The Legart Archive
LEONARDO NOV 2009 “Camouflage technology emerges as the reader works through the book, picking out detail from the background of seemingly endless anecdotal biography entertainingly presented, though of curiosity value to any but the serious researcher.”
“There is plenty to be done in the new areas of digital art distribution, primarily with CD-ROM and the World Wide Web.” The prophetic article for Photofile No 45, published by the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, examines innovative approaches taken by David Blair to “image-processed narrative” using internet browsers, at a very early stage of the internet’s development into an artistic and public medium.
Experimenta Recharge 6th International Biennal, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, November 2014.
“The curators of Experimenta Recharge 6th International Biennial of Media Arts ask three questions, only one of which intrigued: “can artists illuminate knowledge for new generations?” From computer-based animation, through DIY electronics to intensely introspective installations, the multidisciplinary DNA of the current generation of artists has been adjusting, if not exactly mutating, familiar ground. ” RealTime #125
Khaled Sabsabi, 70,000 Veils 2014, 100 channel digital video
“This paper is about theory in practice and practice in theory and how, by understanding how each can alter the other, we can learn to advance both. Theory and practice operate together in creative practice but often the role of theory is perceived as quite separate. The paper will focus on the theory-practice axis and will argue that there is a reflexive relationship between them that shapes our notions of the utility of theory in creative work. The discussion begins with a consideration of what the term ‘theory means in different contexts: theory in general, theory in science, theory in critiquing and theory in creativity. It helps to understand the differentiation in order to consider what categories of theory are relevant to creative practice.”
“Based on performances by Ian Breakwell which took place in London, Bristol and Swansea, Unword is an amalgam of text, performance, sculpture, sound and projection. The series of Unword mixed-media performances during 1969-70 incorporated projections and the simultaneous visual recording of each event as part of the performance by Mike Leggett.” A catalogue essay by Victoria Worsley – see left hand column – was commissioned to coincide with the inclusion of Unword in the exhibition ‘Important Mischief: British Sculpture from the 1960’s and 70’s’. More on Unword.
I encountered the work of the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait (1919 – 1999) at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh in 1971, whilst visiting with Valie Export, Ian and Jackie Breakwell. These gentle and beautiful films left a lasting impression and it was with some surprise to discover that she had been making them since the early 1950s. In 1975 she attended the First Independent Filmmakers Film Festival in Bristol and it was here that she agreed to tour a program of films to the South West the following year in a series I was curating, Filmmakers on Tour.
She and her husband Alex Pirie stayed with me for several days whilst passing through and we talked at length…. Some of these conversations were recorded and together with the correspondence that followed formed the basis of an this extended essay (copies of these are held at the BFVASC). In the mid-80s this was handed to my friend and colleague Richard Kweitniowski to edit prior to publication in Undercuts – this publication did not eventuate. The MS was used as the basis for an entry on Margaret Tait in the Directory of British Film & Video Artists 1996.
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.
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.
https://vimeo.com/105633508 PLEASE VIEW AT FULL SCREEN
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.
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/