LUX Moving Image

Video Space by John Hoppy Hopkins

TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television, Maeve Connolly

An international symposium investigating the experiential implications of format 

The experience of viewing projected archival film or antiquated video footage can have a seductive, even spellbinding effect on the viewer. Its material and aesthetic qualities act as a trigger to memories, evoking a sense of time and nostalgia or conjuring up fantasies of history. Read more on the LUX website and e-flux's website

Taped footage, poems and archival material; collage, splicing and cheap effects

On YouTube you can find a clip from a 1970 BBC documentary, The Crimes of Joe Orton, about the arrest of the playwright and his lover Kenneth Halliwell for defacing books borrowed from a London library. They had altered dust-jacket blurbs and pasted photographs onto covers – a monkey’s face on a history of the Tudors, say, or a heavily tattooed man on the front of a John Betjeman biography. These additions – ‘sometimes amusing, sometimes mildly obscene’, as the librarian puts it – landed the pair with a six-month prison sentence in 1962, five years before Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer.

Though the clip is not by Stephen Sutcliffe, it has several things in common with the videos that the Glasgow-based Yorkshireman has been making for the past ten years: it is little more than five minutes long, has the straight-laced humour of a somewhat nebulous, pre-MTV period of paternalistic British television programming, and involves a collage technique with a rather laissez-faire attitude to publicly available materials. Disgruntled librarian Jim Connell gives a succinct description of Orton and Halliwell’s methods that tallies with the techniques favoured by Sutcliffe: ‘Most of these blurbs were written […] so that one started reading almost without realizing that this was a thing which had been doctored.’

TRANSCRIPT: FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE performed on the opening night of the annual Transmission Members Show, 26th June 2010

This piece of work is called: First Person Narrative, and it is highly unlikely that this is a master-piece. The work is much owing to the 1968 film Documentary Footage by Morgan Fisher, which I saw for the first time this year. I described the film to several people the week subsequent to my watching it, in much the same way I am about to describe it to you, and then I forgot about it for a while, and then I started thinking about it again a few weeks ago. In Documentary Footage, there is a naked young woman sat on a stool directly in front of the camera. You will have noticed that I myself am undressing, but I have fashioned this screen from my living room curtains, a hula-hoop, and a few other elements. I have elected to be naked, but I am not willing to be un-obscured. I often feel as though I am being obscured in one way or another. I often feel quite indistinct. Read more

In Generation: 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland

Kate Davis’s work frequently presents imagery and objects that have political, historical or social significance. Her interests are diverse, ranging from how the art of the past can be read in the present, to systems of education and economy and the role of historical events in our lives. Drawing is key for Davis but she also makes sculptures, films and photographs, sometimes combining found objects in her works. Her works often refer to the body in some way: through visual representation, an underlying idea or the way they are made. 

Wed 24 September 7pm, CCA Glasgow 

Friday 26 September 7pm, Tate Modern (as part of the TV as Material weekend) 

Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image at the BBC is a unique residency programme based at BBC Scotland organised by LUX and BBC Arts, offering six artists unprecedented access to the facilities and archives of the BBC. This programme includes the London premiere of six new moving image works produced as part of the 2014 residency. These events showcase a diverse range of artists’ approaches both to television and the archive, and include the premieres of works by Kate Davis, Kathryn Elkin, Luke Fowler, Torsten Lauschmann, Stephen Sutcliffe and Alia Syed. 

Artists and Archive: Artists' Moving Image at the BBC is supported by BBC Scotland, LUX and Creative Scotland.

The new works will be available to view online on the BBC Arts website from Monday 29 September 2014 and for public screening and exhibition through LUX Distribution.

WORKS

WEIGHT Kate Davis, UK 2014, HD Cam, B&W and Colour, Sound, 11:06 min ‘Taking a 1961 BBC documentary about artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point, Weight explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour. Weight re-imagines the value systems...Read more 

LUX will be on the Short Film Jury of the 19th edition of Milano Film Festival. Benjamin Cook, Director, Gil Leung, Head of Programme, and William Fowler, Curator of Artists' Moving Image at the BFI, will land from London. LUX and William Fowler will present a special "This is now" programme at Milano Film Festival 2014, inside Expanded Music Video section. Read more 

• Press ‘play’. Guillotined battery hens are falling into an Electrolux mixer. Riot police storm hair spray adverts, electrode-manipulated laboratory rats collide with stuttering newsreaders, the buckle of a straightjacket is refastened endlessly. The sound is a low melancholic drone of synthesised echoes and radio static. Eject. This is `Bleeding Images' by Nocturnal Emissions.

• Press ‘play’. Goose-stepping soldiers in Red Square receive the salute from Thatcher and Heseltine at the Conservative Party Conference. The Saatchi Tory logo, an ice-cream cone with flames leaping out, blurs into the hammer and sickle. Lady Di glides by waving to the beat of New Order's `How does it feel to treat me like you do?' Eject. `Scratching for a new texture' by the Duvet Brothers.

• Press ‘play’. Sultry eyes blink on screens within screens. Joan Crawford slaps William Holden. Violins play a distant tango, interrupted by snatches of dialogue from Hollywood melodramas. Floating layers of images are washed away by seeping pinks and crimsons, like the jelly blobs in those novelty table lamps. Eject. `Polka Dots and Moonbeams' by Sandra Goldbacher.