Curated by David Mabb
November 02 - December 14, 2002
The work in Critical Home Video was selected on the basis of the simplest of parameters: I would know all the artists; they would be my friends and/or ex-students from Goldsmiths College where I teach; all the videos would be short; all the videos would be single monitor/projection; all the works would in some way be self-critical; I would bombard my audience with multiple experiences.
There are twelve works, made by fifteen artists, including three collaborations. The works have common features. Two of them, Gone by Sheena Macrae and Don Bury Presents Saturday Night Fever, involve appropriation of popular film. Two of them, Welcome to the studio by Angus Wyatt and Blood and Xerox by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, are ‘traditional’ animations. Two of them, Cake Eaters by Janet Hodgson and Bike by Kate Smith, are videos of ‘performances’, in the sense that the camera is set up and switched on to record the ‘event’ as it occurs, with little editing, beyond starting and finishing. Three works, Can Can Can by K R Buxey, A Closer Look at the Life and Work of William Morris by David Mabb and Rotator by Volker Eichelmann and Ruth Maclennan, use primarily still images which are then sequenced in different ways within the edit suite.
Only two, Mud by Yasu Ishige and Westminster by Johannes Maier, use a camera and edit suite in a more conventional way to set up shots and construct narratives.
One characteristic shared by all the work is the low- or no-budget production. The work is made with cheap equipment, with amateur or borrowed casts and crew and uses appropriated sound tracks. The work, perhaps because of this, has a ‘home-made’ quality. And from this it might be possible to deduce that the artists are not particularly well known.
David Mabb
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Welcome to the Studio
Angus Wyatt
1 minute 30 seconds.
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Welcome to the Studio is an invitation to enter the fabled arena of cultural activity, the near-mythic site of production, that is the cherished domain of the individual cultural producer. Welcome to the studio is a guided tour of the inner sanctum wherein the wonder of creation and the marvels of artistic process are laid bare for all to witness. More than a simple exercise in PR or self-promotion, our host’s carefully considered representation, his portrait, dramatically illustrates the exceptional freedom enjoyed by the contemporary visual arts practitioner. So enjoy your stay, look around, delight in the unbridled enthusiasm and dedication exhibited by an obviously confident accomplished and committed artist, comfortably surrounded by the tools of his trade.
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Don Bury Presents Saturday Night Fever
Don Bury
4 minutes
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Recent work by video/installation artist Don Bury joyfully exploits the vernacular of the mainstream, reconfiguring popular Hollywood film footage in order to produce a more ‘satisfying’ cinematic experience. [Don Bury Presents Saturday Night Fever] is a reedited version that highlights alternative narratives – ones that emphasise homosexual characters and relationships …This mini-film is usually shown on a monitor in order to reproduce a familiar site of blockbuster movie consumption: the television. By mixing the familiar with the uncommon, Bury re-enacts and disrupts the cinematic process of identification. Using cinematic conventions of slow motion, repetition, score, and genre, Bury’s film provides an alternative reading to this populist film. Don Bury Presents retains a primary regard for the viewing pleasure of the audience while simultaneously obliterating the conventional narratives (i.e. boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy triumphs against odds and gets girl at the end of the film) that customarily produce it.
Extract from "The Pleasure of Subtext: Homoeroticism, Appropriation, and Cinematic Spectacle In Don Bury Presents" by Adrienne Lai
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A Closer Look at the Life and Work of William Morris
David Mabb
4 minutes.20 seconds
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I have made a DVD/video that quite literally looks closer at the work of William Morris. It functions as a parodic art documentary, particularly with regard to the rostrum camera shot of the artwork and the close up. The structure is taken from a computer-generated movie/animation that replicates the zoom tool in the computer software programme Photoshop. The animation takes the viewer on a journey. The image of a Morris’s fabric starts as a pixel and zooms, appearing to reduce in size (1% at a time) until the whole image fills the screen. This procedure then appears to go into reverse, getting smaller until it ends as a dot on the screen. The space vacated by this image is filled by another of Morris’s fabrics, which has begun the inverse process: the image seems to increase in size until a whole image becomes visible, and then appears to increase still further until a single pixel fills the screen.
This imagery is set to a Russian rendition of the Internationale. This music, juxtaposed with the imagery, highlights the divergence that existed in Morris’s practice between his decorating business and his socialism, but it also serves to place Morris firmly within the revolutionary tradition, bringing that tradition forward to the end of the 20th century through the medium of computer digitisation. This technology, we can assume, would have been an anathema to Morris, who with few exceptions looked to the past for his tools.
David Mabb
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