Category: Performance

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/

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)

“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 the simultaneous projections and visual recording of each event as part of the performance by Mike Leggett. The subsequently processed film footage would become part of the multi-projection elements of the next Unword performance, which would also be filmed, processed, and then projected in the next performance, and so on. The projection of the footage was on a Spectro stop frame analysis projector, (a scientific examination tool), running at 2 frames per second. The scarcity of such projectors meant that the Unword stop frame film which Mike Leggett edited after the end of the series of performances, could only occasionally be shown together with a soundtrack on tape compiled from the original tapes of language lessons and eyesight tests plus voice-over narrations by Ian Breakwell used in the original Unword performances.”

In 2003 Mike Leggett and Ian Breakwell digitally reconstructed the Unword film as a video installation. Collection of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London – see catalogue essay (2006) by Victoria Worsley in left column.

In 2010 a questionnaire devised by Breakwell in 1970 was located, together with my responses to aspects of the collaboration, its production and reflections upon its affect.

“This document is about broadcast television in Britain in 1973.”
Following the award of a prize in an art competition sponsored by a local television station, I campaigned with other film and video prizewinners, including Beau Geste Press, to have our work screened on the channel. Prizewinners in other categories had their work exhibited publicly whilst the best the station was prepared to offer was the screening of some extracts from the moving image work. The 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 a book published by Beau Geste Press in 1974. (NB Britain at the time had three television channels in any one geographical area, two run by the BBC and one by commercial franchises. It was not until 1981 that Britain licensed 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).

The Image Con Text project commenced in 1978 and was about interaction of the analogue kind, between the artist and an audience gathered for a screening of artists’ film. During the event interpretive information, or contextualising material as it was called then, provided to ‘new’ audiences a way into the artworks, whilst giving access to the conditions and processes involved in giving the films and tapes the form and content observed.
“Leggett’s early experiment was with film, though his exploration of video started in the ’70s with CCTV and performance … and re-contextualising the video image as film, to questioning the electronic technology and its ‘ambiguities’. Leggett has moved fluidly between shifting moving-image technologies, film, video and digital, and engages the audience directly with the associated and variable discourses.” – J.Hatfield*
The Image Con Text project comprised three parts. The first, described some of the conditions that had been involved in determining the artworks, from two distinct approaches – from the artists’ viewpoint, (Image Con Text: One); then later in 1981 from the audience viewpoint, (Image Con Text: Two). The second part of the project was on-going research, with regular live presentations to audiences, the feedback from which would inform subsequent presentations. Thirdly, a videotape version made in 1983 archived both presentation performances thus extending their meanings to later audiences. Interactive study utilising the dynamic linking of the digital format continued the process, with analogue to digital transfer by the Rewind project (University of Dundee 2005) and distribution via DVD and the Web.
*The PDF is the MS version of a chapter about the project in Experimental Film and Video (2006), John Libbey, London (ed. Dr Jackie Hatfield).