whole community to preserve a sense of communal life between local shops, childrens’ play areas and office space.

What comes over strongest in this exhibition is the sense of solidarity, of working together, an awareness of other peoples’ struggles and how to respond to the plight of others that led to a questioning of the role of the traditional author and a move towards a socially engaged collective art practice.

The Berwick Street Film Collective’s ‘Nightcleaners Part I’ was at the outset a campaign film to help unionise women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimised and underpaid. But the film is remarkable for letting the women speak for themselves, never attempting to designate a spokesperson to speak on their behalf. Through experimenting with narrative techniques, questions about the status of film and documentary filmmaking come to the fore. It has some fantastic images in it. It doesn’t look like a documentary film or an art film but seems to have created its own genre somewhere between the two.

The beginning of the Gay Rights movement is documented through photographs and given the scale of Gay Pride today, its impressive to see how far it has come. The squatting scene was a breeding ground for the creation of London’s homosexual rights movement. Two early super 8 mm films by Derek Jarman in the exhibition, perhaps sketches for later works, have no overt political content but give us an insight into the development of the translation of homosexual desire into a personal aesthetic. Although I didn’t see it in the gallery, Ron Peck’s Nighthawks was also part of the exhibition. Shot in 1978, it portrays the coming out of a teacher in front of his class, a confrontation with his pupils and the everyday conflicts suffered by gay men at the beginning of the decriminilization of homosexuality.

In a series of small b/w photographs by both Homer Sykes (a Canadian born journalist) and an anonymous photographer, police presence figures very large in the frame representing a climate of street confrontation.

Burned out houses and cars during the Brixton Riots, an array of Union Jack flags, tear gas and more police in a National Front Demonstration in Lewisham in 1977, a small gay and lesbian demonstration with an over sized police presence, 5 Asian women forming an official picket line surrounded by over 20 policemen. The weight and presence of the police and state repression in these images set against volatile living and working conditions visually outweighs the energy and the conviction behind the struggle.

In a glass cabinet are a couple of copies of Spare Rib, one of the most prominent feminist magazines in Britain in the early 1970’s. Its founders, Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott were involved in the underground press of the 1960’s and this aesthetic can be found in the look and style of the magazine that had a left-wing, anti-capitalist convictions, engaging in discussions on socialist feminism, radical feminism and black feminism. It was a far cry from glossy Cosmopolitan. Jo Spence was a contributor to Spare Rib and a founding member of Hackney Flashers, a collective of socialist and feminist documentary photographers based in Hackney in the East End of London in the late 1970’s early 1980’s.

Jo Spence as a baby and adult. The Family Album 1979 (in collaboration with Terry Dennet) shows the photographer as a sepia toned baby, naked on a bed, on her front lying from right to left, her baby arms pushing up her head, one leg crossed over the other, her gaze directed just past the camera lens. A photograph below shows the photographer as an adult lying, naked, in exactly the same pose, but in the opposite direction, a similar gaze but with glasses on. Baby and adult in their natural state. There is an obvious reference to art history and painting where the ‘male gaze’ searches for a sensuality of the body or an erotic undertone, only here it is denied. References to the Family Album is equally challenging in its break with conventions of acceptability. Jo Spence’s influence on a generation of women photographers is considerable, helping us understand our subjective views of ourselves and opening up popular photography to questions of gender, class and social status.

In the video work TV Fighter/Cam/Era/Plane from 1977 by David Hall, archive footage from World War II is played and replayed repeatedly. The speed and the sound of the plane’s gunfire together with the speed of the train racing through the countryside gives the whole scene a dynamic action packed edge and we are not sure at first if it is real or if it is a reconstruction - a movie. We are following the plane, we feel simultaneously outside and inside the bomber pilot’s cockpit. As the train thunders through the countryside, it is blown up. Was it aware of the fighter plane? It seems to be moving as fast as possible, trying to avoid the inevitable. Then we’re looking at a monitor within a monitor which is having a target painted onto it. The viewing of the archive fighter pilot is being modified and mediated, interfering with our reception of ‘real events’.

Moving through the exhibition, it seems fitting that the final work, an act of defiance and disgust is a video work by Stuart Brisley. We see him standing throwing up in front of the camera, close-ups of his mouth full of saliva or lying submerged in a bath of dark muddy water. The title of the performance ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ connects the work to continental Europe, the three words (freedom through work) were written in iron over the gates of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The endurance and the resistance of the body makes obvious parallels to torture, submission, and the limits of human perseverance. This is a hard-hitting work and hard to look at, but well chosen and well placed in the context of this exhibition.

Works by Peter Kennard form another link between Britain and mainland europe, especially Berlin. Heartfield’s strongest adherent, Kennard responds to national and international issues, bringing media images into question. Heartfield is buried in Dorotheenstädtischer Cemetery in former East Berlin, Kennard still lives and works in London.

The inclusion of works by Peter Kennard, David Hall and Jo Spence presents a former generation, politically engaged and innovative, moving photography, performance and video art in new directions and in the representation of the squatting movement and collective social resistance there are affinities with Berlin of the past and the Berlin of today: a city ripe for real estate investment where developers are buying up every empty patch of ground available.

Finally, the images in Goodbye London are a testament to communities of resistance and a representation of opposition outside of the mainstream media that finally gave way to a decade of Thatcherism and another decade of neoliberalism.

1. Introductory text to the exhibition.

NGKB - http://ngbk.de

Newsletters from the Tolmers Square Squatting community can be found online at www.nickwates.co.uk/tolmers

Louise Crawford

Focus on Film: Artists’ Film and Video in Scotland Study Day

Two Views on the above, first by Sarah Smith, followed by review by Ann Vance

Saturday 7^th November 2009, 9.30am-4.30pm, Hawthorden Lecture Theatre, National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh

The Focus on Film study day was a collaborative endeavour that brought together a set of common themes and issues proposed by two coincident Edinburgh-based film events: Running Time: Artist Films in Scotland 1960 to Now, an exhibition at the Dean Gallery (17^th Oct – 22^nd Nov, 2009), and the Diversions experimental film and video festival, which is now in its second year (Filmhouse Cinema, 6-8 Nov).

The well-attended event presented an engaging programme of short talks by distinguished curators and artists interspersed with screenings of artists’ film and video. Particular highlights of the day were the historical overviews provided by videomaker, lecturer and Rewind lead researcher Stephen Partridge and curator, writer, and Director of Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Francis McKee. Partridge focussed on video art in Scotland in the 1970s and 80s, noting its antagonistic relationship to television, and showed two of David Hall’s seminal Television Interruptions (1971), while McKee offered observations on the recent shift in film and video practices in Scotland from Douglas Gordon’s DIY aesthetic in the 1990s to the professionalised film production of younger artists such as Henry Coombes today (an internationally resonant shift).

Diversions director Kim Knowles’ and Running Time curator Lauren Rigby’s introductions to the day included a brief acknowledgement of the pertinent issues of nomenclature (here they opt for ‘artists’ film’ over ‘experimental film’ or ‘moving image art’) and national contexts activated by this series of related events. Clearly there are limits to what can be explored in one day, however a direct tackling of these central framing devices in one of the talks would have been useful. Without it, these interesting issues, though identified, were left somewhat hanging.

In an essay that charts the differences between experimental film and artists’ films in the face of a growing tendency to conflate them, Jonathan Walley observes “the spectre of a split, even an unbridgeable gulf, between two camps of film art.”[i] He urges us to recognise the material conditions - “historical, institutional and discursive” - of these camps so that we avoid the temptation to overvalue aesthetic allegiances.[ii] Like Walley, I suggest that it’s preferable to remain sensitive to differences that prevail between the two modes of practice rather than endorse imprecise catchall appellations that emerge from the recent crossovers between them.

Artist Matt Hulse’s introduction to his animation film Take Me Home (1997) emphasised the significance of Scotland to his practice from his enrolment in the influential MA in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone to the valuable local network of filmmaking resources, while artist couple Dalziel and Scullion spoke about their Scotland-based trajectory from artschool to now, also screening a number of their sumptuous moving image works. London-based curator George Clark introduced a screening of Duncan Campbell’s Falls Burn Malone Fiddles (2003), by theorising the use of archival material in the found footage work of Campbell and another Scotland-based artist Luke Fowler; each of whom disrupt and interrogate the documentary image and form in different ways. Although the geographical focus on Scotland was clear, scholar David Curtis’ comment in the closing panel discussion that experimental film is really an international movement leaves us wondering, apart from location, what precisely constitutes Scottish artists’ or experimental film.

McKee’s talk ended with a general note on new media’s continued aberrance within the rarefied gallery environment - one that in various ways prohibits its disruptive potential - and both Partridge and McKee noted current changes in moving image art practice, technological and budgetary, which mark an uncertainty about its future. Not only have recent years heralded a greater confluence between moving image art and experimental film (in terms of funding as well as modes of practice and reception), we now see these converge with the cinematic. Where previously artists and experimental filmmakers engaged with the cinematic in an oppositional and overtly critical manner, we now see a more nuanced relationship, albeit one that often retains criticality. Sometimes today an interrogation of cinema is not the main objective, but rather an exploration of the potentialities of narrative and mise-en-scène for art practice. Such narrative works often also precipitate an artist’s move into commercial cinema production proper e.g. Sam Taylor Wood’s first commercial feature Nowhere Boy (2009) and Glasgow’s own Henry Coombes’ anticipated first foray into feature film making following on from the success of his short narrative film The Bedfords (2009).[iii]

The Focus on Film study day undoubtedly provided a valuable and stimulating forum to pause and reflect on the current landscape of moving image art practices in the UK and internationally. Although this reviewer would have liked to see a more pointed discussion of central issues, it is certainly a welcome and important item in the Scottish calendar of moving image events.

Sarah Smith

ON THE TELLING OF TALL TALES: Focus on Film: Artists Film and Video in Scotland

Running Time : Artists Films In Scotland 1960 To Now has just completed a five week run at The Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, showcasing more than one hundred film/video works by over sixty artists. Focus On Film, a study day of talks/presentations was programmed to coincide with the show, which claims to be the “first exhibition of its kind dedicated exclusively to film and video in Scotland”. Armed with the knowledge that this claim simply isn’t true, and in the belief that the show may well be flawed in a number of ways, I signed up in the hope of gaining some insight into the curatorial approach that resulted in the presentation of such a crocheted history.

Kim Knowles, Professor of Film at The University of Edinburgh, informs us that the study day has actually been organized by Diversions Festival of Experimental Film & Video, of which she is also Director and that it was a simply coincidental that both events were taking place at the same time. That may explain the fact that information was not made public about the study day on The National Galleries website until less than a week before the planned day. The intention was to get together, “celebrate” and “promote” each event. Whilst I can see the logic in that from the point of view of Diversions, a short weekend festival, I cannot imagine what more publicity The Dean Gallery should need needs as part of Scotland’s National Galleries.

Steve Partridge, a key figure in the development of moving image practice in Scotland, and an artist himself kicked the day off with a concise history of video art produced in Scotland in the 70’s and 80’s. This is a rich and inspirational history and deserves more attention than I can give it here but, most notably, he cites the origins of artists video practice in the movements of community activism and radical politics, mentioning work by John Latham, Sue Hall, John Hopkins and David Hall, whose TV Interruptions, a series of six “counter television strategies” were broadcast unannounced on Scottish Television in 1979. We are treated to a rare viewing of two of these works, shot day by day on 16mm, the broadcast format of the time. Continuing through the 70’s, we hear of the works of Tamara Krikorian, Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield and key exhibition events Open Circuit ’73, Video Towards Defining An Aesthetic and related symposium The Future of Video in Scotland ’76 and David Hall’s Vidicon Inscriptions also ‘76 as part of the aforementioned at the Third Eye Centre. The next decade proves even more fruitful with the inception of The Television Workshop at DJCA and the wealth of great work that emerged from there and Partridge goes on to mention EventSpace 1 and 2 at Transmission Gallery in 1986. Also noted were the film/video screenings at The National Review of Live Art demonstrating the close ties between moving image and performance art. Film/video was used as both documenting medium and as vehicle for performative expression, reflecting a very early trend in the use of video and pre-dating the 90’s return to this with the obsession of ‘performance to camera’ works. Not touched upon by Partridge are the Made In Scotland I and II programmes produced by Artapes Ecosse and curated by himself and artist Chris Rowland. I think they are important to mention here in the context of Running Time because they demonstrate a clarity in their remit, i.e. works made in Scotland but not necessarily by Scottish artists. For me, this throws into focus the lack of coherence in the Running Time selection which the curators have attempted to overcome by subtitling the exhibition “Artists Film and Video In Scotland”, thus side-stepping the awkwardness of defining a ‘Scottish Art’ – somehow they only manage to cause confusion with a somewhat ‘slacker’ approach and lack of coherence in the final programme. When this ‘Scottish question’ was later raised at the public discussion, Lauren Rigby, one of the curators of Running Time, simply stated that she thought it made for a “more interesting and diverse” body of work. This lack of rigor and programming integrity may be further evidenced in the omission of artists active from this period of the 80’s and early 90’s. I shall desist from naming them here, suffice to say, the gaps are glaring and sadly, left unexplained.

Francis McKee’s presentation Art In A Clamshell : Video In The 90’s was a very personal take on the approach of a few artists to the “newly discovered” medium of video and by that I mean the mainstream galleries’ acceptance and accommodation of certain stylistic approaches to the use and presentation of moving image media, which were not “new” but perceived as such i.e. video projection and the Loop. Don’t forget, a lot of this had gone before. Throughout his talk, we saw excerpts from works by Douglas Gordon, McKee’s main focus, Smith & Stewart and Alan Currall. I found his blatant mythologizing of the artists he discussed unconstructive and somewhat contradictory. He claimed their initial practice arose out of a rejection of fine art traditions and a critique of the values of the art market through their espousal of DIY culture and the punk aesthetic. However, continuing, he seemed to applaud, in the case of Douglas Gordon, his success in the very same marketplace, in overcoming copyright obstacles and selling his “ideas” for ‘millions’. He explained that this interest in money was ‘subversive’. I’m not quite sure what a subversive interest in money means unless, perhaps, you’re planning to rob a bank.

What I found more puzzling was his assertion that it was out of necessity that these artists turned to pop culture for inspiration as it was ‘impossible’ to see film/video works of that period and from the past. To me this was just an utter nonsense and simply an ill-thought-out adjunct to his own potted history. The writing of histories can be complex but if we reduce it to an entirely subjective pursuit, we run the risk of re-writing those histories through the telling of Tall Tales. Perhaps not Mckee’s intention, but this assertion is simply not true and serves only to deny the work that had been done, and was being done at that time, to bring artists film and video to a wider audience in Scotland.

When I put this to him later at the final discussion mentioning New Visions, with which I was personally involved, the work that went on around Glasgow Film & Video Workshop and the Hertake Festival of 1990 he simply answered that he wasn’t “in that scene” and understood that, in the case of New Visions, it only took place over five days. New Visions was an organisation set up voluntarily to promote artists’ film/video in Scotland, staging three International biennial festivals from 1992 -1996, each showcasing more than 200 works as well as programming regular monthly screenings throughout 1995 and curating packages that toured around Scotland. Together with Café Flicker, based at Glasgow Film & Video Workshop and The Fringe Film & Video Festival in Edinburgh and the numerous organisations in England e.g. LFMC, LVA, Moviola and Film and Video Umbrella, that exhibited and distributed this work, there was ample opportunity for viewing and participation. I should say that many of these organisations came out of an artist-initiative drive, in Scotland at least, much of the work being unpaid and deliberately ran counter to the interests of the mainstream art world. The most erudite of the speakers, David Curtis reminded us of this fact as he joined the rest of the speakers for the panel discussion (editor notes: Curtis was the first projectionist at the Arts Lab in London in the 60s, see his book A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain). In my view, a schism of sorts is detectable in the early 90’s in the trajectory of film and video practice with the acceptance, albeit limited, of these media by the mainstream as ‘new’ forms of artistic expression and McKee’s focus on one tributary only, to the exclusion of all else, is perhaps symptomatic of an art economy that thrives on the manufacturing of originality and the cult of the individual artist-genius.

The afternoon thankfully provided a reprieve for me with the viewing of some work. George Clark discussed the films of Luke Fowler and Duncan Campbell and their appropriation of ‘found footage’. I’m not sure I would classify their approach in this way, as the use of archival material does not, in my mind, make a found footage film, more evidenced in the work of Jurgen Reble with the film group Schmelzdahin, Dietmar Brehm or Monika Schwitter. However, I could see what he was getting at with this. He screened Falls Burn Malone Fiddles by Duncan Campbell 2003, who has recently produced a filmic portrait of Bernadette Devlin using archival, newsreel material in an attempt to rehabilitate her image. Interestingly, the work he screened uses photographic images from Community Visual Images and Belfast Exposed, an archive bank begun in Belfast in1983, and so harks back to times of community activism when the politics of representation was high on the agenda and some artists engaged locally with their communities.

Dalziel & Scullion showed a number of excerpts spanning the beginning of their collaborative practice in the early 90’s to the present whilst discussing their interest in ecology and their changing relationship with the landscape. Their remit varies as they work mostly through commissions but the context/site is important to them whether it be the gallery or elsewhere. This raised the issue of how moving image work is viewed in the gallery setting and what is most appropriate for it’s exhibition. Their work fits well in this environment and is to be ‘contemplated’ rather than watched from beginning to end.

Matt Hulse screened his ’97 piece Take Me Home, a pleasure to see again, playful and accomplished, I liked the transparency in his introduction revealing his influences and techniques, not generally the done thing ! He also articulated a personal dilemma which I think bares some relation to this schism I talked about earlier. Not sure whether to call himself artist or filmmaker . . . is it art ? Is it film ? An old argument, but one that repeatedly crops up. In the end it really depends where you position yourself, and artists do have some choice about this ! He has rightly gained much recognition in his field and won many prizes but he is to date a maker of single-screen works firmly rooted in the traditions of ‘cinema’ – I mean the widest possible definition – and the art gallery has always had trouble accommodating this. So there are two worlds and they sometimes collide and these questions often have little to do with the actual ‘making’ of work and are perhaps, more for the academics to ponder. In the case of Matt Hulse, and indeed many artists who are included in Running Time, the work speaks for itself.

This takes me to the close of the day and the final, panel discussion consisting of all invited speakers with the addition of David Curtis, currently Senior Research Fellow at The British Artists’ Film & Video Study Collection and Bryony McIntyre of Arika, an organisation that produces the Install and Kill Your Timid Notion festivals. There weren’t many questions fielded from the audience and after my own was neatly side-stepped I decided to take a back seat and avoid the risk of spoiling the celebratory atmosphere.

Kim Knowles directed the questioning herself, careful to give most members a chance to speak but she politely accepted answers without too much uncomfortable questioning. At one point she almost landed herself in a sticky spot with her meanderings on the Scottishness of the Running Time selection, and seemed to say that there wouldn’t be very much work if the curators hadn’t expanded their definition to include such a broad catchment ! We heard how Lauren Rigby and co-curator, Rosie Lesso did most of their research at Rewind, a project initiated by Steve Partridge, which aims to preserve and conserve film/video work from the 70’s to the 80’s. I found this odd considering the glaring lack of work from that period and no hint at all as to where they did the rest of their research for the years to follow. All very disappointing really and I was left feeling that the writing of this history has been marked by incompetence and a lack of rigour that is disappointing considering the claims it makes, not to mention the budget it presumably had to work with.

Ann Vance

Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening

Cardew et la Liberté de l’Ecoute/ Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening
CAC Bretigny 5th April - 27th June 2009
Curated by Dean Ikster, Jean Jaques Palix, Lore Gablier.

“….from all those who carry across one thing into another state: an adaption works best when it is a genuine transaction between the old and the new, carried out by persons who understand and care for both, who can help the thing adapted to leap the gulf and shine again in a different light. In other words, the process of social, cultural and indiviidual adaption, just like artisitic adaption, needs to be free, not rigid if it is to succeed. Those who cling too fiercely to the old text, the thing to be adapted, the old ways, the past, are doomed to produce something that does not work, an unhapiness, an alienation, a quarrel, a failure, a loss.” Salman Rushdie (1)

Who is Cornelius Cardew? What was the Scratch Orchestra and what was Scratch Music?
One of Cardew’s works being performed on the 16th & 17th May at CAC Bretigny in the outskirts of Paris is titled The Great Learning and there is the sense that with this exhibition, concerts and performances we are approaching a great learning curve, and we are on a journey of discovery.

In the exhibition, documents from the 1960’s and 1970’s are displayed in specially created cabinets and on the walls of the gallery; newspapers, concert posters, original compositions, conceptual ideas and revolutionary songs. There are two video monitors, a video by Luke Fowler tracing the history of the Scratch Orchestra with interviews and archive footage mixed together with present day situations, sounds and images reflecting an artistic empathy and suggesting a continuity. The other  video shows documentation of a performance of The Great Learning - Paragraph 7 under the direction of Jean Jaques Palix with students and staff from Valence Art School in France.

Among the documents on show are those describing different actions carried out in public spaces by various members of the Scratch orchestra situating the work within the conceptual art movement of the 1970’s along with images of The Scratch Orchestra ‘on the road’ visiting town halls, village squares, urban and rural communities up and down the country.

Laid out under glass in a long cabinet is the 193 page graphic composition ‘Treatise’, written or more accurately drawn by Cornelius Cardew. An abstract drawing in black and blue ink on landscape A4 format paper unfolding horizontally. The empty music staff still present at the bottom of the page, remains as an indication of which way up we should read the score and for notation should musicians need it.

On page 153 of Traetise, a peak, a curve, rectangles, a semi circle and a dot leaves one thinking how a musician should approach such a schematic composition.  But Cardew was intentionally seeking to turn the musician from a ‘passive’ interpreter of notes and music into an active thinker in the translation of forms into sounds where the pitch, tone and duration of each note, the choice of instruments and the number of players was left open to interpretation. The history of Treatise is documented in detail by Cardew in the Treatise Handbook, which appeared in print some years after the completion of the score. The first part of the Handbook consists of working notes, which shed light on many aspects of Cardew’s musical thought.

Each time a page or a paragraph from a Cardew work is played it will sound different because within Cardew’s libertarian approach is a challenge for each musician and what we hear will not only reflect the musician or musicians’ engagement with music and sound in general but reflect the challenge that Cardew poses.

In the magazine Performance the composer David Bedford described his experience with Cardew’s work: “Speaking as a performer in many of Cardew’s early works it must be said that the experience was totally rewarding. Our creativity was constantly being challenged, and the empathy of the performers, channelled into producing a coherent piece of music despite sometimes sketchy and sometimes paradoxical instructions, was often remarkable. It should be pointed out that none of Cardew’s works ever gave total freedom to the performer. The instructions were a guide which focused each individual’s creative instinct on a problem to be solved - how to interpret a particular system of notation using one’s own musical background and attitudes”. (2)

For the opening of the exhibition Keith Rowe former member of The Scratch Orchestra, co-founder and ex-member of the free improvisation group AMM, Peter Todd independent filmmaker, film curator, writer and editor and Luke Fowler artist interested in radical  social experiments from the past, performed ‘Expanded Cinema for Cornelius Cardew’.

Keith Rowe was seated behind a table upon which a transistor radio, a small part of a guitar neck, various knobs, jacks and cables and Cardew’s manuscript ‘Treatise’ open at page 153 were arranged. He performed an improvised solo while Peter Todd and Luke Fowler projected 16 mm films. One projection on top of the other, Luke Fowler’s images on top of Peter Todd’s, all edited in camera, showed bookshelves, old cupboards, interiors and hallways. All appeared to be imbued with a personal memory and history. One of Peter Todd’s images of a room is in fact the Holst room in Morley College, London where Cornelius Cardew taught in 1968 and which gave rise to the formation of the Scratch Orchestra.

The images were passive and unobtrusive allowing sound and image to coexist. The images helped us focus our ears and the sound at times seemed to fit perfectly to an image in an abstract and subliminal way. Keith Rowe tuned into radio sounds that murmured in the background and at times you weren’t sure if it was somebody talking in the audience or sounds from outside. Mixed with electronic sampling your ears reached into the space, stretching to hear the subtlety and layering of sounds, heightening our auditory perception. Towards the end of the performance a child was talking to her father unaware of what was going on around he, her voice blending in perfectly with the closing sounds of the performance capturing the essence of improvisation.

What happens in the space between the reception of sound and image is continually changing and is dependent on the way in which the spectator receives the sounds and images at any given time. This space ‘between’ where the work takes form is similar to Harun Farocki’s method of ’soft montage’ where two images are presented side by side creating a mental space from their juxtaposition and in this in between space we find meaning and significance.

The performance in the exhibition space gave a wonderful sense of the continuity of free association and free thinking that runs through the exhibition It was a fitting homage to Cardew and a welcome break from market-produced contemporary art. The performance was intense but unassuming and self effacing, it existed for what it was, it wasn’t trying to be radical or contemporary.

The documentation on show can only testify to and provide an insight into the revolutionary approach and experimentation that was invested in music by a small group of people in England in the 1970’s . The rest is really up to the visitor to pursue, to reflect upon, and to venture further. But there is a sense that once we start to join the dots together we realise that what from the outset appears to be a short, obscure and radical historical moment has had and still has repercussions throughout the contemporary art and music fields. Cardew, this maverick composer, musician and radical opens up into an international personality, contemporary of Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Tudor and John Cage.

Given the widespread influence of Cardew within contemporary music, his influence on Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman to name the most accessible and commonly recognised household names and given his recently acquired status as one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th Century, why does Cornelius Cardew still remain an esoteric, marginal figure in contemporary music? If we read between the lines the answer lies in the various documents on show;  his rejection of the avant-garde, his involvement with the Marxist-Leninist wing of the British Communist Party and his early death.

The exhibition is like a jigsaw, we have to piece together bits of information to build a picture of Cornelius Cardew. It is made up of;  Cardew as apprentice to Stockhausen as interpreter of works by Morton Feldman, John Cage, David Tudor and Boulez, Cardew as member of AMM, as co-founder of the experimental performing ensemble The Scratch Orchestra, and Cardew as political activist serving the people not the ruling classes, fighting for the collapse of imperialism and bourgeois culture.

Joined together these fragments begin to create a picture of Cardew as an extremely talented, innovative, erudite and uncompromising figure and help us understand the short life and huge impact that he left behind.

Finally it is only left to thank the curators for the work and research that has gone into mounting this exhibition, and to the CAC in Bretigny for taking it on board and  for shedding light on Cardew and his contemporaries, their radical approach and convictions and for placing it in an historical and international context that connects us to the present day. The context seems particulalry appropriate: an art centre on the periphery serving the local population and bringing together visual art and music.

(1)  A fine pickle,  Guardian Reveiw Sat. 28/02/09.
(2)    Cornelius Cardew: An Appreciation, Performance, April-May 1982, p.11

Further performances and concerts on the 16th and 17th May - The Great Learning Paragraph 1 & 5 & 7. 7th June - The Tiger’s Mind, Volo Solo and Treatise and on the 22nd June Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album. For more information on exhibition and events: www.cacbretigny.com

Louise Crawford
Louise is an artist and writer based in Paris.

George Barber – ‘Beyond Language: Selected Video Works 1983 – 2008’

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, Thursday 2^nd April 2009

“We called it Scratch Video rather than ‘Video Art’ because we associated the term Video Art with being boring…”

Through George Barber’s engaging, absorbing talk and the screenings of work which interspersed his commentary, this event adroitly demonstrated the difference between work which has led to video art’s equation with ‘being boring’ (let’s face it, we can all think of an endless, droning list of perpetrators) and the work of Barber and his fellow independent video pioneers. Scheduled to coincide with the release of a new DVD of Barber’s work published by LUX, the screenings ranged from early Scratch video works of the ‘80s and his so-called ‘slacker’ videos of the 90s to more recent performance videos.

In his talk Barber spoke of his attempt to ‘change the notion of video time to TV time’, of the intention to compress or speed up ‘art time’ to make video art more engaging, pleasurable, visceral. Video art, according to Barber, typically asks a lot of its audience time-wise (especially when compared to other disciplines), and the inevitable comparisons with television add to this potential frustration for the video artist. In many of the works on Beyond Language – from Scratch video to the present, Barber’s aim for his work to ‘meet’ pop culture whilst maintaining its status as fine art has been wholly successful.

Out of the Light - Semiconductor in Paris

Out of The Light - Semiconductor at Le Cube Issy-les Moulineaux 5th October 2008-17th January 2009

Le Cube is the first Arts Centre in the Paris Region and in France dedicated to New Media and the Digital Arts. Situated in Issy-les-Moulineaux in the South West suburbs of Paris and only half an hour  from the city centre, the centre is housed in a purpose built building. The Cube’s  remit is to offer production, diffusion and education in digital and electronic multi-media to the local community. It is well-equipped and the programme includes workshops, seminars, concerts & performances, an outdoor festival and artists residencies.

Semiconductor is a British duo formed in 1997 by artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Their work explores the physical world in flux; cities in movement, changing landscapes, systems in chaos, a world of protons, magnetic fields and seismic reverberations. Combining computer generated imagery with hand drawn and filmed sequences, their work is both scientific and poetic. They are not overwhelmed by scientific information or data, they have found how to play with it, control it and use it either reverently or irreverently for its aesthetic and evocative qualities. Their images leave us fascinated with the world around us and whether real or constructed, broaden the limits of our perception.

For their exhibition Out of The Light Semiconductor presented six works made between 2005 and 2008 and an installation presented for the first time. The six works on monitors gave an overview of their work to date. Set up like a videotheque with the monitors housed in individual cases, seats in front of the screens and individual headphones, this presentation gave an intimate and documentary feel to the viewing process. 

The representation of invisible magnetic fields and radio activity is gaining ground in art & design and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s books Hertzian Tales: electric products, aesthetic experience and critical design and Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects add a rich, playful and conceptual contribution to the genre as does Magnetic Movie from 2007 (4′47). A Channel 4 ‘Animated Projects’ commission in collaboration with the Arts Council of England, it presents one of the Space Sciences Laboratories in the University of California, Berkley. A voice off describes the movement and cause of magnetic fields, brightly coloured lines describing these magnetic frequencies oscillate throughout the laboratory, flowing through corridors, vibrating in tubes, increasingly taking over more and more space. Its as if Semiconductor are imagining and visualising the secret life of these magnetic fields. 

In 200_Nanowebbers 2005 (2′49), hand drawn and vectorised molecules and crystal structures are generated and controlled by the sound of Double Adapters’ ‘Osaka Recordings’. The coloured prisms and pyramidal shapes grow and change form, evoking glass pyramids, cut diamonds and crystals in shades of blue, green, yellow and purple. Hand drawn lines like barbed or electric wires with particle formations growing around them evoke an idea of natural organic growth and chemical crystalline structures isolated in virtual space.

Brilliant Noise, 2006, (5′56), shown here on a monitor was presented in Paris in October 2008 as part of La Nuit Blanche (meaning an all-nighter). La Nuit Blanche takes place each year and is an evening of large and small installations, concerts and performances throughout Paris from 7pm to 7am.  Museums  open their doors all night and it is nor rare to find long queues for events at two in the morning. The installations are large and impressive and last year all the railway stations in Paris had major art works for the night. Semiconductor showed Brilliant Noise in the large entrance hall to St. Lazare Station. On a large scale screen black and white grainy  images of spectral explosions and what looked like rivers of silver flowing fluids shone in the dark, luminous rays that made you wonder what kind of strange landscape you were looking at. They resembled photograms or photo-sensitive material exposed to light. They were in fact from NASA’s archives, satellite images of solar winds from radio and electromagnetic fields. The layers of sound from radio frequencies accentuated the galactic supernova sensation of these images which left you in awe at the aesthetic quality of energy and radiation. Brilliant Noise was also shown in Glasgow in November 2007 as part of Radiance: Glasgow’s Festival of Light, in a programme of site-specific works in abandoned locations in the Merchant City, curated by Street Level.

The installation Out of the Light, 2008, is Semiconductor’s most recent  work, a co-production with Arcadi (Action Régionale pour la Création Artistique et la Diffusion en Ile-de-France). A cube was constructed in a rather reduced and crowded space, disappointing from the outside, but once inside you forgot about the limits of the space and were looking down on a large rectangular surface with images moving across it. There was something magical about it, like a camera obscura where scenes of people walking outside in the street are magically played out in front of you. A series of short sequences  filmed and computer generated, real and artificial, poetic and scientific.

The movement of light and shadow; through a window, through trees, on strangely constructed settlements, on artificial looking rocks. The changing position of the sun and the resulting shadows at times real and at times artificially created, giving us the sense of time passing and the perpetual cyclical movement of the earth. The sound as in all of Semiconductor’s work plays an essential role. It controls and adds interpretation, it helps us understand what we’re looking at. In Out of the Light we hear the distant sound of birds or of wind helping us situate the abstract images in Nature. The sound of an electronic zoom on a telescopic lens indicates not only that we are looking through a telescopic device but that it is changing the scale. The sun trembles and shifts in the frame, the close-up is so great that its almost as if the telescopic camera is hand-held and quivering, causing hand shake.

Whether real or false, whether using archive imagery or computer-generated simulations of scientific data, phenomenon and spectrums, making the invisible visible is a way of understanding the world. The spectator wants to believe in the authenticity of what he or she sees “because men cannot understand neither form nor substance if it doesn’t resemble anything in their world. That is why I have to tell them parables to bring them the comparisons and the images they are missing.”1

Louise Crawford

1. Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls.

Louise Crawford is an artist and writer based in Paris.

Expanded Cinema seminar, BFI, London, December 6 2008

Guy Sherwin 'Paper Landscape' 1975-present

The one day event was one of a number of pertinent international events being staged at London’s main venue for the arts of the moving image. The following day, an Afterall symposium and launch of the publication, ‘Art and the Moving Image’, explored similar fertile terrain, and if this weren’t enough, BFI were also screening some of the early works of one of the cornerstones of experimental film, Michael Snow, who was also on hand to introduce the films and discuss his practice over the past half century. All this helped to create a more developed appreciation of the constituent parts of a polymorphous subject.

Artist Michael Snow with Elizabetta Fabrizi, Head of Exhibitions, BFI Southbank

‘Expanded Cinema: The Live Record’ supplements David Curtis’ essential reading, ‘History of Experimental Film and Video’ (2007) and draws upon material sourced from two previous events, in Dortmund (2004) and in Stuttgart. Another significant forerunner is ‘Experiments in the Moving Image’ from 2003, a major chronological programme of experimental moving image by artists from the late 60s to date, held at the Lumiere Cinema, where in 1896 the first public demonstration of the moving image was given in the UK. That event was coorganised by the late Jackie Hatfield (with Steve Littman), whose drive and enthusiasm is acknowledged as laying the foundations for much of this current research project.

The theme was the relationship between the live event in expanded cinema and its documentation, with Duncan White focussing his talk on some key works of Expanded Cinema using clips of documentation to illustrate issues such as the infidelities of digital documentation, as many of the works require the artist present to activate the moment. A clip from Malcolm LeGrice’s ‘After Leonardo’ - one of the highlights of ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ at DCA in November of 08 – allows the audience to experience the present performance in relation to past performances. A Werner Nekes performance illustrated how documentation is becoming trivialised by the sheer amount of recording devices that you will see at any live event – the clip shows the artist in performance with the incessant flashes of camera and the intermittent mobile signal interfering with the sound recording. Also included here was some footage from Paul Sharits’ captivating ‘Epileptic Seizure Comparison’ (1976) which was also shown at KYTN.

William Raban’s conceptually strong live performance for this event, ‘4’22”’, develops an earlier work in which a camera is filming the audience watching a blank screen, which is reflimed each time screened. This new work was shot at various screenings preceding this event and is a film which ‘begins and ends with the period of its own making’ and ‘is a film which IS its showing, differing each time, always the sum total of its past screenings’ – 4.22 is the actual running time of a reel of film.

Another highlight of KYTN, Guy Sherwin currently uses previous works as references for re-enactments. His live performance here of ‘Paper Landscape’ has to be seen to be fully appreciated, but in the original work Sherwin filmed a large white frame in a landscape, which he gradually tore to reveal the landscape and the artist on the other side of the frame. In this version, he plays this 10 minute piece projected onto a polythene framed sheet behind which is Sherwin who gradually paints the plastic sheet white which then reveals the original film of him tearing away the paper to reveal the landscape ‘So the emphasis switches more and more to my recorded image, as the real me becomes progressively walled in’. As the image of the artist in the original sees him walk into the distance, Sherwin slices the frame open and climbs through to reveal the real him in real time. It is quite compelling.

Artist Michael Snow with BFI Head of Exhibitions, Elizabetti Fabrizi.

Artists’ practice now is being nourished by exposure to the vast areas of work undertaken in challenging the conventions of cinema projection. In a scholarly lecture, Le Grice speculated on the next period of critical debate as one of ‘radical time’ - the way a spectator constructs spatiality in relation to Expanded Cinema, presenting a teasing conundrum to dwell upon: ‘how far apart does something have to be before we know we have a gestalt?’ The sight of a sold-out cinema space late on a cold and wet Friday in London was evidence that there are hungry audiences for events that demonstrate that ‘then and now’ are not so much times apart, but places which are currently merging and transforming one another in new practices. The film on show was Michael Snow’s structuralist 3 hour epic from 1971, ‘La Region Centrale’ – a tour de force of the hard-core seventies.

Malcolm Dickson

This review is published by Map magazine issue 17, March 2009

Remembering Nan Hoover

By Robert Ayers
Published: June 16, 2008 in http://www.artinfo.com/news

NEW YORK—The American artist Nan Hoover died in Berlin last Monday, shortly after her 77th birthday. She had learned only a few weeks earlier that she had developed inoperable lung cancer.

Though I met Nan only a few months ago — in February 2008, when we worked together at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow — I had been looking forward to meeting her for many years, as I believed her to be one of the unsung pioneers of video and performance art. We hit it off immediately, and I was delighted when she agreed to collaborate in a festival podcast I was working on.

Nan began her career as a painter and enjoyed some success in her native New York in the 1950s, but it was in video — which she started using in 1973 — and particularly in video/performance hybrids, that she made her most important work. She had solo shows at MoMA in 1977 and 1980, but she was most celebrated in Europe, where she was based for the last four decades of her life, moving to Amsterdam in 1969 and then Berlin in 2005. She exhibited at Documenta (twice), the Venice Biennale, and museum and galleries the length and breadth of Europe.

Last month, Nan contributed to ARTINFO’s Weekend Picks column. We featured her current exhibition, “Some Times,” a two-artist show with Bill Viola at Salzburg’s Museum der Moderne (through July 6), and she in turn was asked to select other exhibitions to see throughout the city. In her typical fashion, Nan selected not only exhibitions at galleries and museums, but also her favorite sweetshop, which offers, she said, “pastries that are sinfully delicious — fantastically arranged like works of art!”

Though she had been an ex-pat for many years, Nan maintained a passionate interest in her home country, and particularly in its politics. The last email she sent me arrived on June 3, the morning that we learned Barack Obama had clinched the Democratic Party presidential nomination. It began “CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Broadcast Yourself: Artists Interventions into television and strategies for self-broadcasting from the 1970s to today

Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 28th February – 8th March 2008

Since the ‘counter-cultural’ emergence of video, artists have wrestled with the institution of TV, both as opportunity and as threat. ‘Broadcast Yourself’ is a carefully curated panorama which pulls out some key artists’ projects from the 70s through to the noughties, and hence covers a course of artistic endeavours in broadcasting through to narrowcasting. A pivotal model marking the shift from the ‘old’ approach to intervention into the existing structures to the ‘new media’ methods of setting up your own, is Van Gogh TV’s attempt to transform the mass medium of television into an interactive medium that reverses the relationship of one broadcaster and many receivers. ‘Piazza Virtuale’ was an interactive television project that could be received all over Europe via 4 satellites for 100 days during documenta IX in 1992. Here video documentation and original poster works convey the sense of the chaos and frenetic enthusiasm over new media at the turn of the 90s.

Home to the permanently display of Kurt Shwitters’ final piece of work, the ‘Merzbarn’ wall (which manages to appear part of every exhibition that is hosted there), the show has been carefully laid out as a series of installations of works which were all originally broadcast via TV, cable, CCTV or the internet. Somehow appropriately adjacent to the Schwitters work was Alastair Gentry’s ‘Nowhere Plains’, a four monitor video record of the live performance event from 2005, which was based on a utopian journey to Nowhere, which culminated in him being the first human being to land on Mars. Thematically witty and visually alluring, this work is also politically foreboding in the current climate whereby superpowers abnegate responsibility for environmental devastation through the media tease of possible travel and colonisation of other planets.

The works for television were presented in the comforting environment of a reconstructed 70s living room with sofa, standard lamp, lurid wallpaper and carpet, fake coal-effect two-bar electric fire and cheeseplant, that was characteristic of British working class and middle class homes of that time. In the USA in the 70s however, one can’t imagine the uncomfortable experience of having your evenings’ viewing interrupted by Chris Burden’s TV ads, one of which ‘Through the Night Softly’ sees the artist naked with arms tied behind his back, slithering along a road at night over broken glass. Another displays bold and cryptic statements such as ‘Science has Failed’, ‘Heat is Life’, ‘Time Kills’ – wonderful imprints on the eyelids to keep your dreams on edge. The artist bought the airtime from various channel providers for the works, and over 30 years after their recording these conceptual performance records maintain a provocative edge. The physical abuse of the body in the name of art, and the mental jarring of the artist/spectator relationship makes these works feel current and profound.

Ian Breakwell’s ‘Continuous Diaries’ were (and remain) a series of mini television programmes, which lasted between 3 and 12 minutes, and dotted over a set period of Channel 4’s broadcast time in the mid-80s. These are timeless art classics that seem to become more interesting with repeated viewings through their celebration of the ordinary, the recording of bizarre incidents, and of course, Breakwell’s refreshingly ironic humour. ‘13th May 1984’ for example was shot on the day of the London marathon which went past his studio and was broadcast the next day. In it, he undertakes a hilariously dry critique of the mass banality of compulsive jogging (as well as the national obsessions of royal births and royal weddings). Breakwell requested that the pieces be broadcast after the pub’s close, in order to capture some of the audience in the right ‘mellow’ frame of mind.

The producer, Anna Ridley, pioneered a number of artists works at the inception of Channel 4 through her company Annalogue – importantly, works made by artists rather than about them. There was an optimistic hope then of television opening its doors to the real creative’s who could adequately explore it – not the creative’s who produce the visual effects, stunning credits or clever advertisements - but those who could optimise new concepts in television, in form rather than just content. It has to be noted that Channel 4 did this for a while under the direction of some enlightened executives and commissioners

The project TV Swansong was a homage to TV past, present and future, and remains a prime example of an artist’s initiative which combined use of the internet with an in-part socially engaged ethos and sharp curatorial approach that involved collaboration between the initiators, the artist’s Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope, and the artists, who included Graham Fagen, Chris Helson, amongst several others. The whole project culminated in a symposium at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2002, which brought together the artist teams as well as interested individuals. It gave an opportunity to consider the works again, post transmission event, and to discuss issues raised by the project in a social format. A publication was launched at the event. Some of this was webcast, so there was both a live audience and an online one, and these are viewable on the media art archive on www.swansong.tv. This linking of the atomised desktop space of the online producer/participant with that of a live audience, alongside the consideration of the aesthetic qualities of on-line projects and the requirements of the social realm remain unresolved in the current politics of webcasting.

‘Broadcast Yourself’ was produced for the 2008 AV Festival in the North East of England. It will be at Cornerhouse, Manchester from 13th June – 10th August 2008.

A shorter version of this review was published in The Map issue 14, summer 2008.

Malcolm Dickson

Lost and Found: Recovered British Artists’ Video Work

Lost and Found: Recovered British Artists’ Video Work
Dundee Contemporary Arts, 9th November 2007

Expanded video works not seen since the 1970s that have been recovered and preserved by REWIND| Artists’ Video in the 70s & 80s, an AHRC research project based at the Visual Research Centre.

The evening featured:
Pieces I Never Did by David Critchley
Nmutter by John Latham
In Two Minds by Kevin Atherton
Dialogue for Four Players by Stephen Partridge

This is the first time these multi-screen pieces have been exhibited as projections in this form.

Outside the gallery:
In the Minds Eye by Tamara Krikorian
Video documentation from The Video Show in the Serpentine Gallery 1975. The first major exhibition of Video Art in the UK.

Further information www.rewind.ac.uk

Pieces I Never Did - David Critchley, 1978, 30mins

“David Critchley’s Pieces I Never Did (1979) explores issues raised through live performance, chronicling a series of short works he had planned but never previously got around to making. Critchley addresses his audience directly, explaining and then restaging the works especially for the camera. Critchley made a number of significant video works during the mid- to late 1970s drawing on his background in live performance to develop a series of single screen video works that explored the relationship between the video camera/recorder and the performer and performance and recording spaces, including Static Acceleration (1976) and Zeno Meets Zero (1975).

Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, The Development of Form and Function.2006.

Nmutter - John Latham, 1984, 6mins.

(Please note this piece contains strobe effects)
This piece was originally shown on Channel 4 television in 1984 as part of the Dadarama video art series. The work was produced by Anna Ridley of Annalogue productions and the sound treatment is by David Cunningham of The Flying Lizards fame. Each frame of the work is represented by a different abstract and so when played back creates an intense experience for the viewer. This work is influenced by the Geometric Abstractionists such as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich.

In Two Minds - Kevin Atherton, 1978, 26mins

‘In Two Minds’ is a two monitor video installation first exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1978. This work consisted of myself on one video monitor asking questions of myself on the other monitor. The questions, typically of that time, largely address the nature of the piece itself. At the time of making the piece I had no intention of using it beyond the Serpentine show, the rough and ready state of the black and white tapes attest to this. - Kevin Atherton February 2006.

Dialogue for Four Players -Stephen Partridge, 1979, 16mins

‘Dialogue for four players was a video playback installation by Steve Partridge at the AIR Gallery during Mid-March of 1978. Four Monitors stand in a square facing the viewer in a darkened room: their own light is the only illumination. Each monitor is replaying a different tape; each showing the lower half of (the same) woman’s face, thus each speaks its own contribution to the dialogue. The piece has been transferred from its original format enabling it to be viewed in a new arrangement directly onto the gallery
walls.

Monitor Works

In the Minds Eye - Tamara Krikorian, 1977, 13mins

Influenced by the discussions about narrative which were thrown up at the time by for example Jean Luc Goddard’s Numero 2, I thought about ways of approaching formalism through some sort of restricted narrative The poem Dream for winter by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud forms the structure of the work which includes a sequence of self-referral devices pointing to the notion of video per se. The poem at the beginning of the work describes a railway journey in winter. The second section is the view through the carriage window, which is quickly exchanged for the same view re-shot off a TV monitor accentuating the movement of the train and underlining the unreality of TV information. The third section shows the image of the train journey on TV reflected in the eye. The programmes on the TV are switched from channel to channel alternating between TV and the railway journey. In this way, the journey is removed one step further from reality becoming a figment of the imagination The result is a sort of impressionistic formalism if such a definition exists.

Tamara Krikorian

The Video Show Documentation, Serpentine Gallery, 1975, 28mins

“In the summer of 1975 ‘The Video Show - first festival of independent video’, held at the Arts Council’s Serpentine Gallery in London, was the first substantial British survey of this still-new medium. Under a poster-headline proclaiming ‘Television has been attacking us all of our lives, now we can fight it back’ (the words of Korean/US video-pioneer Nam June-Paik), it, too, pursued an inclusive selection policy, bringing together tapes by many community and political groups, work by international artists such as Dan Graham, William Wegman and the Vasulkas, and installations and performances by rising British stars such as David Hall, Susan Hiller and Tamara Krikorian. The month-long programme included a repertory of tapes shown on monitors. Some American tapes came with the smart logo of the Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery, New York, on the front - introducing the novelty of a well-heeled commercial gallery with a substantial stake in moving-image media. Interest by British galleries had been limited; many British artists disapproved of limited-edition works in principle; certainly any hope that a market might develop in Britain proved premature. But the Serpentine show was widely reported in the art and even daily press.”

David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. British Film Institute, 2007.

REWIND| Artists Video in the 70s & 80s www.rewind.ac.uk