Mike Leggett – Page 8

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

Meta/Data : a Digital Poetics

“This rich collection of writings by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history* and network infused language art.”

* This includes a reference to my work at the London Filmmakers Co-op.

2007

Mark Amerika

Artspace, Sydney exhibition: Another kind of cinema

2014

Mike Leggett

'Situated Cinema' at Artspace, Sydney by Solomon Nagler & Alexandre Larose.
'The visibility of the projected image is an issue of physical and cognitive events meeting in space. Situated in the gloom of the gallery are references to cinema, a cultural form until recently regarded purely as a conveyor of story-telling based entertainment, both popular and classical; and cinema as a place, the bricks and mortar where such encounters occur … three screens capture the projected image, one visible, a second invisible and another out of action (a different kind of signification, more later).' RealTime #120. More in link at left….

Artists for Democracy

Artists for Democracy, an exhibition based upon the archive of Cecilia Vicuña, held in Santiago, Chile, at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (the Museum of Memory and Human Rights) and at the Museo Nacional Bellas Artes (the National Museum of Fine Arts). The video Chile Lucha was part of the original exhibition, Artists for Democracy, held at the Royal College of Art, London in 1974, in which over 100 artists, mainly from Britain, contributed work in support of the people of Chile, who one year after the military coup were suffering persecution and deprivation.

The links on this page are to various reviews of the Santiago exhibition, most of which are in Spanish.There is also a blog with links to further reviews: http://artistsfordemocracy2014.com/

2014

Various reviewers

Chile Lucha

The video Chile Lucha was part of the exhibition, Artists for Democracy, held at the Royal College of Art, London in 1974.

In 2014, under the same title, the archive of Cecilia Vicuña concerned with the London exhibition was held in Santiago, Chile, at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (the Museum of Memory and Human Rights) and at the Museo Nacional Bellas Artes (the National Museum of Fine Arts). The original tape had been archived by the University of Dundee (2005) and with the approval of the curator Paulina Varas, a second Spanish language version was prepared for the exhibition in Santiago – these two versions were shown as part of an installation designed and built by Carolina Zuñiga. The videos are now a part of the Museums permanent collection.

The dual-language catalogue also included ‘testamonials’ from artists who had taken part in the exhibition in 1974 – my responses can be accessed as a PDF at top left of this page. This video link is to a 2015 documentation of the exhibition.

2014

17-min loop

Chile Lucha

1974

17-min

The video was made in response to the military coup that occurred in Chile in 1973. To mark the first anniversary of this outrage, one of the Chilean refugees living in England, Cecilia Vicuña together with a small committee invited artists to contribute work to an exhibition and series of events called Artists for Democracy. I took a Portapak to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London marking the first anniversary of the military coup and got into a good position to record the events – speeches and performances by Inti-Illimani. Towards the end of the event I noticed a friend of mine, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, down in the crowd also with a Portpak. A media activist of many years, he had a studio, Fantasy Factory, just around the corner, and enthusiastically agreed to share the video material he had shot for the AFD project. Editing technology for analogue video was quite crude in those days which accounts for the variable quality of the tape today. But we both associated with artists and community co-operative workshops (film and video), the essential objective being that we made and distributed work independently of the dominant media channels.

The finished tape was shown on a monitor screen at the Royal College of Art exhibition – there were no video projectors at that time – and subsequently was distributed to student and trade union groups. Collection:the Museo dos Memoria y Humanos Dereche, Santiago, Chile.

Wayward Action!

1973

Mike Leggett

"This book is about broadcast television in Britain in 1973."
Following the award of a prize in an art competition sponsored by a local commercial television station, I campaigned with other film and video prize-winners, (including Beau Geste Press, who printed an A3 poster/flyer), to have our work transmitted on the Westward TV channel. Prize-winners in other art categories had their work exhibited publicly: the best the station was prepared to offer was the screening of some extracts from the moving image work. The television station finally offered a discussion about their refusal to screen complete works in a monthly magazine arts program. The 15-minute broadcast item became a performance and discussion intended to raise questions about the ownership and access to Britain's three television channels*. Documentation of the whole event was completed with the book Wayward Action! published by Beau Geste Press in 1974.
(* Britain at the time had three television channels in any one geographical area, two run by the BBC and one by commercial franchises. The book was submitted in evidence to the Annan Committee on the future of broadcasting, a national enquiry whose report (1977) led eventually in 1981 to Britain licensing another television channel, Channel Four, with a remit to provide access to a wider range of program makers, including artists. Television by its very centralised nature defines for the many the tastes of the few, a situation much changed in the era of the internet).

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