Month: January 2014

Tales Gates

The installation was for EXPERIMENTA, Australia’s First National Exhibition of Art, Film and Video, presented by Modern Image Makers (MIMA) in November 1988.
A significant survey of the work of moving image artists at the time, it was staged across several venues in the city, included a series of live performances as well as screenings and was accompanied by an impressive catalogue that included essays by Adrian Martin, Fiona Mackie, Arthur Cantrill, Ross Gibson, Kris Hemensley and George Alexander, contributing to re-dressing the minor standing this group of artists had at the time within the national art scene.
The Tales Gates installation combinedan earlier photographic work of the same name with a video and sound installation facing the work, which was hinged to the wall. The video was based on the photographs seen in the panels, intercut with red, green and blue field colours, and a soundtrack made of some stories told by my neighbour at the time the photographs were made.

1988
10 days

The Pneu Life

The Pneu Life was commissioned by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, editors of the remarkable publication,CANTRILL’S FILMNOTES, published between 1971 and 2000 in 100 issues.
Written not long after migrating to Australia with partner and child from England, it sets out to survey idiosyncratically the theory and practice of moving image making at that point in time, predominantly of my own professional practice but also reflecting on that of others. There are ten sections in the PDF (at left): The Immigrant, The Student, The Teacher, The Filmmaker, The Editor, The View, The Critic, The Film Viewer, The Theoretical, The Installation. For reasons that were never quite clear to me, several artists in Melbourne were upset by the article.

1989
Mike Leggett

Kultur Speziell

The Kultur Speziell team from Austrian Television (ORF) visited the 1973 Avant-Garde Film Festival at the National Film Theatre and other venues in London. Unlike the British media who took no interest at all in the event, the Austrian team spent several days at the Festival, filming some of the events and performances, and interviewing various of the attendees. They approached me for an interview and I suggested that I could instead, using their crew and equipment, make the film that would respond to the question:”Why did you want to make this film?”. The program that was later broadcast in Austria included the piece uncut and concluded as half-hour report that was unpatronising and positive. In the late 1990s Peter Mudie recovered the program from ORF from which these stills were taken. (See more under Performance).

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This was the scene between performances outside the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), one of the venues during the Festival. David Crosswaite at the top of the steps, Mike Leggett and Valie Export foreground right.

1973
ORF (Austrian Television)

Kultur Speziell

The Kultur Speziell team from Austrian Television (ORF) visited the 1973 Avant-Garde Film Festival at the National Film Theatre and other venues in London. Unlike the British media who took no interest at all in the event, the Austrian team spent several days at the Festival, filming some of the events and performances, and interviewing various of the attendees. They approached me for an interview and I suggested that I could instead, using their crew and equipment, make the film that would respond to a question. The performance commenced with me switching on the camera, the program host asking the question “Why did you want to make this film?”. As I zoomed into the words Picture and Sound on the editing machine against which the interview leaned, I spoke about the process of making a film, before zooming and out, walking round in front of the camera and then leaning into shot to switch it off. The program that was later broadcast in Austria included the piece uncut and concluded as half-hour report that was unpatronising and positive. In the late 1990s Peter Mudie recovered the program from ORF from which these stills and the extract were taken. (More in Reviews and Citations)

1973
1-min