#luxmovingimage

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.