REWIND + PLAY

An Anthology of Early British Video Art

The Past is a Different Medium

Sean Cubitt

The light shows of the 1960s had not quite faded.

Abstraction still held its charms. But in Mike
Leggett’s Heart Cycle, one of the earliest pieces
collected here, we can see something else beginning
to take shape. Pop science images punctuate the
abstraction, which eventually reveals itself to be
derived from the rolling spool of a projector. The
elaborate vision mix we had presumed turns out to
be in part at least an artifact of filming through
the apparatus: a self-reflexive gesture that would
recur across the art and the critical language of the
decade covered here. It was not, Leggett explains in
his REWIND interview, that the works themselves were
political in any but the most oblique sense, but that
the act of making them, the alliances, the scraped-
together funding, the vision of individual agents in
the art world and the ethos of community building
formed a kind of political movement underpinning
the making of a kind of work which never really
established itself in the UK. Uncollected by either
the national art collections or the national film and
television archive, marginal to the concerns of the
art market and the art establishment, video art was,
for this brief period, the only real avant-garde ever
generated in Britain. It is that status that made it
a political moment: a moment when an aesthetic turned
into a mode of action.

Watching the BBC’s drama Life on Mars (January 2006


and April 2007) is – as it is intended to be – a
window onto a world that is almost as remote from
today’s 24/7 connectivity as the pre-war era of tugged
forelocks and Jarrow Marches. At the same time, it was
a period of intense political commitment and turmoil
nationally and internationally. Old myths of empire
collapsed in Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of
independence. The anti-nuclear movement was revived,
while the Anti-Nazi League politicised a generation
and made Trotskyism a vigorous strand of youth
culture. Thatcherite depoliticisation led by the new
hedonism of the Blitz Kids was as yet a faint smudge
on the horizon. European structuralism and North
American cybernetics formed the intellectual vanguards
for the video artists of the day, as they struggled to
escape the stranglehold of Clement Greenberg’s medium-
specific aesthetics, and to find new ways to address
the old question, how to make contemporary art matter
to social and political life.

The 1970s began with Ian Paisley’s election in North

Armagh and ended in the Winter of Discontent, spanning
the era between the break-up of the Beatles and the
dissolution of punk, between Smithson’s completed
Spiral Jetty and Jenny Holzer’s Truisms. The 1980s were
Thatcher’s decade, a decade of intense political
antagonisms, of war on ‘The Enemy Within’, the
Miners’ strike, the abolition of the Greater London
Council, and the re-orientation of the UK economy
towards the finance sector. In retrospect, the suicide
of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in 1980 seems an apt
introduction to the sense of foreboding that came
over the country’s youth as unemployment soared and
political antagonism erupted in the urban uprisings
of 1981 in Brixton, Toxteth, Dalston and elsewhere.


In 1980 Tony Cragg was working on Britain Seen from the
North: the decade concluded with the Magiciens de la
Terre show at the Beaubourg. In between, there was
a slow, painful opening of the art establishment to
both global perspectives and the art emerging from
the diasporas now becoming familiar elements of the
rich multicultural experience of daily life in urban
Britain. Revolutionary aspirations in the immediate
aftermath of 1968 turned to postmodern ironising,
while in an equal and opposite movement, feminism,
identity politics and environmentalism became mass
political movements with deep effects on the social
and intellectual life of the period.

1979 saw the first Walkman personal stereos. MS-DOS

only became available in 1981; the first cellnet mobile
services in the UK were licensed in 1981 (services
opened for business in January 1985). Between 1972 and
1982, the decade spanned by this compilation, the UK
scarcely moved from a three-channel terrestrial TV
regime. Channel Four was in preparation through the
first years of the 1980s, but the opening broadcast
would not come till November 1982. Cable TV was the
subject of public hearings in the same year, but the
first services would only come online in 1985, while
satellite broadcasting would have to wait four more
years after that. An era without mass access to
internet, when network media were the province of
command-line interfaces and specialist knowledge (the
first e-mail protocol was released in 1971, the year of
the first designs for file transfer protocol [RFC 114]),
it was nonetheless a decade of rapid development in
video technologies, from the 1968 Portapak to Umatic
in 1971 and VHS in 1976 (the Sony Camcorder would
not be available till 1983). Increasingly precise


transport mechanisms made edit controllers effective
for the first time in the late 1960s, along with burnt-
in timecode, allowing almost frame-precise editing.
Two and three machine editing became available at
London Video Arts, and along the street the music
video houses were making kit available to the upcoming
generation. All the same, with the exception of
homegrown devices like Peter Donebauer’s Videokalos
analog video synthesizer, the camera remained a key
tool in the video art process, even as digital kit
was becoming available through centres like John
Landsown’s at Middlesex Polytechnic. These were the
days of assembly edits, the ‘linear’ still referred
to in the term ‘Non Linear Video Editing’ proudly
worn by software packages like Final Cut, Premier and
Avid. The decision to change an edit early in a tape
meant laying every subsequent edit again. It required
either a deep sensitivity to the rhythms and themes
of the piece from the get-go, or as in many of these
pieces, a reliance on far longer takes than were being
used in the cinema and television of the time. And
unlike contemporary digital editing, every edit caused
generation loss, a downgrading of the image which
became the central theme of a number of David Hall’s
works.

It was also, of course, the era of the change

from monochrome to colour, the most radical shift
in broadcast media since the introduction of
television. Though the first regular service on David
Attenborough’s BBC 2 began in 1967, access to colour
equipment remained sparse in the 1970s. Cameras were
expensive, and were tube-based, which meant that
inadvertently pointing them at the sun could destroy
the most expensive element and wreck a production.


Projection, videowalls and large screens were still
in development and rarely used until the mid 1980s.
Monitors were the medium of display, rarely much
bigger than a large domestic TV, giving screenings a
kind of domestic huddle that fostered the community
spirit of screenings in the AIR Gallery basement or
at Bracknell video festivals. The discrete nature of
monitors, and the possibility of running two or three
in parallel, became a major if expensive tool in
producing more complex performance pieces like Kevin
Atherton’s and David Critchley’s.

The qualities of monochrome are lost to us now. From

the Trinitron grid, which brings greater apparent
resolution by interpolating straight black lines across
the screen, to the pixel array of LCD and LED screens,
geometry has superseded the softer mix of fluorescents
in the old television screen. The gradations of grays
were integral elements to the video art of the period,
especially given the difficulty of achieving rich
blacks on the grey ground of blank screens, even in
the deepest light traps. In works like Hooykaas and
Stansfeld’s Split Seconds these grays become a palette
in their own right, like the old grisailles of the late
renaissance, but also a range of textures. The video
image of the period is extraordinarily tactile, so
unlike the glossy surfaces of digital 3D, and indeed
of high-resolution screens and projections. Not so
much making a virtue of necessity, but working with
the capacities of the available tools to produce work
of sensuous virtuosity, Hooykaas and Stansfeld, like
Hall, use the limitations of sound recording too, to
estrange but also to render tangible the processing
of the image, and more so, its reception. If reflexive
mediation on the gap between image and reality was de


rigeur, it led to other discoveries and other virtues,
made from the loss of generations, and the relatively
dim luminance of the available screens to make a range
of textures, from velvet to grit, that passes across
all the monochromes in this collection.

But likewise the introduction of colour, from

Donebauer’s early experiments at the Royal College
of Art and later collaboration with Brian Hoey and
Wendy Brown, to the variously subtle and lavish
use of colour in early eighties works, brought with
it a certain sense of wonder, and a readiness to
experiment. Though the range of hues available to
the television (as later the computer) is less than a
third of the range visible to the human eye, there are
moments when the lustre of pure colour leaps from the
screen, as in Judith Goddard’s blues in Time Spent, the
sumptuous greens revealed in zooms across the room
where the fractured narrative plays out. These video
colours are equally important in more chiaroscuro
tapes. Like Goddard’s dark poppy against a field of
black, John Adams’ Stories plays itself out in a zone
of darkness in which the face and the few props
acquire the colour not of nature or domesticity but
of the monitor itself. But perhaps of all the works
here it is Steve Hawley’s Extent of Three Bells that
most depends on the limitations of the equipment.
The comet tails which were the bane of television
technicians, tracks left by sharp changes in light
levels within the frame, become the matter of the
tape, which puns first on the algebraic formulation of
bell-ringing with an early calculator, and then with
the visual equivalent, candles waved in arcs through a
darkened room, tracing their paths not as afterimages
in an eye, but on the tube itself, and in the process


lightening the space with the kind of dramatic account
of candlelight familiar from great master paintings.

The desire to be art was one of the great motivators

of the period’s video practice. Tamara Krikorian’s
Vanitas is a solid example, establishing the still
life vanitas genre in her careful mise-en-scene, and
even explaining it through the voiceover from the TV
that appears in the depth of the mirrored image. Of
course, in this mise-en-abyme, this nest of nested
images, the symbol which above all evokes the fleeting
pleasures of life is the television itself, and by
inference the videotape that frames and gives it
meaning. The political allegory here is closer to the
surface than in almost any of the other tapes, even
though gender politics especially creeps through a
number of the performance pieces, and a satirical
relation to broadcasting remains an important element.
Krikorian actually cites political reporting in the
tape, with the inference that this is mere froth on
the daydream, while at the same time framing the
artist herself as an element within the still life
whose own ephemerality is also included in the general
passing.

It was the form of television, its domesticity, its

familiarity, which most of all framed and formed the
politics of the video art scene up to the mid 1980s.
While many pieces adopted a critical and even negative
attitude, others followed Donebauer into collaboration
with TV, which was, it must be recalled, itself still
a hotbed of radical drama before the Thatcherite
cull of political entertainment. David Hall’s ten
TV Interruptions of 1971, (seven of which were later
released in recorded form as 7 TV Pieces) broadcast


unannounced on Scottish Television, could hardly
harbinger a utopian dawn of artists’ television, but
it did present in vibrant form the insight that the
goggle box didn’t have to be like this, that it could
have been and could yet be something quite radically
other.

The television was even more a unifying and familiar

beast then than it is now, when the multi-channel
universe scrambles familiarity and commonality, the
shared familiarity that was the unavoidable outcome of
the paucity of channels. This was too a period prior
to time-shifted recording, so that the TV schedule
was also a shared and common architecture of the day,
and the year. To move towards this most common of
commonsense vehicles, to interrupt but also and more
importantly to stretch and redefine, was an integral
political aesthetic. Its reverberations have yet to
fade away.

Sean Cubitt

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Stories In the Home Time Spent
John Adams Ian Breakwell Judith Goddard

Eyebath David Critchley TV Interruptions

Peter Anderson Pieces I Never Did David Hall

In Two Minds Circling State of Division

Kevin Atherton Peter Donebauer Mick Hartney

Lenny’s Documentary Kensington Gore The Extent of Three Bells

Ian Bourn Catherine Elwes Steve Hawley
Flow The Heart Cycle 2nd and 3rd Identity
Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown Mike Leggett Marcelline Mori

Split Seconds Mirror Monitor

Madelon Hooykaas/ Stephen Littman Stephen Partridge
Elsa Stansfield

Clapping Songs Go thru the Motions Video Sketches

Tina Keane Stuart Marshall Clive Richardson

Vanitas Continuum Drift Guitars

Tamara Krikorian Chris Meigh Andrews/ Tony Sinden
Gabrielle Bown
Works

Stories (1982, 13 minutes)

John Adams

‘Stories was the first work I produced after graduating from

the Fine Art course at Newcastle Polytechnic. It was also
the first stand-alone tape I had ever made. Until then I had
used video as an element in performances and installations
that I had made as a student. The equipment we used then
was very primitive, mostly black and white reel-to-reel kit.
It was drummed into the students not to point the cameras
at light sources because this could cause a permanent
‘burn mark’ on the pickup tube. But then suddenly I had the
opportunity to make a programme at Aidanvision studios in
Carlisle where they had proper broadcast cameras on movable
pedestals. Furthermore, these were colour cameras that could
be pointed at lights! Although I was never interested in
making formalist work, I was happy to take advantage of the
advanced technologies available there and incorporate them
into Stories. So a naked light bulb was in shot and the camera
moved. Because is could. My interest was always in producing
narratives which I hoped would say something about the world.
However, I couldn’t make conventional dramas at the time,
partly because of financial constraints but mostly in truth,
because I knew absolutely nothing about directing or editing
films. Stories is essentially about a character sitting alone
in a room, reflecting on the past - and by implication, the
future. Some of the things this person had done were pretty
bad and I played the character, so there was some ambiguity
there. It’s not up to me to interpret Stories but many people
did ask me in a concerned kind of way, if these tales were
true. I probably said that they were but that the character
was fiction. Anyway, don’t bother calling because I never
answer the phone.’ JA

John Adams
Born 1953, Leeds, UK. Lives and works in Newcastle.
After graduating at Newcastle Polytechnic, appointed as an
associate lecturer there in Fine Art and Media Production.
Founder member of the Basement Group and a trustee of Locus
Plus. Worked also as a visiting lecturer, freelance writer,
director, editor and video artist until establishing Indigo
Multimedia in 1995. Works include, Kick In the Eye, Stories,
Sensible Shoes, Bob & Jill Pt2, Intellectual Properties, We Are The
Country, This Is the Man, It Seems Strange But It’s Almost Dinner
Time, Margaret, Jamaica Plain, Goldfish Memoirs.

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On art: ‘It was great being a video artist. The job was
exciting and I got to travel and meet people. But I had
to give it up because the pay was so bad. These days I
make commercial productions instead. Sometimes it’s not so
interesting but the money is okay.’

Eyebath (1977, 8 minutes)

Peter Anderson

‘Eyebath evolved from an intensive phase in my experimentation

with Sony’s black-and-white 1/2 inch high-density reel to
reel video format, newly available to the Fine Art students
at Lanchester College of Art and Design in Coventry, where
I was a student. Faced with extraordinary limitations at the
time for post-production, elements which are second nature
to us now with complex editing and digital image manipulation
on hand through our laptops, I set to with a pioneering
spirit to conjure up a single screen piece. Essentially this
was shot in real-time across three different time layers
or recordings, which were condensed through the process
into one resultant image. A certain amount of pre-planning
conceptually was necessary in my studio, which resembled an
eccentric scientist’s laboratory- the eye being the focus
of my research! How far could I go in manipulating the eye
through the medium of water and reflections, leaving certain
things to chance, to achieve an abstract and unrecognizable
image state, before returning to normality. The first stage
of the process, with camera on tripod and ‘Portapack’ VTR
alongside, was the straightforward recording of an eye
occasionally blinking. The second stage involved the playback
on an identical machine of this recorded image on a monitor
screen reflected in a large mirror underwater in a tank. The
resultant image was picked up (upside down) by the camera
on the tripod. This second generation image was replayed,
via the same means and reflections, for the camera to record
the third generation and final image. No editing and no added
sound were considered necessary. The visual narrative was
punctuated by a recurring drop of water falling into the
pupil of the eye. This rhythm lasts throughout the eight
minutes. The reflected forms of the eye were intermittently
disturbed, the water suspending them in the viewing monitor
frame, as it were. This manipulation became more frantic,
veering towards the abstract, before returning to an ultimate
calm.’ PA

Peter Anderson
Born 1955, Kenya, studied at Lanchester College of Art and
15
Design and the Slade School of Art. He has taught on many art
and design degree courses in the UK, for five years at the
Slade School of Art and for 20 years as a visiting lecturer
on the MA Film and TV design course at Kingston University,
where he is a research fellow. He has led several dance
for the camera workshops introducing dance and movement
on screen to professional choreographers, film-makers and
composers in the UK and Europe.
Anderson is also director in television, a film-maker and a
video artist working in the theatre and with dance. Movement
and dance on screen have been central to his work for over
20 years, highlighted in the acclaimed short film boy (1995),
followed by greenman (1998) and Infanta (2000), all created
over a five-year period with choreographer Rosemary Lee
for broadcast on BBC2. Other major collaborations of note
were with Cathy Marston, associate choreographer at the
Royal Opera House in 2005. They worked together on a dance
adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts, with film projections, which was
premiered in September 2005 at the Linbury Theatre, Royal
Opera House, London, before the piece toured worldwide.
Another was the film Soil Dances, a year-long collaboration with
Michael Platt, choreographer and theatre director in Suffolk.
In 2006 they worked with six groups of youngsters from mid-
Suffolk on this site specific-location based film project
supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. In May 2007, Peter
worked on a major project with the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra to create projections and an installation to
accompany a concert performance of Bartok’s The Wooden Prince
at the Lighthouse in Poole.

In Two Minds (2 screen version composite version)

(1978, 25 minutes)
Kevin Atherton

‘In Two Minds began as a video performance in 1977. The format

for the performance was that I would arrive at the venue a
few hours in advance of the performance and make a video
recording of myself asking questions whilst sitting where
the audience would sit for the performance. On beginning
the live performance I would face the audience and ask: ‘Are
there any questions?’ Upon asking this question, the video
recording of myself would begin playing on a video monitor
situated amongst the audience. What ensued was a half hour
conversation between my recorded self and my live self.
In 1978, Stuart Brisley selected me, along with four other
artists, for an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
Although I wanted to continue doing the work that I was
16
currently doing, the opportunity of showing work in a gallery
for a month was a different challenge to doing a one-off
performance. The solution was to record the answers as well
as the questions on video. In this way In Two Minds became a
video installation.
This time I made a recording of asking questions whilst
sitting on a table at one end of the gallery and then
recorded my responses whilst sitting on another table, at the
other end. Seating was placed on either side of the gallery
in order that the audience could watch the two monitors in
dialogue with one another - Wimbledon Style.
At the time I wrote in the exhibition leaflet: ‘I want my work
to begin by asking questions, not just about itself, but also
about the time and space that it finds itself in’.
More recently as a person in his fifties I have begun to
perform again with the original Serpentine question tape.
Across the thirty-year gap that now exists, between the live
and the record, the work is still asking questions about the
time and space that it finds itself in.’ KA

Kevin Atherton
Kevin Atherton was born in the Isle of Man in 1950 and
attended The Isle of Man College of Art and the Fine Art
Department at Leeds Polytechnic. Graduating from Leeds
Polytechnic in 1972 his early work was in the area of
performance and film. In the 1970s he began using video as a
counterpoint in performance and performed extensively through
out Europe including at De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam, The
Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London, and the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. In 1979
he was included in the British Council survey exhibition Un
Certain Art Anglais at the Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris.
In the early nineteen eighties Atherton was one of the first
artists in Britain to move out of the gallery and into public
space, producing a number of pioneering site-specific public
sculptures including A Body of Work at Langdon Park School
in Poplar, East London. Other commissions from this time,
described by Dianna Petherbridge as ‘time based sculpture’
included Platforms Piece at Brixton Railway Station which
consists of three commuters, frozen as life size bronzes,
waiting for a train, and Cathedral, a fifteen foot by ten foot
stained glass window, permanently suspended between an avenue
of trees in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.
Sculpture work has continued in the public realm including a
series of pieces that integrate large scale mirror polished
stainless steel spheres, these include: A Different Ball Game,
in West Malling in Kent, A Private View in Cardiff Bay, and
17
more recently, A Reflective Approach in Leeds. Whilst working as
Head of Fine Art Media at Chelsea College of Art, Atherton
as Research Team Leader on the Virtual Reality as a Fine Art
Media Research Project, developed Gallery Guide, a virtual reality
performance, which he has performed at a number of galleries
and museums internationally including The Museum of Modern
Art Stockholm, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and
the Tate Gallery, London.
Atherton lives in Ireland, having moved there in 1999, to
be the first Head of Fine Art Media at the National College
of Art and Design in Dublin. In 2001 he held a mid-career
retrospective of his media based work at Arthouse in Dublin
and the Manx Museum in the Isle of Man. He is currently the
NCAD Research Fellow at the Graduate School for Creative Arts
and Media in Dublin.

Lenny’s Documentary (1978, 45 minutes)

Ian Bourn

Lenny’s Documentary takes the form of a monologue. It involves

one character who thinks aloud the script for a planned
or imagined documentary about his life and environment.
Lenny is obsessed by a bleak vision of his past and present
circumstances. We are given fragments of what seems an
eternal evening of dark introspection. A glimmer of hope
remains in the tape’s one visual metaphor, Leytonstone High
Road, which acts as a release from the dark interior and a
possible way out for Lenny.

Ian Bourn
Born in London 1953, lives and works in London. Studied
at Ealing School of Art, 1972-75 and Royal College of Art,
London, 1976-79. Screenings include Bracknell Video Festival;
Hayward Gallery, London; The Kitchen, New York; Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam; National Film Theatre, London; Image
Forum, Tokyo. Video Fellowship (awarded by Arts Council of
Great Britain and Sheffield City Polytechnic), 1982-83. Co-
instigator with Chris White of Housewatch a group of mixed-
media artists who collaborate, individually or collectively, to
produce environmental site-specific performance events.
‘Ian Bourn has been making videos since the late 70s, at a
time when most video artists were experimenting with black
and white low-band U-matic, and relatively few homes had
video recorders.
However it was the medium’s means of playback - on domestic-
TV-like monitors which attracted Bourn, who saw the potential
for using the familiarity of television’s modes of address
18
to develop his own highly personal and idiosyncratic style.
Taking his cue less from contemporary artists’ film and more
from televisual conventions, with a particular antipathy for
TV’s portrayal of the ‘cheeky Cockney chappie’, he set out to
develop his own pantheon of imaginary tragi-comic characters,
pitched somewhere between Tony Hancock and Harold Pinter.
Bourn has described his single-screen video work as ‘a kind
of portraiture that examines role-play and the viewer’s
relationship with people portrayed on film.’ As well as
being a consummate writer, Bourn is also an actor, often
appearing in his own and other’s work. The blurring of fiction
and autobiography is what gives the work its edge. This is
paralleled in his work for Housewatch, a mixed-media group
co-founded by Bourn in 1985, in which the facades of real
houses are used, their illuminated windows presenting the
passer-by with an illusory, fictional interior.’
Felicity Sparrow, Luxonline, 2005

In the Home (1980, 10 minutes)

Ian Breakwell

The traumas of a wedding night.

In the Home is a domestic melodrama of absurd intensity
in which newlyweds in their ideal home undergo a severe
emotional trauma on their wedding night. Colour videotape
produced at Aidanvision Studios in Carlisle along with The
News. The artist explores the conventions of television studio
production by focusing on two aspects of the medium: the
television play and the television news.

Ian Breakwell
Born in Derby in 1943 and died in London in 2005. Studied at
Derby College of Art and the West of England College, Bristol.
From his early performances in the 1960s Breakwell worked
in a diverse range of media, from painting to film, video,
performance and installation. He has exhibited widely and
his paintings are in public and private collections including
Tate Gallery, Contemporary Art Society, Victoria and Albert
Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Art Gallery of New
South Wales, Australia. Screenings include: World Wide Video
Festival, The Hague; Videonale, Bonn; National Video Festival,
Los Angeles.
He produced films for television broadcast and is well known
for his writing, which includes: Ian Breakwell’s Diary 1964-85
(Pluto Press, 1986); collected illustrated fiction The Artist’s
Dream (Serpent’s Tail, 1988) and Free Range published by
Victoria and Albert Museum 1993.
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Fellowship at King’s College and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
1980-81; John Brinkley Fellowship at the Norwich School of Art
1982-83; Artist in Residence, Tyne Tees Television 1985; Artist
in Residence, Durham Cathedral, 1994-95.

David Critchley
Pieces I Never Did (3 screen composite version)
(1979, 31 minutes)

‘Pieces I Never Did was made as my attempt at a

‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, drawing on all the elements of differing
forms that I could muster. This was not simply a summation
or record of all I had done before but rather a working
together of disparate elements into a coherent complex
whole. My intention was to push the boundaries of video art
at that time: to push my own physical, intellectual and moral
boundaries, and to negate the whole endeavour by sowing the
seeds of the work’s own destruction from the outset. The
resulting three channel, eighteen part, 31 minute piece both
celebrated and denigrated my own history, my peer group and
my alma mater.
In 1984, along with all of my other films, photographs,
recordings and works on paper, I did actually destroy all the
master material, edits and copies in my possession – left in
a black bin liner in Tisbury Court, Soho.
Copies of the single screen version, (made for practicality
after the three channel version), survived in the collections
of several colleges and galleries. It was from these that
I have been enabled by the REWIND project to make a complex
reverse-edit procedure with Adam Lockhart and create what is
essentially a restoration of the three-channel piece. This
in turn has been composited into a single channel version on
this DVD. So, there are now the single, three in one three
separate channel versions.’ DC

David Critchley
David Critchley, born in 1953, studied art in Newcastle
upon Tyne and at the Royal College of Art, London. Having
exhibited at the Serpentine gallery The Video Show in 1975,
he became one of the organisers of the influential series of
installations and media performances at 2B Butler’s Wharf
in the late 1970s. Critchley was a central figure in the
organisation of London Video Arts from its inception in 1976,
and as its manager between 1981-86. He taught video art at
the Slade and Chelsea and was a visiting lecturer at many
UK art colleges in the late 1970s and early 80s. His video
artworks have been screened in the UK, Europe, North America
20
and worldwide, and are currently in distribution with LUX.
Trialogue was screened as part of A Century of Artists’ Film in
Britain at Tate Britain.
After LVA he formed and ran the video production company
Greenstreet Ltd until 1991. Followed by a period of distance
from the production of public art work, Critchley began
to collaborate with Dr Liz Lee and Susie Freeman from 1999
onwards, creating multi-media installations with a Science-Art
theme centered around a variety of common medical conditions.
Many artworks, exhibitions, publications and web sites
followed, culminating in the permanent exhibit since 2003 of
Cradle to Grave in the Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British
Museum.

Circling (1975, 12 minutes)

Peter Donebauer
Music composed/performed by Simon Desorgher

The imagery and sound were performed and recorded by

Donebauer and Desorgher ‘playing’ together in real time
with both participants having visual and aural feedback of
each other’s transforming contributions as they affected
the piece in real time and thus in turn their own continuing
contributions. The tape represents an early example of the
visual techniques Donebauer developed through access to the
old ATV colour studio donated to the Royal College of Art in
London in 1973. These techniques involved manipulating the
studio in ways for which it was never designed, enabling the
development of a form of ‘Electronic Painting’ equivalent to
the ‘Electronic Music’ that was being first developed around
that time. The two went on to work together for several
years with Desorgher providing and co-ordinating the sound
elements through a mixture of traditional musical instruments
and electronics. The key visual motif of a slowly spinning
form is used as a visual metaphor for cyclical processes
in nature in general. Whilst there is no direct attempt to
visualise specifically astronomical events, Circling triggers
cosmic associations in most people. It can equally suggest
connections to an individual’s personal inner space rather
than a collectively perceived outer one.
In parallel with the visuals, the soundtrack utilises
repeating elements that circle back on themselves, and was
performed as a live mix of eight pre-recorded loops of
different lengths running randomly alongside one another.

Peter Donebauer
Born 1947, studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He
21
was a pioneering artist in the UK in the 1970s and early ‘80s
working with video in newly-available colour and collaborating
with musicians, pursuing improvisational, non-representational
and spiritual aspects of media art. Supported by the
Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Film Institute,
Gulbenkian and Thorn-EMI, he was the first UK artist to be
commissioned by the BBC for national broadcast. Donebauer
built an image-processing synthesizer, the ‘Videokalos
Image Processor’, to extend his work beyond TV studios and
performed at venues including the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
and ICA, London. Works from that period have continued to be
shown nationally and internationally. Donebauer went on to
found one of the UK’s most respected independent production
companies, Diverse Production, and has recently returned to a
full-time role as an artist, including a recent retrospective
performance at Tate Britain.

Kensington Gore (1981, 15 minutes)

Catherine Elwes

‘This early tape is based on my experiences as a make-up

artist at the BBC in the 1970s. I wasn’t much good at the
glamour make-ups, but I made blood and gore my speciality. In
Kensington Gore, I drew on my old make-up skills and created a
slit throat out of mortician’s wax dripping ‘Kensington Gore’
into the gash to complete the effect. ‘Kensington Gore’ is
the name for theatrical blood and it is also the address of
the Royal College of Art where I was a student at the time.
The idea of the work was to deconstruct the illusion of a
wounded body, one of the images with which television induces
fear or excitement in the audience, then as now. Although it
was quite clear that the wound in the tape was fabricated,
people winced when the knife cut through the wax and women
dragged their children out as the ‘blood’ was applied. I was
astonished to witness how a moving image with synchronised
sound could so easily lead viewers to suspend disbelief even
when the illusion was being simultaneously revealed as a trick
of paint and wax.
I inter-cut the throat-slitting sequence with a story of
an event that took place when I was filming on location in
Scotland. The film included a scene involving a group of
British redcoats who were ambushed by Highlanders and I
had to create numerous sword and knife wounds including
slit throats. I became so absorbed in this mythical carnage
that when a member of the crew was kicked in the head by a
nervous horse, I was quite unable to switch back to reality
and instead carefully observed the spurting of blood and
22
worked out where it should flow from the angle of impact
etc. I only registered the event as real when the director
fainted.
In Kensington Gore this event was related in various theatrical
forms ranging from the slapstick of mime to the authority of
the text read with my inherited BBC accent. This Brechtian
approach reduced the story to the form of its telling and
although it was based on real events, it did not pretend to
posit an irrefutable truth. In the same way that reality and
fiction are often interchangeable, the truth of an event has
as many versions as there were witnesses.’ CE

Catherine Elwes
Born 1952, St Maixent, France, studied at Slade School of
Art and Royal College of Art. Lives and works in Oxford and
London.
Catherine Elwes is a video artist, writer and curator who
was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s.
She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About
Time at the ICA in 1980. Throughout the 1980s her work and
writings continued to explore time–based media in general and
feminist themes in particular centring on the belief that the
‘Personal is Political’. Recent work in video has investigated
masculinity as it solidifies and dissolves within the military
especially in the image of the war hero. She is currently
working on a series of landscape works. Her videos have
been shown widely both here and abroad and her tapes are
in a number of collections including the National Gallery of
Ottowa, Arnolfini Gallery, Liverpool and Arts Council England.
Her work has been broadcast on Channel 4 television as well
as on Spanish, Canadian and French networks.
Elwes is the author of Video Loupe, (K.T. Press, 2000) and Video
Art, a guided tour (I.B.Tauris, 2005). She is currently writing
Landscape and the Moving Image for Wallflower Press. From 1998-
2006 she was the director of the UK/Canadian Film & Video
Exchange and is currently co-curator of Figuring Landscapes,
an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape.
Elwes is Professor of Moving Image Art at Camberwell College
of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Time Spent (1981, 12 minutes)

Judith Goddard

‘Time Spent was the first work I made using video. I was doing
an MA at the Royal College of Art, and the tape was in
part prompted by a question from Peter Kardia - Head of my
Department. He asked me what I did with my time? I spent the
23
next week recording with a video camera - and the work Time
Spent was my reply.
I realised, that the time I could not account for, was
perhaps as important to me, as the time that could be
measured by events or the activity of making. In that in-
between time, I was looking, thinking and daydreaming. It was
a space that allowed thoughts and images to come together
and fall apart, an unstructured place of possibility. To
acknowledge this space and avoid the danger of ‘death by
daydreaming’ I had to find a form for it. In Time Spent, I
wanted to translate the gazing into looking, to focus the
amorphous state using the camera and its lens, and by editing
to construct an order of images, which would unfold over the
12 minutes in a non-narrative structure.
The work opens with a white screen; we hear the off-screen
sound of sparrows chirping, a hammer banging repetitively
and children playing in the distance. Cut to the first silent
image, which is photographed from a screen and reinserted in
the narrative. It shows a man, head in hands with downcast
eyes, the making of this image is revealed by the scan
lines, which slice diagonally across his face. The duration
of the still, while allowing for concentrated viewing, was
an issue of the day, a deliberate contrast with the medium
of television. Throughout the tape the differences between
the still and the moving image are highlighted by the use of
photography and video. The stills are all silent while the
moving image has a multi-layered soundtrack. The first moving
image is a focus-pull of an extreme close-up of a blurry
horizon. The camera then focuses and zooms out. We see a
green and white checked tabletop and a vase of tulips - a
domestic interior. A vague conversation is heard though we
never see the participants, and in the background Beethoven’s
7th Symphony plays. The work continues in this domestic
interior, its occupants more absent then present, a pattern
of stillness and movement, of distorted reflections, diagetic
sound and space with colour filled detail are patched together
like a quilt.’

Judith Goddard
Born 1956, Shropshire, lives and works in London. She has
an MA from the Royal College of Art, and has taught at the
Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and Slade School of Art, London.
Goddard began using video in 1982, her single screen and
large-scale installations have been shown widely both here
and abroad. Early on Goddard developed a rich visual style
influenced by film, collage and painting, an example being the
video triptych The Garden of Earthly Delight (1991) that offers a
24
fragmented, dystopian view of life in the 1990s in the spirit
of Hieronymus Bosch.
Goddard’s exhibitions include Tate Britain and Liverpool;
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; the Bluecoat and John Hansard
Gallerie’s; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, as well as installations
in Portugal, Canada, Estonia and India; her single channel
work has been screened worldwide.

TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) (1971, 23 minutes)

David Hall

Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were

broadcast by Scottish Television, unannounced and uncredited,
in August/September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as TV
Interruptions (7 TV Pieces).
‘TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) were my first works for TV,
and are a selection from the original ten. Conceived and
made specifically for broadcast, they were transmitted by
Scottish TV during the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. The idea
of inserting them as interruptions to regular programmes
was crucial and a major influence on their content. That they
appeared unannounced, with no titles (two or three times a
day for ten days), was essential.. These transmissions were a
surprise, a mystery. No explanations, no excuses. Reactions
were various. I viewed one piece in an old gents’ club. The
TV was permanently on but the occupants were oblivious to it,
reading newspapers or dozing. When the TV began to fill with
water newspapers dropped, the dozing stopped. When the piece
finished normal activity was resumed. When announcing to shop
assistants and engineers in a local TV shop that another was
about to appear they welcomed me in. When it finished I was
obliged to leave quickly by the back door. I took these as
positive reactions...’ DH (1990)
‘These have come to be regarded as the first example of
British artists’ television and as an equally formative moment
in British video art’. Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on
British Video Art.
‘David Hall’s work set the stage for an era in which artists
took up the camera to challenge television’s established
formulations and its power as a medium of social control...
[his] interventions almost established a genre, with
subsequent works by [for example] Stan Douglas, Bill Viola and
Chris Burden following the form of unannounced disturbances…’
Eye Magazine, Issue 60, 2006.
Hall’s transmissions formed part of the Scottish Arts
Council’s Locations Edinburgh event, the first exhibition in
Britain to be staged outside the confines of a gallery.
25
David Hall
Born 1937, studied at Leicester and the Royal College of Art
in the 1950s and early 1960s. Awarded first prize for sculpture
at the Biennale de Paris 1965, he also took part in the first
major exhibition of Minimalist art, Primary Structures, New York
1966, before turning to photography, film and video. His first
television interventions appeared on Scottish TV in 1971 and
his first video installation was shown in London in 1972. His
single screen and installation work has been widely screened
and exhibited internationally and he has made work for
broadcast by, among others, BBC TV, Channel 4 TV, Scottish
TV, Canal+ TV and MTV.
He helped form the Artist Placement Group with John
Latham and others in 1966; was co-organiser of the seminal
international Video Show exhibition at the Serpentine
Gallery, London 1975; and was co-curator of the first video
installations exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London 1976. In
the same year he initiated and was a founder of the artists’
organisation London Video Arts (now part of LUX).
Appointed Honorary Professor at Dundee University in 2003 he
has taught at the Royal College of Art, St Martin’s School
of Art, Chelsea College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute,
Nova Scotia College of Art and many others. He introduced the
term ‘time-based media’ through his writings, and created the
first time-based art degree option with an emphasis on video
at Maidstone Art College, Kent (now UCA) in 1972. Sculpture,
films, videotapes and/or related material at the Tate Gallery
London, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Gemeente Museum The Hague, West
Australia Art Gallery Perth, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
British Council, Arts Council of England, Contemporary Arts
Society, Great South West Corporation Atlanta USA, Richard
Feigen Gallery New York, Visual Resources Inc. New York, Royal
College of Art, Harvard University, ZKM Karlsruhe and other
public and private collections worldwide. Films and videotapes
held by LUX, London, British Film Institute, National Film and
Television Archive, Rewind Archive and Venice Biennale Archive.

State of Division (1978, 5 minutes)

Mick Hartney

‘The basic idea behind State of Division was that a videotape

would be found on a bus and played by the finder. It would be
found to contain the rambling statement of a character aware
of himself only as a video recording. In fact the tape was an
attempt to deal in a state of tranquility with the experience
26
of period of clinical depression I had had some years before.
As I was no longer affected by these feelings, I felt free to
deal with them with a degree of humour. The work does seem
to have hit a variety of different nerves in its audiences
perhaps because of the apparently raw, confessional nature of
the script.’ MH

Mick Hartney
Born 1946, London, lives and works in Brighton.
Mick Hartney is one of the first generation of video artists
in the UK. He is also the first systematic chronicler of the
medium, setting out the aesthetic and political territory
of video art in influential articles such as An Incomplete and
Highly Contentious Summary of the Early Chronology of Video Art (1959-
75) (LVA Catalogue, 1984) and After the Small talk; British Video
Art in the Eighties (Video Positive Catalogue, Liverpool, 1989).
Hartney is also author of a number of monographs on video and
media artists including Nan Hoover and Jack Goldstein.
Hartney’s own practice has included works of a political
nature including Orange Free State (1978) in which issues of
apartheid are alluded to in the juxtaposition of a black
woman’s treatise on investments, economics and employment
and a white man’s assumed superiority in his critique of her
position. More personal works include the classic, State of
Division (1979) in which the artist is seen on a screen within
a monitor screen describing the subjective experience of
being the object of the spectatorial gaze. Over the years
Hartney’s work has been shown internationally at major
venues including the Pompidou Centre, Paris; The Kitchen,
New York and the Tate Galleries in London and Liverpool. He
is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Art at the
University of Brighton.

The Extent of Three Bells (1981, 5 minutes)

Steve Hawley

‘The extent of three bells was made in 1981 and was almost
my first video - I dimly recall something previously on reel
to reel tape. I was interested in the materiality of video,
and especially the video camera, and at that time the colour
vidicon tubes would react to light to produce a flare in low
illumination, something I found quite beautiful. At the same
time at Brighton Polytechnic we had just taken delivery of a
nearly frame accurate U-Matic editing system, and I wanted to
try and create musical structures using the editing process.
I put the two together with a system based on bell ringing,
where the rigid patterns broke down increasingly quickly. The
27
technician who helped to make the piece had been in theatre
and he broke down as well, laughing, saying he was corpsing.
The piece as a whole explores the technology of video, in a
way, but is also about the disruption of logical structures,
which was a preoccupation in my work at the time.’ SH

Steve Hawley
Born 1952 in Wakefield, studied at Brighton Polytechnic. Lives
and works in Manchester. Steve Hawley is an artist who has
worked with film and video since 1981, and has shown his work
worldwide, in galleries and on broadcast TV. There has been
a long preoccupation with language in such pieces as Language
Lessons (1994), (made with Tony Steyger) his documentary on
artificial languages was broadcast on Channel 4 and is in the
collection of Fundacio La Caixa, Barcelona.
His tape Trout Descending A Staircase (1990), commissioned by
BBC2 TV was awarded a German Video Art prize in 1994. More
recently his work has looked at new forms of narrative, in
such works as Love Under Mercury (2001), his first film for the
cinema, which won a prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival,
and Amen ICA Cinema (2002), a palindromic video which won the
prize for most original video at the Vancouver Videopoem
festival. Speech Marks (2004), was one of the first works shot
entirely on a mobile phone and won a special prize at the
2004 VAD Digital Arts Festival in Girona. He is currently
making a generative narrative DVD piece, Timetable (2009),
which explores the power of the medium to present images and
voiceover at random.

Flow (1977, 17 minutes)

Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown

‘Flow was made whilst we were Artists in Residence to

Washington New Town. It was made with financial assistance
from the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Colour Video Bursary.
At this time we were interested in using video as a
‘painterly’ medium to create abstract works that had the
added dimension of time. Flow is a piece playing upon the fact
that the video signal is actually created through the flow of
electrons: the signal is never static but always evolving.
The original imagery is water based: aerial shots of waves
flowing onto the shore, clusters of bubbles on the surface
of water and individual bubbles flowing through the air. The
manipulation of the imagery makes allusions to microscopic
photography also. The images dissolve, or flow, into each
other.
The piece was made using a half-inch monochrome reel to reel
28
recorder and camera (Sony Video Rover). The images were then
processed using the Videokalos video synthesiser developed
by Peter Donebauer and Richard Monkhouse. The colour was
synthesised by the Videokalos. Brian’s undergraduate thesis
had been about the effects of colour on human emotion and we
were keen to introduce colour to a medium that had largely
been restricted to monochrome in that era. Processing the
black and white footage into colour involved a six hundred
mile round trip from our base in North East England to
Peter’s flat and studio in Brixton, which may seem hard to
believe in this age of instant digital technology.’ BH/WB

Brian Hoey
Born 1950, Hartlepool, studied fine art at Exeter College of
Art from 1969 to 1972 where he met Wendy Brown. At Exeter he
developed interactive light sculptures. During post-graduate
work at the Slade School these interactive systems evolved
into video installations using time delays. His installation
Videvent was one of the first video works to be shown at the
Tate Gallery during Video Show in 1976. Brian and Wendy were
Artists in Residence to Washington New Town from 1976 to
’79 where they initiated Artists Video, an annual festival
of international video art. In 1983 Brian began full time
teaching in Higher Education at the London College of Printing
(now London College of Communication). He later moved on to
Northumbria University where he worked until 2009. Brian’s
video work is now in the field of landscape video art.

Wendy Brown
Studied fine art at Exeter College of Art from 1970 until
1973 where she produced behavioural art installations and
kinetic works. After a period working as an audio-visual
technician at University College London she began to work
in video. Whilst Artist in Residence to Washington New Town
she worked in a variety of media including video, inflatable
play sculpture and light sculpture. In conjunction with
Brian she initiated the Artists Video international festival.
This event was the first opportunity for an audience to see
video art in North East England and a number of seminal
artists gained early exposure in this series of exhibitions.
After a period as an arts administrator Wendy became a wood
carver producing mainly relief work on natural themes and was
awarded a residency at Grizedale Forest.

29
Split Seconds (1979, 11 minutes)
Madelon Hooykaas/ Elsa Stansfield

‘In the installation Split Seconds, a small monitor is placed

in front of a slightly larger one, with both monitors showing
the same recording of wood being chopped. An axe splits
logs apart; the video screen and frame are split in two at
the same moment. The speed of the movement is greater than
that of the eye.’ Audio Video Installations Hooykaas/ Stansfield,
Provinciaal Museum Hasselt (1983)

Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield

Have been producing time-based art together for more than
30 years. Prolific artists, they have worked with a variety of
media- film, audio, video, laser discs and CD ROMs, in their
creation of video and sound installations and interactive
sculptures, as well as cable casts and single channel video.
They met as students at the Ealing School of Art, London in
1966 and started working together in 1972 in their studios in
London and in Amsterdam.
Their collaborations have been exhibited widely throughout
Europe and North America as well Australia and Japan. Madelon
Hooykaas, born in the Netherlands, studied in Paris, London
and New York, travelled worldwide (staying several months in
Japan) and worked in photography and film before collaborating
with Stansfield.
Elsa Stansfield, born in Glasgow, Scotland, studied at the
Glasgow School of Art and also travelled widely (with a long
stay in India). She studied and worked in film and photography
at Ealing School of Art and did film studies at the Slade in
London before her work with Hooykaas. She was head of the
Time Based Media Department (Video and Audio) at the Jan
van Eyck Academy from 1980 to 1991. Elsa Stansfield died on
November 30, 2004 in Amsterdam.
Their collaborative work has been highly acclaimed; the pair
were awarded the Judith Leyster Prize for artistic achievement
in 1996 and in 1999 the CD-ROM Person to Person was awarded
the grand Prix for New Media at Split Festival, Croatia.
Twelve publications about their work have been published
internationally as well as in numerous catalogues around the
world. In 2010 a large exhibition of some of the key works
will be shown in the Netherlands and in the UK.

30
Clapping Songs (1979, 6 min)
Tina Keane

‘In Clapping Songs commissioned by Audio Arts 1981 for the

Riverside Studios, London, the approach is very direct and
uncluttered. She used a slide-tape of two girls (her daughter
and a friend) playing clapping games. The sound-tape is a
series of clapping game songs which take us through the
vicissitudes of life itself, including birth, childhood,
courtship, marriage and death. Characteristically, the
verses are larded with ‘bad taste’, sexuality and a morbid
fascination with death (the body will ‘rot, rot, rot’). 
There is a strong sense (as in Shadow Women) of the dialectic
between concrete history (the ever-continuing generation of
girls playing these games) and the universal rituals of play
as learning.’ Michael O’Pray, Performance Magazine (1988)

Tina Keane
Born 1948, London. Lives and works in London.
Tina Keane studied at Hammersmith College of Art and Sir John
Cass School of Art (1967-70) and got an MA in Independent
Film and Video from London College of Printing (1995-96).
She has worked across a range of media from performance and
installation to film, video and digital art.
Tina Keane has exhibited widely both nationally and
internationally and was Artist in Residence at various
institutions including the Banff Centre in Canada. She is a
founder member of Circles - Women in Distribution and curator
and programmer of exhibitions and screenings including The New
Pluralism exhibition at the Tate (with Michael O’Pray, 1985).
She has won awards from the Arts Council, Channel 4, the
British Council and London Production Board.
Keane has been a Visiting Lecturer at many colleges and
universities throughout the UK and abroad, including Harvard
University. Since 1982 she has been Lecturer in Film & Video
at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London,
where she has also been Research Fellow since 2003.

Vanitas (1977, 8 minutes)

Tamara Krikorian

‘The idea for Vanitas came from a seventeenth century French

painting Allegory of Justice and Vanity, attributed to Tournier,
which I ‘found’ in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford. In it a
woman is seated, holding a mirror, which reflects a number of
still life objects, including a skull, a candlestick and other
items denoting the transience of life.
31
Vanitas is a self-portrait of the artist and at the same time
an allegory on the ephemeral nature of television. Apart
from the conventional still-life objects such as jewellery
and flowers, the mirror reflects a TV in which a series of
announcers appear edited in with shots of the artist, who is
describing the symbolism found in Vanitas paintings. The daily
flow of news seems little different today with its emphasis
on money and war. The shots of the announcers are seen as
20thcentury icons, whose appearance and dress might appear
to establish them as figures of authority but in Vanitas they
simply become symbols of transience, like the flowers and
shells and the self-portrait of the artist.
My own interest in video and television stems from a
formalist position, the analysis and de-construction of
the medium within a strongly political context, while using
symbolism and assemblage to create layers of meaning.
This first Vanitas work led me to de-construct Vanitas and
create a series of Vanitas installations in which I explored
the use of different symbols of transience including the self-
portrait, bubbles, shells, print media and live butterflies,
All these works were carefully focussed on a critique of TV
itself – the ephemeral medium.’ TK

Tamara Krikorian
Tamara Krikorian is an artist and curator. She studied music
and worked as an assistant for Opera Piccola in London. She
became involved in the visual arts while working in Edinburgh
in the late sixties and in the early Seventies helped to
develop the first Artists Register for the Scottish Arts
Council, which included using video to document artists’
work. It was during this period that she started to use
photography and video in her own work.
She showed Breeze, her first four-screen work in Edinburgh, in
1974, and at The Video Show at the Serpentine Gallery, in 1975.
As well as being a founder member of LVA and Stills Gallery
(The Scottish Photography Group) in Edinburgh she was co-
organiser of The Video Symposium and Video defining an Aesthetic,
the first exhibition of British video installations at Third
Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1976. She taught for a number of
years at Maidstone College of Art and Newcastle Polytechnic
while showing her installations in galleries across Britain.
She also engaged in a vigorous critical debate alongside
David Hall, Stuart Marshall and Steve Partridge writing
regularly for Art Monthly, Studio International and other
journals. She was a member of the Arts Council’s Film
and Video Panel from 1980-83. From 1984-2005 as Director of
Cywaith Cymru. Artworks Wales she worked with artists and
32
communities across Wales developing public art projects.
She continues to show her work internationally most recently
at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2006 as part of REWIND Artists
Video in the 1970s and 1980s as well as in Analogue, Pioneering
Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968-88). She was also a
speaker at the Analogue seminar held at the Tate in 2006 as
well as Had to be There, the conference organised by FACT in
Liverpool in 2007. She has published many texts on the Visual
arts and on Video art in particular. Recent publications
include a monograph on the Welsh artist Peter Bailey (2006)
and articles for Planet magazine.

The Heart Cycle (1973, 13 minutes)

Mike Leggett

‘Throughout 1972 and 1973 I pursued a hectic series of

projects centred on 16/8mm film, video, together with sound
and book production, many of which were related to one
another in theme, and having in common my approach to
experimentation. Initial experiments with Closed-Circuit
Television (CCTV) collaboratively with other artists (John
Latham, Ian Breakwell, Kevin Coyne, etc) and students, were
followed by encounters with the Portapak.
From a background of filmmaking my initial encounters with
video were revelatory: as a motion picture recording device
the key features were an ability to play back motion pictures
immediately, and to re-use the tape media if playback showed
a recording to be unsatisfactory. In the contemporary context
this may seem mundane, but in the early 1970s the potential
of this facility, as others have noted, (Marshall, Donebauer,
Elwes, Hartney 1996; Critchley, 2006), was as novel as it was
without precedent.
Work on The Heart Cycle commenced as a series of experiments
with a roll of 16mm ‘found footage’ film and a newly acquired
CCTV system sited at the Exeter College of Art where I
taught. A film projector and several studio cameras connected
through a simple vision mixer to monitors and a tape deck,
recorded to videotape a series of procedures and adjustments
made to the system during experiments and ‘rehearsals’.
The new media of analogue video delivered motion pictures
displaying in ‘real time’ the states of a system in synthesis.
The iterations reached a point of final performance, the
extent unedited recording of The Heart Cycle.
The ideal I observed at the time, would be to ‘perform’ the
procedure to an audience; but analogue video technology
had strict limitations for live performance. The Heart Cycle
whilst fitting into the finite time span of the artist’s film,
33
(a singular event), when replayed on the screen of a video
monitor, retains in the electronic genesis of the black and
white image, a provisional gesture in private performance
towards a contemporary present. A present that in the
digital environment, images the signs of decay affecting
the videotape coatings – horizontal white lines and speckles
make aleotoric appearances across the orchestration, an
interference that however, registers the image base of the
completed artefact.’ ML

Mike Leggett
Born in 1945 in Surrey, England. Lives and works in Sydney,
Australia.
Mike Leggett has been working across the institutions of
art, education, cinema and television with media since the
late 1960s. He has film and video artwork in archives and
collections in Europe, Australia, North and South America
and practises professionally as an artist, curator, writer
and lecturer. He was a founding member of the London Film-
makers Cooperative workshop and the Independent Film-makers
Association (UK). He was an active member of the British film
and television union until the mid-1980s when he migrated with
his Australian partner and child to Melbourne, Australia. He
has undertaken consultancies for the Australia Council for
the Arts, the National Association for the Visual Arts, the
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne and was on
the Board of dLux Media Arts (Sydney).
During 2008 he completed a PhD with the Creativity &
Cognition Studios in the Faculty of Engineering and
Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney,
exploring the precept of visual mnemonics for interactivity
within hypervideo systems.
He has curated exhibitions of media art for the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Sydney (Burning the Interface<International
Artists’ CD-ROM>), touring to Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and
Melbourne); the Brisbane International Film Festival; and
Videotage Festival of Video Art, Hong Kong.
He contributes to Leonardo; Continuum, World Art, FineArt
Forum and is a regular correspondent for the Australian
contemporary arts newspaper RealTime. He has an MFA from the
College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales.

34
Mirror (1979, 5 minutes)
Stephen Littman

‘This was my first single screen piece. Shot using a Sony

Portapak Rover using half-inch black and white videotape. It
was edited onto Sony U-Matic 2850 edit deck without any edit
controller. It took a lot of skill to undertake these edit
patterns as you had a hit and miss environment where non-PAL
edits and wobble would constantly be placed in the work by
the editing process used.
This work evokes an emotional response of the driver
navigating a ring road around the centre of Coventry. A
planning disaster of concrete roads and subways. This journey
explores time and space within the screen space further
echoed in the mirror. Sound reinforces the pictorial movement
to create a sound and rhythm work with symbolic meaning of
who is watching whom.’ SL

Stephen Littman
Born 1957, London. Studied at Coventry Polytechnic and the
Royal College of Art. Stephen Littman is an artist, visual
theatre documentalist and academic based at University
College for the Creative Arts at Farnham; he has been
involved in the organisation of festivals such as Video
Positive, National Review of Live Art (Video) and was a
member of the London Video Arts management committee from
1980 to 1987 running the screening programmes and technical
workshops.
His work has ranged from lyrical narrative to strict
structural investigations of the language and form of video
- but often introducing a redeeming touch of the absurd. He
was a pioneer of using video wall technology, installing and
curating a range of works for the Video Positive festival in
Liverpool in 1989.

Go thru the Motions (1975, 8 minutes)

Stuart Marshall

An extreme close-up of a mouth is used to examine speech

patterning, perception of mime, vocal cavity resonation and
the electronic fracturing of speech. Part of the Mouth Works
trilogy which also includes Arcanum and Mouth Room.

Stuart Marshall
Born in Manchester in 1949, died 1993.
Stuart Marshall studied Fine Art at Hornsey and Newport
colleges of Art and did an MA teaching fellowship in New
35
Music Composition and Ethnomusicology with Alvin Lucier at
Wesleyan University, USA. Marshall was a founder member of
London Video Arts in 1976, and was a committed advocate of
British video art, as a practitioner, curator and theorist.
He curated the first UK/Canadian Video Exchange in 1984 and his
videos and writings were amongst the first to explore the
relationship between video, television and the media. With
later works such as Bright Eyes, he explored, and challenged,
misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic
of the 1980s, at a time when lesbian and gay lifestyles
and sexuality were under attack as a result of Clause 28
and the media-encouraged prejudice surrounding the spread
of AIDS. Towards the end of his life, working with Maya
Vision, Marshall made a number of Channel 4 commissioned
documentaries concerning gay identity and he continued to be
a passionate campaigner for gay rights.
Marshall was a dedicated teacher in a number of art schools
throughout his career, including Chelsea School of Art, the
Royal College of Art and Newcastle Polytechnic, where he made
Pedagogue with Neil Bartlett and his students, a humorous
riposte to Clause 28.

Continuum (1977 5 minutes)

Chris Meigh Andrews/Gabrielle Bown

‘Early British video art differs from its American

counterpart and British experimental film in that it is
concerned less with identifying the specific properties of
the medium than with analysing the conditions of viewing and
the mechanics and shaping of perceptual and social space.
Continuum is a good example of this sort of work. Originally a
two-screen piece made in collaboration with Gabrielle Bown, it
plays out the difficulty two lovers have in communicating with
each other whilst at the same time revealing the illusoriness
of the space in which their relationship is constructed. A
man and a woman each occupy a TV screen. The screens are
set side by side and a pendulum visible behind each of the
two characters, who face each other, swings between them,
first one screen then the other. The dialogue between the two
is one of mutual misunderstanding and misread intentions.
However, the piece ends rather humorously, with that dialogue
breaking down, as both agree that the conversation need not
go on in this manner as to do so would be to satisfy only
what the situation of their performing the piece demands of
them. Laughing, the two both rise from their seats and, if
we had not already realised, we see that the space and time
each of them occupies is in fact only illusorily separate, or
36
only illusorily shared. The question is why this sort of space
should be considered to be ‘illusory’ at all: why is it not
real or architectural? This points to an essential difference,
perhaps, between contemporary art and modern art:
contemporary artists are less inclined to accept the autonomy
of the art work, and consider the move of ‘revealing’ the
conditions of viewing to be no less a construct than that
which is thereby ‘revealed’ to be a construct.’ Jonathan
Dronsfield

Chris Meigh-Andrews
Born 1952, Braintree, UK. Lives & works in London and
Lancashire.
Chris Meigh-Andrews is Professor of Electronic & Digital Art
and director of the Electronic and Digital Art Unit (EDAU) at
the University of Central Lancashire. He studied Fine Art at
Goldsmiths and completed his PhD at the Royal College of Art
in 2001. A practicing artist working with electronic & digital
media, he has been exhibiting his videotapes & installations
internationally since 1978.
Since 1990, Meigh-Andrews has specialised in sculptural and
site-specific installations and video projections and recent
work has often featured the harnessing of renewable energy
systems. In 2002, his solar-powered web cast installation For
William Henry Fox Talbot (The Pencil of Nature) was exhibited in
Digital Interventions at the V&A, London. In 2003 he produced
Temporal View in Amsterdam (After BB Turner) a digital projection
for Huis Marseilles Foundation for Photography, Amsterdam.
In 2005, Meigh-Andrews represented the UK with Resurrection,
a solar-powered video installation at Digital Discourse an
international exhibition to coincide with the heads of
Commonwealth Government’s Conference (CHOGM) in Valetta.
He is currently working with Architects Julian Harrap on an
outdoor ambient-responsive digital image installation on the
Monument in the City of London.
Meigh-Andrews was chair of London Video Access 1987-89, artist
in Residence at Oxford Brookes University (1994) Saw Centre
for Contemporary Art, Ottawa (1994), Cleveland Arts (1995)
and Prema Arts Centre (1995), and Arts Council of England
International Artist Fellow at Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow
(2003/04). He was the recipient of a research award from
the National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts
(NESTA) in 2004 and has received British Council travel awards
to Poland and Malta in 2005.
Meigh-Andrews organised and curated The Digital Aesthetic (2001)
and Digital Aesthetic 2 (2007) in collaboration with the Harris
Museum, Preston and is co-curator of Analogue: Pioneering
37
Artists’ Video from the UK, Canda and Poland (1968-88), a major
international touring retrospective exhibition. His book, A
History of Video Art: The Development of Technology and Form, was
published by Berg in November 2006.

2nd and 3rd Identity (1978, 10 minutes)

Marcelline Mori

‘Two monitors face each other; on each is the same pre-

recorded image: a self portrait. The object of this
preliminary set up is to reproduce artificially, the spatial
conditions of a reflection of oneself in a mirror (the
opposite to the normal video reflex). But on the outside
surface of one of the monitor screens is an arrangement
of small silvered squares in which the image on the second
monitor is reflected (this time mirror-orientation). Since the
pre-recorded image on both monitors is identical, the space
between the image and its reflection is condensed within the
frame of the first monitor. The image and its reflection both
facing the spectator from the monitor screen. Between each
appearance of the images a snow field (and its reflection)
elucidate the process. In Magritte’s painting La Reflexion
Interdite (The Forbidden Reflection) a man facing a mirror sees
only the back of his own head reflected. Second and Third
Identities in a way realises, with a time structure, a similar
phenomenon but in reverse. The face and its reflection look
out from the ‘mirror’.’ London Video Arts 1978 Catalogue

Marcelline Mori
Marcelline Mori studied at the Sorbonne, University of Paris,
graduating in 1975. She went on to examine the burgeoning
art of video in the UK for a research project under the
auspices of the Beaubourg Centre in Paris. She moved to
England in 1977 and became an active member of the newly
formed London Video Arts. She began making videotapes and
installations and showed at numerous international events as
well as at key venues in the UK. Mori’s work is characterised
by an engagement in the language of video often fragmented
into smaller units between which she attempts to build a
‘rapport’. She described her work in the 1970s as ‘an attempt
to establish a ‘liason’ between content and form’. Since the
1980s Mori has been working with paint on canvas, photography
and sound.

38
Monitor (1975, 6 minutes)
Stephen Partridge
‘Monitor is an early work by Partridge which demonstrates
his interest in structuralism. Structuralist analysis was
of great interest to many artists at this time because it
provided new and rigorous ways of thinking about art as a
form of language. Its basic claim is that all signs (such as
words, images, clothes, gestures, and so on) operate within
systems (or structures), which are governed by rules. Thus
it is not only words which function within the structure of
a language, but all signs - there is a language of clothes,
a language of the body, a language of painting, a language
of sculpture, a language of film. Partridge’s quest in Monitor
is to find a language of video. In order to do this, he has
to make video turn in on itself: he has to make the medium
of video ‘self-reflexive’. His most obvious way of doing this
in Monitor (apart from its title!) is to turn the camera onto
the monitor itself, so that the subject of the video becomes
itself. This alone, however, would not be enough to establish
the unique properties of video; there is no reason why a
film camera could not do the same thing. What makes video so
special, however - what distinguishes its language from other
kinds of filmic language - is that it can record and transmit
simultaneously. There is no time delay. This can lead to the
special phenomenon of feedback. When the video apparatus
is turned on itself, it can produce an infinite series of
repeated images, each nestled within the other like Chinese
boxes. This effect thus mirrors that very same condition of
self-reflexivity which forms the basis of language according
to structuralist analysis.
Look more closely at Monitor, however, and you will see that
the effect of feedback has actually been ‘faked’. Partridge
has not simply presented a novel and quirky technical effect
of the video medium. Like a mechanic he has dismantled it
to provide a thorough examination, and then, like a poet,
reassembled it in unexpected ways. The slightly different
speeds at which the monitors are rotated in each of the
images introduce an element of variation and syncopation,
which contradict the standardised effect of simultaneity
which occurs within ordinary feedback.’ John Calcutt (1998)

Stephen Partridge
Born 1953, Leicester. Lives and works in Dundee. Studied at
Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art.
Stephen Partridge is an artist and academic researcher. He was
in the “landmark” video shows of the 1970s including The Video
Show at the Serpentine in 1975, The Installation Show at the Tate

39
Gallery in 1976, The Paris Biennalle in 1977 and The Kitchen in
New York in 1979. During the eighties he exhibited widely and
also became interested in works for broadcast television and was
commissioned by Channel 4 television to produce Dialogue for Two
Players in 1984.
With Jane Rigby, he formed Fields and Frames - an arts projects
and television Production Company - which produced the
innovative Television Interventions project for Channel 4 in 1990,
with nineteen works by artists for television (including his own
piece in the series, The Sounds of These Words). He also co-produced
a short series of student and artists work Not Necessarily with
BBC Scotland for BBC2 network television in 1991.
He has also curated a number of influential video shows: Video Art
78 in Coventry; UK TV New York; National Review of Live Art 1988-90;
19:4:90 Television Interventions; and the touring tape packages Made
in Scotland I, II, Semblances, Passages.
He has worked with the artist and composer David Cunningham,
whose soundworks and structural approach has enriched many
of his works since 1974. Other major collaborations include
the artist Elaine Shemilt on a series of works including the
installations Chimera and Rush.
He has lectured since 1975 in a number of art colleges, and
established the School of Television & Imaging at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art & Design (University of Dundee). He is
presently Professor of Media Art and Dean of Research. He is the
principal investigator on the four-year research project REWIND,
investigating the first two decades of UK artists’ video practice.

Video Sketches (1972, 22 minutes)

Clive Richardson

‘The Video Sketches tape is a continuation of work I was

doing on perspective corrections, using projected light and
photography. Video was a new tool which allowed me to record
the process of working out ideas.
Sketch 1
Pre-recorded tape of walking in both directions across the
screen is played back with the monitor picture positioned
having the same background perspective. The walking sequence
is then repeated behind the monitor and in sync with the pre-
recorded tape. Because the two walking sequences occupy the
same picture plane they give the illusion of being the same
sequence.
Sketch 2
Body rolls across the monitor screen on 45-degree angle left
to right. The angle tilts to opposite side of screen and body
rolls to left. The sequence repeats with gradient getting
40
less and rolling becoming slower until the floor is horizontal
and the rolling stops. Tilting the camera each way to alter
the floor horizon line gives the illusion the gradient is
controlling the movement of the body.
Sketch 3
A pre-recorded video of a repeating zoom in and out on a
rabbit is played back on a TV monitor. The image of the
monitor and rabbit was then recorded again, zooming in and
out in reverse to the previous tape, keeping the image of the
rabbit the same size. This gave the illusion of the monitor
moving forward and back.
Video Sketches was made while a student at The Royal College
of Art in 1970-1972. Hugh Casson the head of Architecture had
been to a World’s Fair Exhibition and seen a large multi-
screen projection there, which gave him the idea of starting
the department at the RCA called Environmental Media. We were
given a small room and little money to be building World’s
Fair exhibits, so I suggested buying video equipment which
at least we could reuse. I was living and working in a church
hall in Fulham at the time, so took the equipment there and
recorded the Sketches Tape.’ CR

Clive Richardson
Born 1944, Newark, Nottinghamshire, lives and works in
London. Studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal
College of Art, before going on to teach at Chelsea School
of Art. He has worked for over 30 years as a producer and
director of commercials and pop promos at Island Pictures and
other production companies before going on to found Clive
Richardson Films, producing over 100 pop promos. His work has
been exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Serpentine Gallery,
Tate Britain and the National Film Theatre.

Drift Guitars (1975, 21 minutes)

Tony Sinden

‘Drift Guitars is a video documentation of one of my early

minimal sound pieces, performed ‘live’ in front of camera.
Other related experimental works of the period such as the
Functional Action Series (1972-1976) explored film, sound and
photography.
Drift Guitars emerged as a consequence of experimenting with
sound, albeit music: performing a repetitive but transitional
acoustic action. Drift Guitars was performed ‘live’ for the
camera as a continuous unedited videotape, flaws and mistakes
are an inherent part of the work. The music is formed as
a counterpoint to the traditional notion of notated music,
41
producing a random ‘phasing’ structure that moves in and out
of synch. I guess what interested me at the time ‘happened’
in the recording session, documenting the event of performing
the work, the duration and music.
Drift Guitars was finally produced by David Cunningham on vinyl:
side B of the Functional Action Series (parts two and three) and
distributed by Piano Records as an LP (1977).’ TS

Tony Sinden
Tony Sinden is an artist who began independently to make
short experimental films in 1966. Subsequently he went on to
produce several films funded by The British Film Institute and
Arts Council of England. His practice in the 1970’s embraced a
conceptual approach to film and video and wide-ranging debates
of contemporary art. He was one of the first artists in the UK
to exhibit film, video and installation in the gallery context,
including the ICA, Serpentine and Hayward Gallery; Arnolfini
Gallery, Bristol and Third Eye Centre, Glasgow.
The issues of Tony’s current work continue to explore the
moving image in relationship to issues of contemporary art
and the environment of exhibition: opening up space for
reflection and interaction, between the work and spectator.
Tony has exhibited widely during his career, including
installations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive; South Bank Centre,
London; Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, sites in Kyoto, Kobe
and Art Tower Mito, Japan; Durham Cathedral; Canary Wharf
Tower, London; Forest of Dean Sculpture Park; Lux Gallery;
Whitechapel Art Gallery; and The Bloomberg Space, London.
Tony Sinden collaborated with David Hall in the early to late
70’s participating in inaugural shows such as 1975: The Video
Show, Serpentine Gallery with 101 TV Sets. Hall and Sinden
collaborated on the 16mm films of 1972/3, This Surface, Edge,
Between, Actor and View. This collaboration developed out of
him earlier assisting David Hall in the production of Hall’s
TV Interruptions for STV in late 1971. He taught at Maidstone
College of Art from 1971 to 1980. Sinden’s practice has
spanned three decades of substantial production, experiment
and exhibition. He has worked across mediums: single screen
16mm, expanded 16mm, video, installation, slide and site
related.

42
43
Afterword
Stephen Partridge

About ten years ago there was a developing concern

about the early works produced in the UK using film,
video, performance and media installation. Because of
the fragile and decaying nature of the early media and
the growing obsolescence of the associated technology,
video works in particular were in danger of
disappearing altogether. This unhappy state of affairs
was compounded by the fact that so little had been
written down about the work. The hegemony of text in
our culture can distort histories and particularly the
relative significance of artistic output. In early 2002
I was approached by Laura Mulvey, who had herself,
become concerned about the state and status of early
video work produced in the UK. She suggested that I
might be well placed to develop a research project to
address both the issues of conservation and to write
and record - from primary sources - an intelligible
history of the field.

I am deeply grateful for the advice, information

and support I subsequently received while I was
developing the project, from a great number of
distinguished artists, scholars, curators, writers and
arts administrators, particularly David Curtis of the
British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

REWIND | Artists Video in the 70’s and 80’s, funded by

the Arts & Humanities Research Council, started its
work in early 2004 and this DVD anthology is a very
tangible outcome from the research undertaken. Based
at the Visual Research Centre, Duncan of Jordanstone
College of Art & Design in Dundee, we have spent

44
the last five years on a rewarding and multi-faceted
project that has re-discovered many ‘lost’ works. We
have had the pleasure of working closely with the all
the artists, without whose enthusiastic co-operation,
REWIND would not have been possible.

Jackie Hatfield undertook the majority of the

field research for REWIND, and Maggie Warwick and
I completed the interview series. Our archivist
Adam Lockhart has established himself as a leading
specialist in archiving and conservation issues for
artists’ video. Sean Cubitt has been a constant
adviser to the project, also contributing theoretical
and historical input including the essay included in
this booklet.

The DVD anthology is largely derived from the REWIND

Collection with some important gaps filled from
the LUX archive, and affords a revealing insight
into the concerns and innovative approaches taken
by the artists working in the first decade of
video production. For those interested in further
exploration, visit the REWIND website for interviews
with the artists and supporting information and
ephemera at www.rewind.ac.uk

45
A note on the selection of works

The works on REWIND + PLAY An Anthology of Early

British Video Art represent a broad selection of
artists’ video work being made in the UK from 1971
to 1982. The selection is by no means exhaustive but
rather represents a cross section of strategies and
themes being explored in the medium at that time,
particularly in and around London Video Arts (one of
LUX’s predecessor organisations). The period the DVD
focuses on is really a pre-digital one, when artists
were first exploring the parameters of the medium and
where frame accurate edit controls were not readily
available, which to a degree shaped the work that was
being made. In terms of the physical quality of the
works - the DVD has been made from the best master
versions available at this time - mostly without
extensive restoration work, (some of which have faired
better than others), and are presented here with the
dropout and glitches which have very much become part
of the patina of works of this era.

46
REWIND + PLAY. An Anthology of Early British Video Art is
published in Great Britain in 2009 by LUX in collaboration
with REWIND Artists’ Video in the 70s and 80s

In memory of Tamara Krikorian (1944-2009) and

Tony Sinden (1943-2009)

LUX, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ

www.lux.org.uk

REWIND, Visual Research Centre, University of Dundee, DCA 152

Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4DY www.rewind.ac.uk

Many of the works included on this DVD are distributed by LUX

and part of the REWIND collection. For more information on
many of the artists and works see www.rewind.ac.uk and
www.luxonline.org.uk

Selection Benjamin Cook, Sean Cubitt, Adam Lockhart,

Stephen Partridge and Emile Shemilt
Producer Benjamin Cook
Design Paul Abbott
Video re-mastering Adam Lockhart
DVD Production Stephen Connolly
Printed in the UK by Branded Media

DVD 9/ PAL/ Region 0

© 2009. Videos copyright with Individual artists.
Essay Sean Cubitt. Publication LUX

The copyright holder has licensed this DVD for private

use only. All other rights are reserved. Any unauthorised
copying, editing, exhibition, public performance, diffusion
and/or broadcasting of the DVD or any part thereof, is
strictly prohibited.

REWIND Artists’ Video in the 70s and 80s is funded by the Arts &
Humanities Research Council
LUX is financially supported by Arts Council England

REWIND
Artists’ Video in the 1970s & 1980s