From our vantage point today perhaps one of the most revealing aspects of works such as Tilt is their longevity. It’s easy to identify the legacy of the Scratch aesthetic at play within the work of a plethora of contemporary copycats. What [these newer copies] works lack, however, as they ape the lo-fi ‘feel’ and sound of Scratch, is the sense of critical adventure so resonant in the earlier works, the playful attempt at a paradigm shift for video art in an era (in art) characterized by its ‘worthy’ didactic tone. As Barber noted in his talk, much of this work was intended as a ‘pleasurable critique of television’, using formal devices shared by contemporaneous hip hop ‘scratch’ DJs in New York – sampling, remixing, appropriating and cutting found footage and existing sources to create a new ‘whole’. In Barber’s accompanying discussion he claimed that he was often differentiated from other video artists in the early stages of his career as being ‘less interested in the formal aspects of the medium’, yet the experimental nature of the videos dispute this.

One of the most recurrent features of Barber’s work is its energetic humor. In almost all of the works, a real mischievousness can be detected, a sense that the artist had great fun while making of the videos. In the hilariously laconic, deadpan performances of The Venetian Ghost, Waiting for Dave and I Was Once Involved In A Shit Show Barber uses parody to great effect not just for its humor but for its critical potential. In A Theory of Parody Linda Hutcheon wrote: ‘the pleasure of irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual “bouncing” (to use E.M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance’. In Barber’s works, we are placed in a similar relationship with the medium and subject matter. Although often highly politicized, there are several layers on which we can read many of Barber’s works, and often we ‘bounce’ between these texts and subtexts. The degree to which we (and the artist) might be complicitous with the subjects he represents shift and alternate as we move through each of the works.

The strategies used by Barber in Absence of Satan employ a kind of subversive repetition and ‘drawing out’ of film time now common currency in video art (Tracey Moffat and Douglas Gordon are two key examples), while in the yuppie-baiting Hovis Ad, Schweppes Ad and The Story of Wash and Go our attention is drawn to the manner in which we are manipulated by the media while simultaneously allowing us to laugh at its absurdity.

The significance of both the DVD and the event at Street Level was the showcasing of these works and their introduction to a new audience. While Barber’s use of disco music in his work might have been ‘troubling’ to his art school tutors in the early 80s what is more troubling today is the lack of awareness or acknowledgement given to Barber and his contemporaries by younger video art practitioners (and art students who continue to pursue a meeting between art and pop culture). The very Englishness of Barber’s work also provides a much needed counterpoint to the dominance of US video art in the art historical and curatorial canon. Organisations such as LUX, Dundee’s REWIND project and galleries such as Street Level (whose hosting of this event followed a related programme of Scratch Video screenings and a talk by Sean Cubitt) deserve wholehearted support for their endeavors.  For many in the audience, this event marked their first encounter with Barber’s work but the audience’s response and enthusiasm exemplified the continuing relevance and interest in these experimental, critical and – yes - pleasurable video works.