Month: September 2014

Pcock

https://vimeo.com/105661189 PLEASE VIEW IN FULL SCREEN

The strutting display of a peacock is both spectacular and confronting. in a public nature reserve with a peahen in attendance, the sounds of other animals and human activity has the effect of undercutting the image of authority presented by the animal; it is as if the spectacle – and this could be said of this video – subsumes the purpose.

The screen image is presented following a sequence of procedures initiated by a fragment of a video recording made on Betamax; captured into the computer and processed in a way reminiscent of the ceramicists of the East, the ‘all-seeing eye’ of the ancients stares out of the screen as the viewer’s gaze is distanced by the approximation of the image to that tradition.

2011
2-min 30s.

Special Events – NYC’71

The footage was shot in New York City in 1971 as the portrait of a city I was visiting for the first time. I had of course been there many times before – on film – so the form of the document needed to be distinct and reflect the specificity of the medium. The film was shot on a standard 8mm camera and I asked Kodak not to split the film – I had shot the ‘second side’* holding the camera upside down. Projected on a 16mm projector, the four frames are thereby visible right way up.

In the early 1970s I was working intensively with 16mm and the NYC footage was included in screenings and performances, sometimes being slowed down using an analysis projector. In about 2000 I began experimenting with the images as digital video. But it was not until I heard the amazing compositions of the New York musician John Zorn in 2009 that I realised how I wanted to complete the film.

Note: the World Trade Center was in the early stages of construction at the time; the images of its sunken foundations we saw again in 2001.

*Standard 8mm film is a now obsolete guage of film. It was in fact 16mm film with an additional sprocket hole adjacent to each image frame. After the first exposure onto the 25 feet of film, the spool was turned over and fed back through the camera for the second exposure. At the laboratories after processing, the film was split down the middle and joined end to end to produce 50 feet of continuous projection time of about 3 minutes.

Premiered at the Australian International Experimental Film Festival, Melbourne.

2012
4-min 20s

https://vimeo.com/105633508 PLEASE VIEW AT FULL SCREEN

The Institution (with Ian Breakwell)

Part of the Art Spectrum exhibition at Alexander Palace in north London, The Institution was a performance devised by Ian Breakwell and Kevin Koyne. The improvisation drew on Coyne’s experiences as a nurse in a mental hospital (as they were called then), just outside Manchester, combined with his performances as a musician and song-writer. Breakwell at the desk, wearing the doctor’s white coat, interceded with items of news – “we’re at war in Northern Ireland” – delivered to the video camera, which Mike Leggett roamed around the space throughout, the image being seen on a large monitor to one side of the performance area. (There was no recording made). Though the presence of the camera and monitor amplified Breakwell’s citing of The Media accounts of national and international events, Breakwell and Coyne presented the performance several times without the addition of the camera.

1971
40-mins

Circulation Figures (with Anthony McCall)

In the early 70s I took part in a performance event organised by Anthony McCall. About six of us met at the Balderton Street annexe of Regent Street Polytechnic, (now the University of Westminster, and by coincidence the film studio in which I spent my final year of college). We brought film cameras, still cameras and sound recording gear to make images with the huge pile of newspapers that filled the space. Besides myself and Anthony, Carolee Schneeman amd others took part. TODAY, 14th June 2011, only forty years later, I heard from Anthony:

“I just completed Circulation Figures. I made an installation, an altered space like the original event, with facing mirrors and scrumpled-up newspaper. At the center, a floating, double-sided screen on which is projected the footage shot at the event. The footage is highly organized but not edited in the conventional sense. First, the color reels are alternated with black-and-white; second, the footage runs for 30 seconds and then freezes; each freeze lasts 30 seconds before the action resumes. Including the freeze-frames one complete cycles lasts 36 minutes. The moving-image sequences are silent, whereas the frozen sequences have live sound (walking on newspaper, camera whirrings and shutter-clicks). The images, the floating screen, and the newspaper-strewn floor are extended into infinity (as we were at the original event, and as visitors to the installation are).

The piece was installed in the exhibition “Off the Wall”, at Serralves in Portugal, a show devoted to performative actions (see http://www.serralves.pt/actividades/detalhes.php?id=1951).”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/62606737@N04/

1973 – 2011

La Belle et Le Bete

Dimensions: 100 x 100cm.

This photo installation used photocopy sheets of an essay by Jean Fitton and some comments by myself, collaged together with some found graphical material. It was in response to an invitation from Robert Short, a curator specialising in surrealist art, to submit some work for a show at the Campden Arts Centre in London. I had no idea why he had contacted me as though I had a deep interest in surrealism, in particular the surrealist films of Luis Bunuel, I had not exhibited in that context previously.

Just before receiving the invitation, I had been asked to mark Jean Fitton’s short essay on the films of Luis Bunuel. Essays were not part of studio practice at the time, but I agreed to help out the history department, who a little later nonetheless ticked me off for scrawling over her work. She readily admitted to copying most of the essay from Raymond Durgnat’s terrible book on the filmmaker and she later submitted a rewrite following suggestions I had made in my comments.

Ever the opportunist, I suggested to Jean that we submit a work to the exhibition, SURREALISM UNLIMITED, based on the documents we had both produced, to which she eagerly agreed. For a final visual flourish, I added some colour; cutting out some paint colour-chart rectangles and in summoning the gods of surrealist chance, dropped the cutouts from a height of several feet, onto the work below. Where they fell was where they were glued in place.

I didn’t for a moment think that a discussion held on paper would ever breech the walls of the surrealist establishment in London. But it did….. such company we had stumbled into!

Shattered by the fact the work did not sell, it was later shoved into storage and forgotten.

Some years later when it was being shifted during another house move, I discovered many of the coloured rectangles were missing…… ‘Oh yes, your son did that when he was of crawling age – he carefully peeled them off’. What remains is but a shadow of the artwork’s former vibrant presences.

1978

Model Descending a Staircase No.2

We celebrate the presence of celebrities in the world, and our presence with them. The glitz, the glamour and the tragedy of their work and lives we share with them as the minutia of their daily round is revealed to us. From the supermodel to the artist, fame is an acknowledgement of the perfection of the moments they inhabit.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No.2’ was a distinguishing moment in 1902 when art was redefined, again. Contributing to the early 20th Century’s surge into the modern era, the painting affirmed within a single image a representation and presence of a figure in the spatial setting of a staircase, as a temporal entity. Informed by photography and the kinomatographic motion picture, the painting and other works from the period encouraged the art-going public to move away from ‘retinal’ art and through the deconstruction of motion, to begin the process of embracing the conceptual underpinnings of art-making.

‘Model Descending a Staircase No. 2’ perversely reflects on the moving image itself as a temporal entity, locked into the suspension of a timelessly and seamlessly repeated image, that of a celebrated supermodel as she steps down onto the catwalk. The retinal ‘eye-candy’ of the contemporary celebrity, encountered in countless public and private architectural settings, are presented to us on myriad rectangular screens of dimensions that vary from mobile phone to stadium in size. In the proposed installation, the interpolation of image and scale recall the medieval altarpieces with depictions of celebrants and supplicants. Utilising mass-produced television screens, the isolated images of movers and gazers rotate through their routines of spectacle, a contemporary version of represented space/time interceding in the daily round of a public space.

Sample of installation, variable dimensions – main centre screen with two smaller peripheral screens.

2014
20-sec loops

https://vimeo.com/98018821

Back Then

A temporal collage traversing the ephemera of past travels.

The art work challenges language in printed, written and spoken form, as the means for recall, or even retelling. A procedural approach to the recorded material establishes four time periods: image representations of time past revealed through; an elapsed performance of the physical excavation of the paper remains, of the day of image capture; the later organisation of the digital data, incorporating voice, pauses, reversals etc; finally, the screening to an audience, making meaning.

As ephemera gathered over many years, my motivation for keeping the collection remained elusive. At first the range of colours, textures, shapes and sizes were stored for later fixing onto card or board, following an aesthetic practiced by artists over many generations. The collection was added to gradually, but never reviewed, simply accumulating under the slope of the desk; once full to spilling, the collecting stopped. The desk meanwhile travelled from place to place, traversing counties, and then countries, and then between cities and neighbourhoods.

The day of reckoning eventually arrived and the recording of the disposal of the collection was made. Another period elapsed. Then it was time to make the collage, as a moving image art work.

“Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously representing ourselves to ourselves, and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise.” S.M.Pearce


Premiered at the Australian International Experimental Film Festival, Melbourne.

2014
9-mins