Past Discussion

The Critical Forum in 2007 was particularly intense and rich. Some of the guest speakers are coming back this year to go into more depth on the topics we only just touched upon. Neil Cummings and Chris Meigh-Andrews will counterpoint the discussion about collecting moving image work with an overview of educational archives and of open source philosophy. Not to be missed!

Here you can find a full and faithful transcript of the discussion. Let us know what you think and what you would like to discuss on Sunday 24th May for the 2009 Critical Forum.

Robin Bhattacharya … I want to discuss the videos broadcast on al jazeera . Hugely influential and yes, they are moving image. Totally different context – they try to increase their production value, etc as part of the propaganda war that’s going on it’s easy to say they are horrible and I can’t watch it and they should not be distributed, they should not be broadcast on tv, but they have a fascination. We can’t just ignore those images because they are there, people download them from the internet – they make their idea up to what that means to them. I’m trying to engage with that form of media. What might be going through their heads? It’s based on an extract by Michel … ‘the possibility …’ where he describes the scene of two terrorists torturing a hostage and discussing the value of the man. It’s a shocking scene in the book. We can just ignore it or try to understand, no matter how sick it is.
Cinzia Cremona (chair) Historically, referring to the media was very much at the heart of the beginning video art. Chris MA has just written a book about a history of video art.
Chris Meigh-Andrews I’m not sure the lead is enough to connect. But yes, I suppose that real time authentic image is something that video offered us and this is obviously not that. The issues for me is that this is acting and so it has nothing to do with the “authentic” torture video, or the snuff film, which has been around a lot longer than has been video.
Robin You are right, but even there you can’t say ‘authentic snuff torture video’. As I said, they increased their production values to try and make it more interesting – they always have the machine gun at the back.
Cinzia So there is the matter of official media and unofficial media - perhaps this would be relatively impossible without youtube and the internet. I don’t use youtube. How many of you do?
Chris Steven There is another phenomenon, which happened recently: filming people being bitten up with mobile phones – a new thing in Brighton at the moment and that’s posted on Youtube. I think it’s interesting that a lot of this new wave that came out of the Blair Witch Project, which is this desire to de-holliwoodize film, because the wobbly camera and the cracked film somehow speaks more authentically than the high production value, so that Al Jazeera is trying to improve its production value and that Holliwood seems to be flirting with the low production value to make it seem more real it’s an interesting phenomenon.
Corrado Morgana I would like to argue with this slightly. Something like al jazeera started as an attempt of democratizing technology. The technology that allows you to do that has to be in place. It started out as an advertising campaign for Tango
CS That’s right
Corrado which escalated, so without the infrastructure that allows it to be distributed, it might have not happened, as without the technology. So I think that you can’t separate out the technology from the place or its poli-foundation.
Cinzia I was thinking about different frames of reference that contain or not the moving image. I was thinking that there are a huge amount of genres, which have different destinations, and then there are genres that go across these larger containers. For example genre- tagging in youtube, which is the only kind of context within this container where there is a bit of everything.
Corrado The thing with youtube is that it has semantic tagging. I got interested in video in the 90’s. We were interested in the concepts and discourse of distribution and democratization. These concerns have come back to the fore with youtube, Google Video etc, which has actually broken down these barriers. In terms of the semantic tagging, everything on youtube is semantically tagged – it has keywords – so it changes the notion of the gallery. There is almost a self-curation there. I have a slight problem with the gallery legitimizing certain outputs. There are things on the edge of art that shouldn’t be legitimized by galleries, which create theory, creates critique, but may be legitimized by galleries. I can’t think about many artists from the traditional ground who actually use youtube as their major distribution point. Robin is a good example. But, where would you rather place yourself, how would you rather advertise your practice? How would you rather reach an audience? Is it by the semantic tagging of youtube or is it by …? Do you want to open it up as an activist piece, which exists, again, at the edges of art? It exists where people engage with it in a very different way.
Chris MA Why does it have to be one or the other? It seems to me that it has always been like this. If you go back to the beginning of video art, artists started messing around with video and asking where will I show this? How will I show this? And looking for opportunities. I think that we look to try and develop parallel strategies. If youtube is there we’ll use it. If you can send it to people’s phones via Blue Tooth we’ll use that. And OK, we start thinking about what’s the relevance of the ideas and messages we are interested in sending. Nevertheless, we look around at what’s possible. In a sense the artists who made video cassettes, you know, VHS cassettes, and the Scratch artists and so on in the early 80’s, that’s why they did it. The Duvet Brothers and George Barber, they were making videos and compilations and distributing them to their mates, basically through an underground network. I think video art is often an underground activity, it’s not just a gallery-legitimized activity.
Corrado However, you are in a gallery at the moment. You can’t take away from the actual institution that fosters a particular type of activity.
Chris Yes, but there is gallery and gallery. There are all kinds of hierarchical relationships.
Robert Luzar When you say for example that we have to be conscious of the fact that we are in a gallery, this seems to lead to the another contradiction, which would be to say then why are you obliged to present work outside the gallery? Really, what we are trying to do is to re-utilize and transform the gallery space into something else. Moving image … We are in a sense trying to make more of an event here, let’s say much more of an active experience of the gallery.
Cinzia There is also a different approach to the gallery, because here there are 3 artists who have selected other artists and we are also talking to other artists and also trying to think what have we not included? What else exists? Some of this forms sit more or less comfortably in the gallery, therefore we weren’t able to include them. Not because we weren’t able practically, but because we didn’t know how to connect things with each other. For example, documentary work and activist work are not here – genres that sit less comfortably with video as we addressed it, as an aesthetic process. On the other hand Dallas Seitz is the director of 1000000mph gallery and an artist who has been working with video for a number of years, as well as with sculpture and other forms. How do you feel when you hear this kind of different way of looking in on the moving image and the gallery?
Dallas Seitz Well, I agree that technology gets used as it arrives and perhaps in some cases with artists like Jane Prophet - sometimes she works with the scientist to build the technology to make the piece. So I think there is that happening with artists. I’m not a fan of the internet for looking at work. I do feel that going to the gallery, and maybe it’s a very old fashion or romantic idea, but going to the gallery is an experience, which adds something to the work. You contemplate work in a different way when you are in a gallery than you would be looking at something on a computer screen. And I think also commercially it’s a mistake for artists to be loading up their sites with all their video work or put it on youtube, because if I was a collector and I had purchased that piece, and then I felt that everybody had access to that piece, I don’t know how happy I’d be. There’s a problem when it gets into, like you were saying a hierarchies of galleries – as an artist sales is not my highest motivation, but if I was a commercial gallery, it would be a problem if my artists were putting up their work on youtube.
Corrado There’s a parallel to this in terms of interactive art. I co-curated something recently about video games. All the stuff is downloadable, accessible and free. The gallery becomes a point of entry for this practice. It shows stuff off. It says, OK, here are exciting examples of this kind of activity. Now go off and do it on your own. This is where I touch on edges of … - interactive practice, open source video, computational art, which probably exist better outside the gallery, where you get a proper interactive experience.
Neil Cummings I thought it would be nice to hear from somebody else who has been involved in this exhibition, just to give some context, so that we might think about what’s not here in relation to what’s here.
Cinzia Yes.
Peter Forde The piece I did was really based around ideas of the gallery and then the ideas of graffiti art coming into the gallery. So I think it is quite relevant what you were saying about how one interprets work on the internet and how one interprets work in the gallery. So how you interpret this kind of art from the street when you are independent of the context of where you are standing and how you appreciate it and the idea of ‘oh, I’m looking at art and appreciating it’. How you place your mind in that kind of setting is something that’s quite similar to taking in moving image at the cinema or on television. The gallery is not that different from the way you appreciate it in any kind of context. Any kind of work you look at, the exact space you are looking at it in completely changes how you appreciate it.
Cinzia Just for those who are not sure, PF work is the projected piece, in which Peter draws a frame around a projected image, so it’s a frame within a frame, within a projection. A great example for the core theme of this forum. Although it is hard to see, in Alex Hetherington piece, which is a re-enactment of a Wooster Group performance, the image in the background of the female singer is actually projected onto a canvas with a painting-like frame within it. There is there a similar kind of reference and awareness within the work itself of the issues of the gallery and concentric frames of reference and so on. I would like to introduce to you Gunter Puller who came all the way from Austria to be here his work is the yellow pages piece on the monitor in the corridor. In the introduction to the piece, Gunter says specifically that he found this yellow pages book, which was degrading in the woods and I wanted to make an art action out of continuing and helping the ‘falling-apart’ of this book. There is a clear awareness of a relationship with the art context. Hannah Guy’s work sits differently in the gallery between photography and the moving image.
Hannah Guy Yes, I come from a still photographic background. Seeing my work presented in a situation where there is a lot of work within the moving image is quite interesting. My moving image work is animation, it’s always in relation to my still image work as well. Seeing it in a gallery situation blown up quite large was different to what I’m used to. They are like little sketches – that’s how I approached it. I wanted to try and understand other art forms and bring them in, like into a sketching process. In my work I look at singular images and join them together in a seamless succession. So it’s really like breaking down the gaze and creating moving image just from stills.
Cinzia I think it’s a bit hard in this context to talk about distribution and about the economical level on a larger scale, because what’s happened here is that 3 artists got together and put out an open call and other artists sent in their work. There is almost an artist to artist relationship, which is what Dallas has in his gallery as well, which hijacks in a way the economical system that maybe we were talking about.
Neil I was interested in how people … You talk about distribution, but how did you come across moving image? So I wonder how artists feel about seeing their work on a monitor, you are standing up, you are wearing headphones, you don’t really know how long it’ll lasts, You have to spend 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour …
Cinzia You do know how long it lasts!
Neil There is always a question of value, which is: how long are you prepared to invest in the work.
Gunter Puller For me, video is a medium for intellectual processes and not only a formal thing. For me it’s not a question of what medium is used in the primary way. For me the question is project-based and when I work on a project I use different media and when video is used maybe it’s because it’s useful from a documentary point of view or to clear something up in my brain for this project and the main interest is not in the formal visual thing. I think form today is a bigger thing than to think about background and figure and such things.
Robert I think in terms of using video as a way of thinking through, even if it comes in the form of documentation, sometimes it feels like, for instance in my work I record myself doing performance and my personal question is with performance art being documented. There are some things that work in moving image that very much can frame performance work. How exactly are these two put together? There is something in this brief transition, something about immediacy there, that happens live, and video art seems obliged to bring out this immediacy, liveness … something that film, which is very formally put together, just cannot do. So I feel that this form of documentation is in partnership with video art.
Chris Stevens There is something very important to these few strands that are coming out here, in terms of difference. We are talking about being in the gallery and we are talking about the moving image within a fine art context. It has a huge advantage over film, over the theatrical performance, over art performance, which is that rather like going to the gallery to look at paintings, you can look and walk away whenever you want and you can come back whenever you want it becomes a circular experience. There is nothing wrong with looking at 3 minutes of a video, going off, having a drink and coming back. I think the way one can have an experience of a work of art within the gallery is an immense advantage, because it means that you can look at the work in a very disjointed way, which is not the performance, which is linear, then that’s it, then you go. You can see it from lots of different angles.
Tessa Garland How did you feel about the show on the Friday night, with all the different projectors going off at different times?
Chris S It was great!
Tessa Last year, and in previous Visions with Chris, we had a sit down screening in this room. This format makes people more active and more engaged as they have to move around. We also wanted to experiment with bleeding some of the works together Like Hannah’s work.
Hannah It was great.
Chris MA There is something about public space … I was thinking about something Dallas said about TV and downloading images from the internet and so on. In the old days video was about intimacy. It was on a small screen and you watched it in small groups or even in a one to one relationship and that’s still possible with the internet experience. But with the gallery experience, it’s a public space of some sort and that’s you point Hannah about your piece suddenly made public. It’s not just about the kind of space, it’s about the scale of the image. There is no more information but it’s larger. There is something going on there that changes the experience in some way. I think there are lots of strands here.
Tessa I had a conversation with Andrew earlier. I remember that when you submitted your piece you said you wanted it on a monitor. We had quite a few conversations among ourselves and in the end we decided to project it. I think for you this was quite a surprise for you. How did you feel about that?
Andrew Conio I thought it was OK. I thought it introduced the viewer into the work more strongly and made him participate in a way. I want to ask Robin a question: you wrote a script for your film. Can you say something about your scriptwriting technique? I only saw the last bit …
Cinzia Shall I show it again?!
Many Nooo!
Robin It’s based on an extract from a book by Michel … ‘the possibility …’ the book is about a screenwriter who proposes this movie and the producers censor this scene in the movie and in the book there is a description of this scene of one page. I wrote the script for the video, which is called uncensored from he scene that is censored in the book. How the writing thing works, I can’t tell you, because I just sit down and write.
Andrew There seems to be a deliberate self-consciousness in the writing. You weren’t trying to use the ‘normal’ theatrical devices like allegory or metaphor. The characters are using a language that is meant to be believed. Or subconsciously believed, I thought.
Robin I think that often when you see these terrorist videos you think that they are all madmen, they’ll chop someone’s head off. It’s irrational, we cannot justify that in any way, philosophically or not. So I just tried to do something that is totally irrational and sick and crazy, but where there is a kind of rationality left. In Michel Wellbeck book they talk in Pascalian terms, they try to use some ideas of Pascal’s philosophy, like the metaphysical value, etc. Because we just assume that sick irrational people don’t think rationally, but nobody is just irrational and crazy. There is always some logic.
Dallas I think it’s an interesting point. I’m not a big fun of video work. I only made a few videos a few years ago by accident, but digital cameras now are so easy to use and everybody can afford them. When you have a lot of people running around thinking that they are video artists that actually have no training in any kind of thing, like scriptwriting or any kind of visual training, it gives a standardization of the medium. That’s my worry with youtube as well, that there is no personal style, everybody’s videos look the same because there are only so many tricks on Final Cut Pro that everybody can use. Where with painting or with sculpture you expect people to have a personal visual style.
General noise of disapproval
Jay I disagree with you Dallas, because there are so many things that you can do with Final Cut Pro. You could extract all your frames and paint them one by one …
Dallas I think you can, but not enough people do!
Hannah It’s because it is relatively new. It doesn’t have the kind of history and training behind it that one has with photography or with painting. So you get that homogenized initial …
Chris MA … There is room for everything. It’s like saying that a video camera is like a pencil it’s as easy to get hold of and anybody can pick one up and make a mark with it, but there are still people who can do nothing with a pencil and people who are very able with a pencil.
Robin Someone talked about democratization. I think there is more of a standardization – very similar process, no?
Hannah The possibility to get yourself out there into the network that has been made available by things like youtube and mobile technology, it is all so new that I think people are ready to talk about them, but I don’t think that they work on the level of quality. One hopes that the selection process in the gallery is based on something …
Chris MA You’ve got to look at a hell of a lot of it and you got to be selective. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Tessa I look at about 20 videos on youtube and I wasn’t interested in any of them. How do you refine your search? As a newcomer approaching it, it can switch you off.
Chris MA How would you choose what book to read? There must be millions of great novels out there.
Cinzia I would like to put a spanner in the works of this, because we are all talking about quality as if we knew what it was. We received about 500 submission for this show. We did 3 separate short-listing out of desperation. There were some works that were technically horrible, but were different and some that were very accomplished, but it was the usual video art stuff with the usual sense of humour and conceptual set of references and we didn’t choose it. So, what quality? And even in painting, what quality? Just to disrupt this idea of quality, Neil Cummings did a couple of projects with amateur video.
Neil It is a complicated story. These were not just amateur film makers just filming their family’s wedding. They were people who wanted to make cinema. They formed this film club and made extraordinary films. So they are not amateurs in the sense that they don’t know what they are doing. They are amateurs in the sense that they love what they are doing and they actually got themselves really well trained. So it’s the inverse of how we would like to think about amateur film making.
Cinzia In terms of the kind of projects that you have organized, like Enthusiasm and Enthusiasts and others, there is a different criteria for selection here, which is not quality or training or gallery acknowledgment.
Neil No, it’s true. As you just described we watched literally thousands of films and trying to evolve taxonomies that the film themselves suggested. We didn’t approach the films thinking about where is the documentary, where is the animation, where is the feature film. We tried to let the films speak and allowed the taxonomy to evolve within. In terms of quality, we tried not to use our taste – we tried not to choose the things that we like, but to let what fascinated the film makers come through. So there were things that I didn’t like, but that were extraordinary. Maybe it’s the same as curators – I don’t know if you exercised your taste or …
Tessa I think it was a bit of both. Some things were ones personal taste, but there were other things that one could appreciate, that were very good, but not necessarily your own taste. You also had to think about the audience and about the things that a lot people wouldn’t really engage with.
Cinzia But also, we are 3 very different people, coming from different practices and backgrounds and the idea of doing 3 short-lists and then letting them talk to each other was also partly to disrupt this unifying process. I don’t think we feel we have curated the show, we feel we have selected.
Robin But if you say there is this quality control that should happen within a gallery space …
Hannah It’s a natural selection.
Robin Yes, but there is hierarchy of gallery as we pointed out before. Just because a gallery has a certain name or reputation … What means quality there? Often if they want it to fit that space, and there is a tradition of this, it gets selected if it fits. Just in defense of the internet, because there is lack of context that is very freeing, I find. Yes, it’s good to have your work in a gallery and see what people say, but you just expect so much about what the gallery should do.
Hannah Yes but I think it is a framework. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. It depends. I personally don’t particularly like to see my work on the internet, because I have quite a specific way I would like it to be viewed. I wouldn’t like people downloading it, because it loose its context. My work is based on context and actually, this is a completely different context to where I have seen it or I have designed it to be seen. That’s not a problem …
Dallas I think it’s the same if someone says that their work could be shown as a projection or on a monitor. I think Robin’s work works very well on the internet. It seems the appropriate place for it, in the same way that another piece may seem more appropriate for a monitor or other pieces are more appropruate for projection. I don’t have anything against the internet. I think that when pieces are made for that then that’s the right place for them, but looking at a painting over the internet …
Robin Looking at a painting definitely.
Dallas But some films are not going to work over the internet either.
Hannah It’s the same with photography. As soon as the digital came into play there was this question of where the value of a photograph is. Suddenly we were no longer seeing photographs just printed in books. You can download them off the internet, therefore a one off picture now is just an image. It’s no longer about the material quality. So it’s interesting to look at video art being virtual and how it can be displayed anywhere, the same as a photograph, very similar to how my work for example has just come back from Germany where it was shown on a monitor next to the still photograph but it become something totally different. It became this little animated thing based around the apparatus as opposed to the way I’ve just seen it here as this kind of cinematic experience. When it’s smaller, you can see the quality of every single frame. It was completely different for this piece. I have just seen my work in 3 very different contexts and I think this is applicable to whatever the work is. There is no overriding framework.
Corrado I work digitally and I don’t like the way work looks on youtube. I do show stuff in galleries, what needs to be shown in the gallery. I wanted to ask Robin how do you semantically tag your work? As art or activism?
Robin I wanted to touch on this before – this piece for example I tagged as art. On youtube you have 4 or 5 basic categories. You have entertainment, documentation, art, etc. This is a good question, because it’s the first thing you have to decide. I have noticed tat people don’t really care about it. Some people would not even look at the tags and others don’t get that it’s art.
Corrado But there is an intentionality, though, that is key to the kind of work that you are presenting.
Hannah There is also the question of how one searches for it as a collector or for information. It’s a thing I find really difficult with things like e-bay, youtube or myspace.
Robin But that’s what I find freeing. If you go to a gallery space, it’s because you expect a certain kind of work, but over the internet, I don’t know how people come across my work, but there are a million ways. It could be totally by accident or whatever.
Tessa Do you get feedback on your work?
Robin Yes! It’s amazing. You get feedback that you never would get in a gallery. Obviously, it’s a totally different audience. That’s why I wouldn’t like to use old words. It’s fascinating to me because it’s outside of the art context. People were screaming at me ‘You idiot go away! This is evil propaganda!’ and they were really angry. Then I would reply to them and start something like a dialogue. I’m sure that these people who answer to me, they would never have set foot in an art environment.
Corrado … at the edge of art – it exists with art intentionality, however the market and distribution is not the usual kind of thing. It creates critique. A lot of it might be experienced as crap, but …
Sarah Baker Aside from image control, and viewing experience I think a major difference between showing work in a gallery and on the internet is that it reaches such a mass audience. It’s like the cinema, or television, and it’s not so much an edited audience. While with a gallery, I hate to say it, it’s actually a very elitist system. You have collectors who are willing to pay maybe a few thousand pounds for an edition of 3 video works, or you have on the other side a situation where any person can access the internet and be able to view your piece. This is a major difference.
Cinzia Which brings me to ask you a question: how have the relationships between producers and the market/education/critique changed, and have they? Corrado formulated this question in an e-mail to me. Does this connect with what Neil wanted to talk about?
Neil A bit. I was interested in what you were saying about the gallery. I don’t know how many people make a living out of selling moving image.
Cinzia Do you Sarah?
Sarah No, but I have sold video work. I should say – partly.
Neil It’s probably a tiny percentage. Selling things through a gallery, it’s using a nineteen century distribution model. It’s nonsense, it doesn’t work.
Cinzia It’s an integrated strategy.
Dallas I think that’s really changing. It used to be the case that you would distribute work through Video-in or Lux, which would have video collection libraries, etc. or the museum collection. And these would be the only places to purchase work. But now I’ve seen people who have in their houses Sam Taylor-Woods’ work in their living room playing 24/7. Then there is Loop Fair, which Sarah and I were in last year, which is only for moving image. And it is like a commercial gallery art fair.
Neil I’m sure we can think of examples, but as a model is nonsense. Once something is digitalized, it doesn’t make any sense to start to try to restrict the modes of distribution.
Dallas I guess it’s the same as …
Hannah Photography!
Dallas Yes, you edition them.
Hannah For some work you have to create it, otherwise it’s worth nothing.
Neil How do you create it?
Hannah You create an edition.
Neil Which is a nonsense. We have to rethink how we create value. You can’t do it by pretending there is only 3 of them.
Cinzia That’s very artificial, because then you just have to change the size slightly or some other detail and there is another edition.
Andrew I’m struck by this idea of art being elitist. I think that anybody can go into any gallery and anybody can pick up a video camera or a paintbrush and be an artist if one chooses to be one. When I go to private views I just see peole walking in and they are very much people like me and I don’t seem very elitist to me. I don’t see either art or the gallery system as being terribly elitist. I think it’s OK.
Hannah White middle class …
General yes
Robin The doors are open. I am here we are open. I come from an art background and I know that without the right education, knowledge etc, then those doors are so closed.
Cinzia But do you think that’s still true? Do we all think that’s still true?
Robin What about the people who live in this area and are out side …
Chris MA Well, they are not interested. It doesn’t speak to them. I think that there is something we haven’t touch on yet – Why do people make things that they want to show in galleries? One reason is because they want to be part of the critical base that fine art has. One thing about video that is always been an issue, and I think it still is an issue, is that nobody really writes about it. It’s alright if it’s about film history, and that includes the avant-garde, and there is a whole critical language to talk about film, and there is certainly plenty of critical language to talk about sculpture and painting and installation, but video art doesn’t really have its own critical language, so it borrows all the time. Quite often, I think, artists who want to show their videos in galleries do that because want to have their work engaged with that kind of critical debate, rather than TV or the democratized youtube scenario.
Viewer I’m certainly not part of the art community and I’m not an artist, I work with children. I just happen to be with an artist. My take on it is that there is an elitism, but it’s not necessarily about being middleclass, white or left or any of these things. It’s an intellectual elitism. I would never have come to this gallery or to anything like this if I wasn’t with somebody who introduced me to it. Most of my colleagues and the friends that I grew up with, unless they thought that like that, unless they felt a natural inclination … Because that’s not something you are taught. It’s something that you have.
Chris Do you go t the Tate?
Viewer Would I go to the Tate on my own? Probably not.
Dallas But art is not for everybody! Law is not for everybody. I don’t go to my lawyer and tell him what’s good law practice. He was trained as a lawyer and I trust him. Why is it that everybody should be allowed into art?
Sarah A collector who buys a video piece doesn’t want there to be thousands of other video pieces like it. Look at Matthew Barney – he only makes editions of 3 or 5.
Cinzia This ideas about critical discourse … I’m not sure it’s true anymore that there are no people writing about video critically. We make videos and we are interested in discussing it conceptually, intellectually, aesthetically.
ChrisMA But the language we are using to write about it derives from film theory or from critical theory developed out of painting and sculpture. Even though video and electronic moving image have been around for 4 or 5 decades, there is no language to discuss it that’s come to be developed through those practices.
Cinzia That doesn’t bother me too much. But as soon as we start talking about the larger structures – politics, systems of production, economics, markets – I personally feel uneasy. I just want to get on with my work. I don’t feel it’s elitist, I come from a working class background. Maybe it’s exclusive in the sense that there is almost an inbreeding – we are talking to each other mainly – maybe we are talking about things that people who are not artists are less interested in, but it interests me within myself and as I can see here with other artists as well, as soon as we start talking about larger systems there is a sense of unease. We just want to stay within our frame. That’s why I think that’s why I want to hear what Neil has t say, because I feel that it’s going to open this up. Neil, talk to us about distribution and archive and Screen tests then.
Neil I think it has a lot to do with training. We talked about people being educated to attend galleries and artists are educated to think of themselves as very into the way that makes you think ‘I need to get on with my work, I don’t want to worry about it. I want a gallery or a dealer, etc. to worry about the distribution of my work’. I think that’s doing ourselves a disservice. As artists, I think we should be much more thoughtful about our work makes contact with its audience. And so thinking about this 19th century models of art reproduction and distribution is no longer relevant to me.
Cinzia So what did you do that was different?
Neil I don’t think I did anything that was particularly different. I’m interested in the work of this artist called Christian Marklay (?) who has shown this video work called Quartet. He’s clipped tiny little sections from Hollywood films and he’s made this sound and mage work. He has just stolen those parts. He editioned this work in an edition of 3 for something like £750.000. So the questions about how do you make value in an environment where everything is infinitely reproducible are interesting. Obviously they are trying to increase its value by making it scarce. Whilst some of the things I’ve been interested in and many other people too, is open content licensing. The point is, instead of trying to restrict access, to try and facilitate continuous reproduction. So the fact that I might steal films from existing sources and reassembling it in different ways but then I let it go again to let other people do exactly the same to the film I made.
Jay And is that working for you? Are you making some money?
Neil Yes.
Sarah And where do you put your films so that people may steal them and re-use them?
Neil Well, on a DVD.
Sarah How do you distribute it? Where can I get it?
Neil This was during the British Art Show. You could get it from any of the locations of the BAS.
Sarah So you distributed for £10 or £15?
Neil No, that’s free. They were funded by the Arts Council, so public money paid for the production of the work, I built in a fee to produce he work, so it means that once the DVD is made I could give it away.
Dallas Lots of people I know who are photographers make a lot of money selling one stupid image of a pile of stones to a photo library. Maybe there’s a way in the future where there will be video library where you can …
Neil Not in the future, now. It’s up to us as artists to change the means out of which we work and not allow ourselves to fall into a ridiculous 19th century model.
Hannah I agree with what you are saying but there is still the question of quality, in terms of DVD. It’s a question that interests me as a photographer. With video work, as soon as it goes to DVD from the hard drive the quality of the DVD is very low by comparison. I’m wondering with this mass distribution how authentic the experience of the work can be. Maybe I am looking back and this is a 19th century model, but are we not loosing something?
Robert There are 2 sides to this – on one side you are obviously going to loose something, but give it a chance. This is a great thing. Experience is not to be directed. It’s the same about democratization. You can have a proper way to show it, which can give you an incredible experience, and you can call this the authentic experience. On the other hand, you can play with this now. You can take it in your own hands and expand upon the experience and call it interactivity.
Chris Steven There are other paradigms within art to do with quality and price, like the cost of the user unit, which can be quite small. Does anyone have a problem with buying a paperback copy of your Shakespeare or a CD of music? You can produce stuff of different quality level and it still costs £9.99. It seems to me that art is expensive because there is this 19th century bespoke one off thing. So if you make a painting and it has taken you 2 months to make it, you want to be paid for it, you want to make a living. Equally, if you can access another paradigm as if you were a novelist or a musician, and have something distributable at good quality, if you can do that, why not have more than one paradigm at production level within art?
Hannah It’s the same as having a one off painting and a print of that painting …
Chris S No. Not the same at all. A digital work is an original, which is just mass producible. If take a copy of a painting, it is no longer a painting.
Dallas Gilbert and George have made this work you can download for 24 hours and print and you have an original G&G. Because it was made as a digital piece. It’s not a copy.
Hannah I didn’t mean it has less quality. I meant like when I have my piece on the hard drive and then I transfer it to DVD – that’s like the original and a copy.
Robin Are you talking about image/pixel quality? That’s where I understand …like youtube. It’s been around for such a short time. The resolution is so low. But it’s like photography. I download all sorts of film from the internet at very high quality. And it’s technically more complicated, but it’s going to be easier next year. I think that’s a non-issue.
Cinzia Which interests me, because it seems to ma that a characteristic of the moving image is that we don’t have to choose among these frames of reference, we can move among them. [Seth Price story]
Chris MA I downloaded Un Chien Andalus for £4, a masterwork film, and I have a perfectly good copy. We shouldn’t be talking about the technical quality. We should be talking about the artistic value, whatever that is. That’s the issue.
Cinzia I argue with that, because there isn’t anybody now who can say what is or isn’t good enough.
Chris S Like who is and who isn’t in this show …
Cinzia That’s an interesting point. We had quite some battles with some artists’ work. There were pieces that some of us really wanted and other really didn’t. As a provocation, do you want to see something that didn’t make it? This is a very interesting piece, we just didn’t know how to relate it to the rest of the show. It’s a KA style personal documentary piece and we couldn’t see a way of sighting in relation to other work. It’s just an excuse to show work that wasn’t included in the show. [show of work]
What do you think of this work in relation to the show?
Andrew I want to go back to something that Chris said earlier about the vocabulary of judging video work. I think that when you look at the work, there is a specific critical vocabulary. One of my difficulties with that work would be the way those flowers were shot, and something about the self-consciousness about the nature of video media as it is used in that shot in the way it was hand held. It didn’t seem as if the grammar that was being used in the framing of those flowers didn’t match the grammar that was being talked about or implied or the economy that was being implied. I thought that there is a video language that one can use in talking about this.
Chris MA There is a video language and it being developed. There are many artists who are systematically trying to develop the language of video, but I think that a lot of people talking about it are drawing on critical film language to critique it. You would if you had to go into any depth. I reckon that there is a whole other aesthetic that we haven’t really come to terms with, which has come through TV and video, which is different in the way the camera is used, even what one would accept in terms of editing. For example, anything that works frame by frame seems to me to come from animation, from film, because video artists didn’t work frame by frame, not until video converged with the computer and we started editing as if we were editing film, even using models from film editing, like the timeline, which is not a video editing model at all. They are converging again and probably we have to look again at the language. There is lnguage from TV and video, which is quite different from film, but perhaps now it’s even more merged with film making ideas.
Dallas But is that not also because film makers are now taking the look of video to make their films ‘art house’ – hand held to make it raw.
Chris MA That point was made in connection with the Blair Witch Project etc, but it’s not authentic, it’s a gesture.
Dallas I agree with you. One of my dislikes about video is time. I think video artists are very selfish in terms of expecting someone to sit and watch something that you would never put up with watching on TV or in film.
Chris MA Well, what about Andy Warhol? He didn’t expect you to sit and watch. You came in, sat around with your friends chatting, like the model of video installation that has come into art. There are lots of different kinds of temporal experiences. But you are right, there is this idea of real time.
Dallas We are used to 5-7 seconds edits with TV and cinema ads. So I loose my patience. I want the 7 second edit because I’m used to that and that’s unfortunate.
Sarah It has to be taken into consideration so that you do feel comfortable interacting with the work as if it were sculpture, so that you can feel comfortable coming and just looking at it as if it was a painting and then walking out. I wouldn’t give a painting more than a few seconds thought.
Chris MA But you would come to it over and over again. People go to the National Gallery and there is one painting they always look at. They look at it for a few minutes and go away and 6 month later they’ll go back and look at it again. We rarely do that with moving image work, unless it’s Hitchcock or Tarkowski.
Dallas A comment a Canadian dealer made to me about a Canadian artist called ? Lynn, who works a lot with animation and has worked with NASA. He said, ‘ all her work looks the same’. It’s OK with painting, but with video we expect it be dramatically different every time. There is an unfairness there on how video is judge as well.
Chris MA Unless you are Bill Viola, of course! He uses the same shot over and over again.
Andrew Isn’t it the case that the first task of most video artists is to wrestle the attention of the viewer out of Hollywood and create some new sense of space?
Cinzia The context also dictates what kind of durational approach is acceptable or not. Obviously some artists deliberately disrupt that rhythm. We have doen it quite deliberately here. For example, there is a 30 second video in this projection and a 10 minute one there with almost the same look all along and there is quite a challenging mix of durations in the front room. You have to follow the order of play and durations quite carefully to know what is coming up. Then duration becomes a choice. It’s like having the possibility of using colour and choosing to use b/W. What disturbs me is that a lot of artists are very precious about their work. Dalls’ Moth piece was originally for projection, but we wanted to show it on a monitor. We asked other artists to provide a shorter version of their work. But someone said ‘I want 10 sec of black before and after my work because the image needs to breath and I have a problem with that. It wastes the time of the viewer. I have a durational piece … Andrew’s work, for example, is a long piece and needs to be long because you want to be obsessed by it. I wouldn’t want to loose that power. I want to ask you something about the script. Her is an interesting occurdness about the monologue and I thought it was improvised, but in your statement, you talk about you script. How did think about scripting it an dhow did you do it?
Andrew I wanted to play on the cusp of the audience liking this person or disliking this person, wondering if this person really exists. I wanted the audience to be constantly going back and forth in the same way as I thought this speaker was doing. I wanted the audience to be oscillating and ambivalent in what they thought about as well.
Cinzia In your statement you talk about psychoanalytic language, which is in the background of Dallas’ work as well, but For Dallas it’s not in the language, it is there at some other level.
Dallas Not many of my pieces have someone talking in them, because it carries so much weight and I cannot do it well. If I was going to do it, II would work with a scriptwriter. That would be my first approach, which is like going back into a film approach. I try to do it through visual means. To me video pieces are more like sculpture. I see them more like object in a way, which just happen to be moving. Maybe more like a kinetic sculpture. Quite often – I’m sure this is true for a lot of people – things happen by mistake. It’s about being able to know where these mistakes are going to happen or have happened. Quite often I go to shoot something and I think I’m shooting this, but actually, the work is over there. I guess one should be able to think ahead enough to put oneself in a situation in which these happy accidents can happen.
Cinzia That’s why I was trying to reflect on ideas of quality. If you keep too much control on quality, you loose that. My work grew in that way – I was obsessed with quality, then I realized that I couldn’t do it and I saw that there was something there. Robert, you wrote in your statement about recording modes of thinking. I thought that was interesting.
Robert Yes. That’s one assessment that can be made of video art, I don’t know if these 2 are the same species - video installation or the more cinematic direct viewing. You have to make a judgment between the 2 because when there is a certain intensity involved – directness – then for viewing purposes it has to be quick, under 5 minutes, maybe a few minutes, maybe a few seconds. Otherwise, if it’s going to be longer, durational, Warhol like, you can have this more passive experience of it. In my work in particular, I’m dealing with a proposition, because there is no scripting. All I’m doing is a kind of mechanical procedure. I want to see what happens when I move the camera, if the drawing works at a certain time of the day, etc. hat particular version, I did 10 of these at particular times of the day in few months and that’s the one that came out strongest.
Cinzia There is so much more we would like to discuss ….