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The five 'gallery' pages show a small selection of work from the last
forty years. Most of the quotes are extracted from texts listed in the
bibliography page.
Vidicon
Inscriptions, videotape 1973 and installation 1975
Installation first shown at the Video Show, Tate Gallery, London 1976,
and at Video: Towards Defining an Aesthetic, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
1976. Developed from a videotape of the same name, 1973/74
Over-lighting
exceeds capacity for assimilation in a 1970s video camera and images are
'burnt' into the surface of its tube. Here a unique property is discovered
where both the passage of time and trace of that continuum are registered
as one. A section of the original tape version records the image of the
artist with a camera (via a mirror) panning, by stages, across the screen.
Before movement the lens is covered and re-exposed after the change, and
each time the image appears to be inscribed onto the screen. In the interactive
installation a camera registers the live passage of time through a translucent
polaroid shutter. Periodically the shutter lifts - triggered by the participants'
movements - and images are fixed and inscribed.
'..Here
preserved are the poignant traces of ghostings, where the mugging of participants
has at once the presence of improvisation and yet is already caught in
a moment, simultaneously, of capture and decay. The work is about the
materiality of the screen technologies of the day, for sure. It is also,
especially in retrospect, an elegy for the passing of time - the time
of the gesture as it fades from the screen, the time of technologies that
have their moment and pass away'. Sean Cubitt, Greyscale Video and
the Shift to Colour, Art Journal, Fall 2006.
This
is a Television Receiver 1976
Commissioned by BBC TV as the unannounced opening piece for their Arena
video art programme, March 1976. Programme produced by Mark Kidel, conceived
by Anna Ridley and presented by David Hall
'Richard
Baker [the well known newsreader] describes the essential paradoxes of
the real and imagined functions of the TV set on which he appears. The
second shot is taken optically off a monitor, the third copied from the
second, and so on, until there is a complete degeneration of both sound
and image, removing the newsreader from his position of authority...'
Tamara Krikorian, Art Monthly, February 1984.
'This figure of authority is reduced to what, in essence, he is - a series
of pulsating patterns of light on the surface of a glass screen. In this
way, paradoxically, the verbal statement is realised by its own disintegration,
along with that of the image. The illusion of both transparency and of
power are shattered. This is deconstruction in its primary, irreductable
form; only by remembering these important lessons have artists subsequently
been able to venture out of the enclosure of self-reflexivity and into
the perilous world of representation and narrative...' Mark Wilcox, Deconstruct,
Subverting Television cat., Arts Council of Great Britain 1984.
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