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

December 22nd, 2009