amif2015

[amif2015]

Photos: Pavel Dousek for Tramway LUX Scotland #AMIF2015

[amif2015]

#AMIF2015 was Tramway’s fourth edition of the Artists Moving Image Festival, which took place 12-13 September 2015, Glasgow. 

#AMIF2015 examined the role of collective thinking and making. Presenting collaborative forms of production and research, the festival considered what it means for a group to constitute a single body of work and, inversely, how one can speak on behalf of collective thought or action. 

Including a special two-day focus on the life and legacy of Stuart Marshall, the festival was programmed by Norms, tenletters, Conal McStravick with Ed Webb-Ingall and Laura Guy, and Transmission -- collectives and collaborators with an explicit link to Glasgow. It also featured an installation of work by James Richards and Steve Reinke.

The festival was co-organised by Tramway and LUX Scotland, with support from LUX. 

This website archives content aggregated by #AMIF2015 programmers and artists. It will remain on amif.info until the next edition of the festival, and will be archived on amif2015.tumblr.com. 

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Helke Sander, 'Nr. 1 Aus Berichten der Wach und Patrouillendienste', 1984, 10m.

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Emily Roysdon on ‘Ecstatic Resistance’ (Norms)

Extract from an interview with We Who Feel Differently

Carlos Motta: Can you explain your concept of “Ecstatic Resistance”?  

Emily Roysdon: I started to use the term toward the end of LTTR when I was asked to talk about the project.  It was something I saw around me which began to represent a core set of interests in my work and the work of my peers.  A crucial part of my intellectual life is relating to the work being made around me. I am not a solitary artist so I have always had that drive to look around and ask questions. This is where the term “Ecstatic Resistance” came from. 

The idea itself is about mobilizing a vocabulary of the impossible, and the imaginary. Thinking about political representation, I located this idea and made a diagram of it, a schema where the impossible and the imaginary are two intersecting circles with struggle and improvisation as these two pyramids with movement at the core. It is all set within this field I call “the pleasure stain.” So it is about bringing this element of pleasure and performativity into resistance and thinking about plasticity, strategy and communicability, the unspeakable and telling. It is within this vocabulary of words I am playing with that I am thinking about a disruptive and destabilizing set of strategies to get beyond our limited imaginaries.

One of the examples I use to try talking about it is to think about the way the horizon of the impossible is always shifting. At one point, it was impossible to think black people would be free in America. At another, it was impossible to see women voting. Thinking about politics as a system of impossibilities, where people control the imaginary of what is possible to be, I started to think through “Ecstatic Resistance” as a force against that. The “ecstatic” is about an encounter to me; is an encounter where you get turned on just enough that your boundaries shift for a minute. I am interested in work that brings you to this place and presents an alternate reality as a possibility, works that somehow physically affect you.  

CM: Is the ecstatic encounter a personal or interpersonal encounter?

ER: I think I am positing it as a relation between, an encounter you can have with a person, an artwork, or your own self I guess. It is the encounter that addresses our concept of the other, and my desire is to position that encounter as present and ecstatic because I want it to be developmental and challenging. 




CM:  Do the politics of this schema you just described respond to a set of policies or politics out in the real world?

ER: In a way I sort of want to say no because when I think of my friends who are activists, though I’m called an activist within the art world, when I look at my friend’s lives and their investment in activism I think in a way that I can’t claim that same space but the schema is absolutely inspired by, in the service of, and indebted to those kinds of projects. “Ecstatic Resistance” is interested in the viability of lives and questions the limits of what is intelligible right now. The queer politics I am most associated with center around gender queer and trans bodies, legibility, and the regulation of rights and access to services. Still I cannot say how my project affects these things.  

CM:  How has the concept of “Ecstatic Resistance” been enacted?  

ER: It emerged as an exhibition at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, where I was given the early support to develop the project. It came to New York to X Initiative in its next iteration and I also turned it into a poster with three texts. One is mine, one is by Dean Spade and Craig Wilse and one is by Catherine Lord. 

A great example of the project is Adrian Piper’s business cards. It’s impossible to paraphrase her elegance, but on a discreet business card you pass out one side says: “I guess you don't realize that I'm black I try to not point this out because it makes white people feel like I’m bossy and I tried to assume that you're not racist until you act like it but here is notice.” The other side says: “I’m alone, I actually want to be alone, this is not a part of some larger flirtation, leave me alone,” which points towards sexual harassment instead of an insipid racism. The business cards are an incredible gesture and get to the heart of the encounter, so she is really being drawn into and in drawing somebody into a different kind of encounter relationship and acknowledgment.

[Read more]

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Anja Kirschner and David Panos (tenletters)

Extract from an interview with ica.org.uk. 

Uncanny Valley (2013) developed from an on-going interest in different acting and performance techniques, which started during our 2010 feature length film about Bertolt Brecht, The Empty Plan. While talking with the actors on that film we found out that many of them were increasingly working in the gaming industry, doing voice overs and motion capture scenes for the non-linear narratives that are woven into game play. These implications seemed very interesting, in terms of new demands on performers, but also in terms of the various assumptions about realism and emotional engagement that these processes hold.

We put the new film together with an emphasis on two different types of image or ‘shot’. The ‘close up’ gives emphasis to the human face and the communication of feelings. One of the key focuses of new animation technology has been to get as much data as possible to render faces real and not spookily ‘uncanny’, and to get audiences to empathise with animated characters. We also wanted to contrast the close up with the digital ‘long shot’ – in particular the increasingly ubiquitous long shots of crowds that appear in mainstream cinema and video games. Crowd simulation technology which mobilises thousands of animated characters, each based on a motion captured actor, has enabled the last decade of mainstream cinema to be somewhat defined by huge crowd scenes – enormous battles or hordes of zombies. These new representations of anonymous masses seemed to stand in an interesting relation to the quest for more real or ‘human’ close ups.

We saw this work as part of an on-going series of installation works about acting preparation and process. The first in that series, Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances (2011), was about the influential acting methods of Sanford Meisner. Uncanny Valley is incredibly different in many ways, but both works deal with the same question ‒ what processes do actors go through to create ‘realistic’ depiction of human beings that stimulate emotion and empathy in the viewer?

Uncanny Valley also picks up on our longstanding interest in digital effects, compositing and green screen work. From Polly II (2006) onwards, in which we depicted a flooded London in the not-so-distant future, we used these techniques to create ‘epic’ scenes, a pastiche of genre movies, while retaining an anti-naturalistic DIY aesthetic. In later films, we used the technique subtly to create a manipulated flatness that worked against the historical ‘depth’ of the subject matter. In our more recent films, Ultimate Substance and Uncanny Valley we’ve started to self-reflexively examine these technologies and the way that digital manipulation has a kind of abstract quality that mirrors late-capitalism ‒ with the green screen as a new symbol of abstraction and infinite substitution.

[Read more]

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: tenletters

Extract from The New Yorker Online

Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy By Joshua Rothman

These days, when we use the word “privacy,” it usually has a political meaning. We’re concerned with other people and how they might affect us. We think about how they could use information about us for their own ends, or interfere with decisions that are rightfully ours. We’re mindful of the lines that divide public life from private life. We have what you might call a citizen’s sense of privacy.

That’s an important way to think about privacy, obviously. But there are other ways. One of them is expressed very beautifully in “Mrs. Dalloway,” in a famous scene early in the book. It’s a flashback, from when Clarissa was a teen-ager. One night, she goes out for a walk with some friends: two annoying boys, Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf, and a girl, Sally Seton. Sally is sexy, smart, Bohemian—possessed of “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything.” The boys drift ahead, lost in a boring conversation about Wagner, while the girls are left behind. “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it.” Sally picks a flower from the urn and kisses Clarissa on the lips:

The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

[Read more]

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: James Richards and Steve Reinke, ‘Disambiguation’, 2009, video

Text by Steve Reinke commissioned in by the publication ‘= =’

Maybe it's good to start a project with low expectations. Or if not low, exactly, vague. The people at Light Industry in New York were putting together a packed slate of events as their contribution to the alternative art fair No Soul for Sale and asked Jim and I if we would hastily assemble an exquisite corpse compilation from our respective stores of audio-visual material. I didn't know Jim then, not really.  We'd met when he was a participant at LUX’s Associate Artist Program in London and I was doing an exhibition there (LUX). But we didn't really hang out at all, or even talk, despite the efforts of Mike Sperlinger and Ben Cook, who told me I should pay attention to James' work. And if I didn't really pay attention to it then, it was only because the opportunity did not present itself.

They sent me home, back to America, with a DVD comp of the associates' work, and James' work did stick out, but I didn't pay any conscious attention to it. It entered into me like some kind of dream material, a specific kind of the uncanny: not my dream material, the material of another, but deeper, more compelling than my actual recollections or notions or desires.

A residue that sticks. A residue that sticks because it seems to have once been known and then forgotten, or repressed (a residue from the past). A residue that sticks because it is utterly foreign, but corresponds to a particular psychic hole or lack (a residue from the future). A residue that refuses to move forward, that holds contraries - desires that are undesired - in ambergris suspension. A residue that moves like an amoeba through hostile psychic territory, restless but patient, contingent yet purposeful.

I don't know how our working method developed. An exquisite corpse is a kind of blind (or dead) assembly. The structure may be predetermined, but it is left to chance how the individual components relate. This contingency of arrangement, of montage/collage: delirium.

But I don't think either of us had any interest making an exquisite corpse. I cannot speak to James Richards' beliefs, but I will anyway: we had no trust in surrealist delirium, in the idea that something interesting, some unconscious content or structure, would emerge. Perhaps we can even go so far as to say: there are no accidental deliriums. One must actively work to produce such a thing.

Also: fuck the subconscious. It is not your friend, and it is not your helper. There is no art there, only rot and slaughter churning against any future. The only delirium is a blind trust in such a thing. A pool to be tapped by some giant straw of fucked-upness that can suck some of that unconsciousness to the surface. There is no straw and there is no milkshake. Nonetheless, the idea that we were merely assembling an exquisite corpse was useful: all contingency, no pressure.

So we burned files to DVD and posted them. That is, we actually put them in little padded envelopes, walked to the post office, bought sufficient postage for overseas air mail, and sent them off. I'm Mac-based and use Final Cut, so I sent QuickTime files. He's a pc, uses Premiere. I forget what his files were. WAVs? Whatever they were they were PAL rather than NTSC, which was once a great technical impediment, but in this strange digital age our respective timelines took every file format, like previously incommensurate slime molds finding themselves layered happily in some primeval swamp.

Why is it I like clips of slim hairy dudes jerking off into their mouths? Because I am human, a human being. But many other clips as well, bundled together and posted overseas, mine like a care package to a Canadian soldier in WWI, Jim's, presumably, like those soldier's remains being sent home. Each clip holds some interest, of course, which may be to say each clip elicits, acknowledges, fulfills or negates some desire.

From the beginning, I liked his clips. Some seemed slight and empty, others intense and full, but all, somehow, compelling. (I like to be compelled.) Tremendously varied, but often sharing a kind of charged suspension in which nothing happens, though it seems like something just has or just may. Narrative and argument are frozen, emotion falls away, gravity is perhaps present, perhaps not. Some of his looping clips enact this suspension quite literally (Bambi's father confronting him silently with the news of his mother's death as the snow falls endlessly, Carrie dancing round and round) but elements of narrative and affect suspension seems to me a Richards' hallmark.

We worked on each other's clips, cutting, recombining, adding audio and text, constructing chapters and movements so that with each exchange, a piece began to form. A blood clot around a point of injury; inflammation; snot. Chocolate pudding to stop up the lungs, but not the legs. Five or six rounds back and forth and we had Disambiguation, our first collaboration and, at 46 minutes, the longest video I've been a part of making.

The miraculous thing for me was how effortless and joyful the whole process was. It was a pure kind of play. I loved what we made, but had no idea if others would. My work is usually addressed to the viewer directly. The narrator actively, desperately employing whatever rhetorical devices he can muster to capture the audience's attention. Disambiguation, despite the fact that it is a collaboration, seemed to me a very private, personal work. There is very little direct address; one is immersed, without a guide. I was initially afraid that Jim and I had made what amounted to the perfect television for me, a personal psychic tv program I could watch over and over but that might not have much meaning for others. A dream that turns banal when dispersed. Luckily this turns out not to be the case. Many viewers get sucked into the thing. It takes over their minds and their lives, for the next three or four days at least, are better for it.

This structure - a perpetual mental reality - leaves the subject bewildered. (Here I am paraphrasing a paragraph from Christopher Bollas' The Infinite Question, as it seems the most appropriate ending, though I should I go on to discuss my continuing collaborations with James, but they are not ready yet and so must not be written of.) Is the dream the most sophisticated form of thought? Yes, and whether you are awake or asleep. The dream can never be fully comprehended because it is more complex than the consciousness. You cannot understand the ocean in which you are swimming with all the other disagreeable creatures, though some of them you can fuck and some of them you can eat and some of them are pretty to look at and many are easy to ignore. The ocean is the subconscious, but also the city and also television. It is not yet the internet, but may be soon, with higher bandwidth. Maternal enigmatic signifiers? Barebacked out of existence. That other which will keep us perpetually off balance by sustaining the rift between what we know and what we might know if we were not so clumsy and forgetful.

Steve Reinke, 2011

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Barbara Hammer talks about how she became an artist and her relationship to lesbian history. Her piece ‘Snowjob’ will be part of the ‘Learning in a Public Medium: Legacies’ programme at #AMIF2015.

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CONTEXT: Ian White on Stuart Marshall

1.

In Screen ('Video: Technology and Practice,' Vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 1979) Stuart Marshall points to the lack of a 'legitimising history' for the then nascent practice of video art, while making video art himself and generously attempting to document the work of others. To write about his work is as much to write about the state of video art then. It is ultimately a caustic irony and an ironic testament to his project that his videos, like his sound, installation and live works, have nonetheless shamefully remained outside of an authoritative international canon.

Marshall's article maps an evolving practice, from Nam June Paik's first use of the Sony portapak in 1965 to video's intersection with the Women's Movement (in works by Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas and Hermin Freed on sexual difference). Just as notably, the article describes its limited British economy. In 1979 there was no commercial gallery infrastructure for video works in the UK, commercial distribution was unsustainable and broadcast was in the exclusive grip of a closed 'duopoloy' between the institutions of BBC and ITV. My proposal is that this latter - television - became Marshall's particular and specific, culturally reflective concern, one that found its apotheosis in his 1984 broadcast Bright Eyes. It was a concern to which he was theoretically and practically bound, and that accounts for his work as a special kind of intervention, distinct from artists' film in the late 1960s and 1970s and politically challenging to the visual arts in general. In his own words, the televisual offered "the greatest potential as a critical avant-garde."

2.

This is but one line of enquiry running through a body of work that also included multi-monitor installations and environments that performed important examinations of perception, time and space, in other still-developing media that were - and are - themselves as equally uncharted and as much in need, still, of a more significant historical reassessment than the one standard art history currently provides.

Rosalind Krauss's essay 'Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism' was published three years before Marshall's article in Screen in the American journal October (Vol. 1, Spring 1976). Krauss focusses on video works that utilise (feature, figure) the body of the artist or incorporate the body of the spectator, combined with some kind of actual or implied feedback mechanism (aural, visual or temporal, actual in real time or re-presented). She replaces what in modernist criticism would be the self-reflexive, physical characteristics of the art object (such as paint on a canvas for example) with those of a (self-reflexive) psychological situation, such that narcissism becomes the medium of video, over and above any material characteristics of production or exhibition apparatus.

In certain works of Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Linda Benglis, Joan Jonas and Peter Campus, Krauss describes the monitor screen as various kinds of mirrors, reflecting the artist or the spectator into the feedback loops that they variously exploit, "the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object - an Other - and invest it in the Self." At one point Krauss connects this instant replay mechanism to the artworld's general Pop-art inherited excitement at communication via the mass-media, or "between the institution of a self formed by a video feedback and the real situation that exists in the artworld from which the makers of video come." [emphases in this and the following quotations are mine] Regardless of how the artworld had, according to Krauss been so "disastrously affected by its relation to mass-media," video art was implicitly like the mass-medium television and this kind of television was uniquely, perfectly related to the cultural and economic climate of the (predominantly New York) artworld in America in the 1970s.

3.

Without denying his own significant interest in psychoanalysis, Stuart Marshall proposed a different response to different works (notably by artists that have not since been canonised in/by the artworld) based more upon contradiction than theoretical cohesion. In 'Video: From Art to Independence - a short history of a new technology' (Screen, Winter 1984/5) Marshall accedes video (art)'s initial need to be understood within the modernist tradition. It had to not only claim a place within the visual arts generally, but would, by "being recognised in its specificity" strategically "guarantee the survival of the current means of production [that in the UK was primarily within educational institutions] and the future support of the state funding bodies."

What disrupted the relationship between video and modernism for Marshall is what serves its psychological situation for Krauss:

The video image only comes into being at the moment of playback. As a stored image its materiality consists of a complex pattern of invisible electromagnetic charges on a reel of magnetic tape. Modernist work in film involved a direct working upon the image/acetate surface.

However interested video artists were with exposing the technology they were using, they were snared in a vicious circle of only ever re-presenting its (visual) effects, rather than its (invisible) physical material: "there was an inevitable and constant confrontation with illusionism and representation" [SM]. And representation for Marshall was precisely the stuff of television. In Marshall's notes on 'Video: Technology and Practice' (Screen, Vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 1979) television is "the site of production of representations - as both an industry and a signifying practice." Remarkably different from the language of art, television is the medium from which the language of video derives (for both makers and viewers) : "[all] televisual 'literacy' was established and is controlled by the television industry." To make images from the effects of its technology, video art inevitably challenged television's "dominant modes of representation." Marshall embraced this radical contradiction if not as the medium of video art then as a reassessment of video's relationship to modernism, "At the heart of [which] lay the seeds of a new oppositional practice."

4.

Video art is oppositional. It frustrates modernism and in so doing opposes many things including Krauss's "artworld." Marshall's early video works Go Through the Motions (1975) and Arcanum (1976) look like they might adhere to Krauss's medium. Each features the close up of a mouth. Respectively, the mouth is in- and out-of-synch, with a man's voice heard on the soundtrack repeating the self-reflexive pun (and pun on self-reflexivity) "go through the motions of saying one thing and meaning another"; the mouth is entirely out-of-synch with an initial heard sentence and gradually revealed as being in-synch with a second sentence that is increasingly intercut until we only hear this second sentence and the order of things is restored. What these works reveal is not a psychoanalytic situation per se, but the televisual construction of authority through the otherwise direct, synchronised relationship between what we hear and the lips that we assume speak it.

Moreover, the organisation that Marshall co-founded in 1976, London Video Arts (a "pressure group" for distribution, exhibition and production) took its precedents from collective and co-operative structures, including the London Filmmakers Co-op amongst others, while remaining separate from it. Marshall located his (history of) video art alongside counter-cultural activism, of groups such as Radical Software in New York, or TVX, based at the Arts Lab in London in 1968, and others exhibiting in alternative London gallery spaces such as Acme or AIR. Given such an alternative social-political context video art's relationship to the art world seems simultaneously to be the sum and the least of Marshall's concerns.

5.

There are two aspects of television in Britain during the 1970s to note in relation to Stuart Marshall's work: that broadcast remained impenetrably terrestrial, closed to artists, disinterested in experiment, effectively authoritarian and that it was also preparing for imminent, significant change determined by a unique combination of the demand for diversity and (eventually) the machinations of the free market that we inherit in the form of Channel 4. The first and only British pirate television station NeTWork 21 did not make their short range broadcasts, once a week from undisclosed locations in south London, until 1986. Before then intervention by artists was rather cultural and critical, performed not within broadcast schedules but by extracting material from them, making a 'reading' of it into a video work and representing it to expose its prejudices, its formal construction, the illusions of its authority. The system itself could then be re-read, the intervention as much about literacy as any actual insertion into the medium. In Screen in 1979 Marshall cites Tamara Krikorian's Vanitas (1977) that combines images of 17th century paintings with television news reports as an example. It antecedes the explicitly political, alternative 'news' services of what came to be known as Scratch Video in the mid 1980s in works by Duvet Brothers and Gorilla Tapes. But my point is that this idea of intervention as literacy is key to Marshall's own works.

Distinct, The Streets of... and the three parts of The Love Show (all 1979) are like skeletons of the television genres that they critique. Each is divided into a series of sections that omit entertainment, and often deliberately refute visual pleasure by turning a spare analysis of television into content. The works' elliptical scripts are meta-conversations - commentaries - on the production conditions and visual and economic regulations that ordinarily define industrial television. They reveal constructed sets and fake news, standardised procedures and frustrated creative expression that makes them comparable to the work of filmmaker Owen Land, or David Lamelas's The Desert People (1974) that exposes the prejudice of televisual pseudo-anthropological documentary (albeit with a pastiche Hollywood ending). What is uniquely difficult in these three works by Marshall is that their means are also their content - they are televisual assays on the televisual. The more thorough they are in their deconstruction of this experience the less experience we are left with.

6.

As such, the relationship of Distinct, The Streets of... or The Love Show to the viewer mirrors the quandary of the subject in ideology, incapable of speaking or operating outside of it, a subject represented by the staged frustrations of Marshall's characters/ciphers in the sit-com specific Distinct on their self-referential, futile quest to work out what there is to say. Marshall's engagement with ideology might share its source - the highly influential writings of Louis Althusser - with another filmmaker, Peter Gidal, but his answer to what there is to say is entirely different. Gidal denounces all sexual representation because he finds it inevitably ideological. Marshall to the contrary chose to make work in the field of representation, specifically about sexual representation, because he found it inevitably ideological, directly aligning his practice with a feminist strategy where "a cultural politics.. would demand interventions at the ideological level in order to deconstruct the fictional worlds constructed by dominant modes of representation." ('Video: From Art to Independence)

Raymond Williams's momentous book Television: Technology and Cultural Form was published in 1974, in the midst of the cultural petitioning that marked television's transition from its 'first phase' in the UK from the 1940s to the 1970s into its 'second' and the introduction of Channel 4 in 1982. Stuart Marshall includes a reading of it in 'Video: From Art to Independence'. Williams attacks prevalent assumptions about the social effects of television by revising the prevalent theory of 'technological determinism'; in which technological development is re-cast from being simplistically asocial and self-generating, negatively impacting society with its results, into a process that is indivisibly connected to and driven by social and cultural development. For Williams television does not affect society in morally corrosive ways, but rather social (and/or state) intent, need and desires affect technological change. Marshall's Bright Eyes is an insertion into this equation, an intervention that functions on an ideological level through its participation in the construction and radical deployment of representations, i.e. it was made for television, broadcast in Channel 4's Eleventh Hour slot.

7.

The work is a counter-attack against the slew of alarmist prejudice that formed the tabloid press's response to the burgeoning AIDS epidemic - a response that collapsed difference between sexuality and the disease (to which Marshall lost his own life in 1993) - and examines the relationships between illness, homosexuality, persecution and representation. It exploits its medium socially and formally, as a public information film, a cultural history and an experiment in disruption that can be understood through another idea in Williams's work - the concept of 'flow'. Flow is the term Williams uses to describe how stations organised their schedules for viewers to stay tuned, so that individual programmes are read in the context of a larger unit, a whole evening's viewing of one programme after another, a flow into which the (unwitting) viewer is monopolised - hooked and carried along. The peculiar structure of Bright Eyes, its juxtapositions and variety of registers emulates the variety of an evening's viewing while staging its own disjunctions as a brilliant seduction into and activation of the viewing experience. There is no single authorising voice-over in the video, connections are powerfully implicit rather than didactically explained. It's various sections wildly but purposefully range wildly from dramatic reconstructions of an AIDS patient being whisked into hospital along corridors that are cleared because of a (misinformed) fear of contamination, to historical dramatisations of (prejudiced) scientific enquiry into the visual signs of illness. Along with art historical analysis, there are sections concerning the Nazi persecution of sexuality, mock confessionals, interviews, literary extracts and an extraordinary collapse of time in a first person account by a homosexual concentration camp 'survivor' spoken in the present by an actor whilst being driven along German motorways. Also included are the talking heads of medical professionals, AIDS experts, charity workers (The Terence Higgins Trust), the London gay and lesbian bookshop Gay's the Word and the video ends with the re-reading of American Michael Callen's epochal anti-AIDS-prejudice speech to Congress, now given from the arboretum at the top of the cruising ground on Hampstead Heath.

8.

Bright Eyes shares some of its material with Marshall's important video installation A Journal of the Plague Year (1984), shown in the unprecedented media installation survey 'Signs of the Times' curated by Chrissie Iles at MoMA Oxford in 1990, and it resonates with the defiant, tongue-in-cheek anti-Clause 28 collaborative video Pedagogue (1988), made with performing artist Neil Bartlett. While 'Signs of the Times' was aptly enough sponsored by Carlton Television, Bright Eyes is not only in and of the televisual (referencing and reconstructing representations) it was literally in and of broadcast television. It continuously evokes and undermines flow as a manifestation of social intent and thus effecting social and cultural reassessment. Its formal endeavour was the resolution of works like Distinct with their Spartan aesthetic and decoding-as-content as well as a political reconstitution of viewing.

Four more works for television followed, Desire, Comrades in Arms, Over Our Dead Bodies and Blue Boys, each equally reassessing (homosexual) social and cultural experience and representation, history and commentary and each commissioned by Channel 4's pioneering gay and lesbian strand 'Out'. Given the importance of the televisual not only as a form that he literally embraced but as a way of understanding Marshall's practice and of reading video art as counter to art history, how we understand these works in relation to the visual arts might be the sum and the least of our concerns.

Ian White (1971-2013) was an artist, writer, performer, teacher and curator. He was the cinema programmer of the old Lux Centre in Hoxton Square, and the co-founder and teacher of LUX's Associate Artist Programme.

This text was originally commissioned by LUX for its collection.

[amif2015]

Catherine Anyango, ‘The Death of Mike Brown, Ferguson, 9.8.2014′, 

“The police violence in America is happening almost too fast to comprehend and almost certainly too fast to document. In a series that started with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I have been documenting the last image in the victims of police shootings lives. In this film the drawn footage is worked and reworked until the figures merge with the landscape and the paper is destroyed. There is a sense of burning, referencing lynching and also foreshadowing the subsequent riots.” [Read more]

-- Catherine Anyango 

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Catherine Anyango (Norms programme)

‘That Dark’, Melancholy and Death in the Works of Catherine Anyango

By Michael Salu, ASX, February 2015

It is THAT dark. You know, the dark that exists under your fingernails that you idly pick at and flick away. It is THAT dark, the one you don’t notice as your coat is hung or your car is parked. It is THAT dark that comes with a glossy, coconut oil sheen within which you can see the reflection of your own guilt. Oh yes THAT dark, the shudder you don’t see as she continues stirring the pot of your wearied tryst. It is THAT dark, the barbed silhouette of a fence between you and them. It is THAT dark. The dark you’ve made pretty shimmering down the catwalk, but mute the din a little and listen closely and we can still hear those chains clanking with every slow manicured step. It is THAT dark. The dark that might be muttering to himself at the bus stop, ravaged and emaciated by the city’s indifference to invisible illnesses. Here the night vision goggles won’t really help, but you will be able to press ESC and back away to the main menu. THAT dark will remain, taking with it another who’ll stay shrivelling in the stagnant cold of THAT dark. He might even be your face of dark that you’ve hired to protect your evening’s entertainment and then you’ll even want to taste this dark a little when you so desire.

Catherine Anyango is acutely aware of this symbiosis and her haunting methodical scratchings are a ritualistic unearthing of THAT dark. Look at how her pencil scrapes away in earnest at the faded hopes of THAT dark. Rubbing away the technicolor delusion of our collective hard-on for everyone else’s story, she leaves bare the subjects of her drawings calling us to their honest absence. The starting point here is often the freeze frame, the news still of the crime scene. A redaction of a reduction. Those black and burnt beds draw us in to the spectral horrors of domestic banality, the flat-pack construct of an arid permanence out living our own doubts and fears (well maybe not if you shop in IKEA).

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[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance (Norms programme)

From Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance, original brochure

“Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility—the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance—sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.

The project is inspired by several years of witnessing and participating in projects that re-imagine what political protest looks like. And what it feels like. With one foot in the queer and feminist archives, and another in my lived experience of collectivity,i I first began to use the phrase as a way to think through all the reverberations and implications of the work I saw around me—work I was both invested in and identified with. Ecstatic Resistance became the form of my engagement, as both provocation and inspiration, challenge and context...

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[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Emily Roysdon’s Ecstatic Resistance (in reference to Norms programme)

Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance (schema), 2009

Silkscreen and chine collé on paper. Designed in collaboration with Carl Williamson. Printed by 10 Grand Press, Brooklyn, New York, Edition of 20

[amif2015]

Made by, for and about young gay people, with rising stars of the time Jimi Somerville and Isaac Julien among a host of others, Framed Youth won the John Grierson Award for documentary. Television hadn't seen such real lesbians and gay men talking honestly about their lives. Offering instant 80s nostalgia for an alternative club scene and a pop video informed exuberance." 17th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

[amif2015]

#AMIF2015 Workshop: The Love(s) Show: Parts 1, 2 & 3

Book now!

As part of #AMIF2015's special focus on the life and legacy of Stuart Marshall (1949-1993) artist Conal McStravick will lead a reading and performance workshop with writer Laura Guy and filmmaker Ed Webb-Ingall. Workshop participants will engage in a series of exercises departing from Stuart Marshall's writing in order to explore ideas relating to collectivity in speech, performance and video making.

Informed by the tripartite structure of Stuart Marshall's The Love Show, a series of open and energetic exercises, including collective reading, collaborative annotation and group movement, will invite participants to engage with Marshall's influential essay "Video: From Art To Independence" (1985) alongside the original working script "The Paths of Least Resistance", which later became The Love Show, Part 2 (1980).

Approaching the texts through these deconstructive, playful and anarchic methods, participants will work in groups to challenge the forms and ideas of original material; to adapt some of the strategies and processes undertaken; and consider the strategies revealed by Marshall's actors Bruce Bayley and Grazyna Monvid.

Light refreshments will be provided for this event.

This workshop is limited to 20 reservations. Booking essential and available via LUX Scotland’s Eventbrite. In the event of full booking, you may request that your name be added to a wait-list, administered by scotland@lux.org.uk.  

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: Stuart Marshall

By Conal McStravick

As a student in 1970, Bruce Bayley (b. 1947) founded the first gay society at Kingston Polytechnic. Entering the London School of Economics as a PhD candidate in 1971, he cited sociological field research in the politicisation of deviant sexual behaviour – namely the recently formed Gay Liberation Front and its milieu of gay discos, communes and meetings. Choosing to become active in GLF, Bruce left academic research behind. Increasingly he was drawn through GLF meetings and communes to a burgeoning gay and lesbian theatre scene.

Following GLF Bruce trained as an actor, starting out in 1975. In 1977 he joined the leading gay theatre company Gay Sweatshop to play Magnus Hirschfeld in the original touring production of As Time Goes By. Bruce describes the piece as “a panoramic history lesson” combining musical theatre to tell the 20th-century tale of the homosexual subject up to the moment of the Stonewall Bar altercation that sparked gay liberation. Following its resounding success the play was re-conceived as a month-long residency of weekly cabarets at the ICA where the critical moments of queer history captured- 1890s London, 1930s Berlin and 1960s New York–and inspired period-themed irreverence and satire.

It was in these ICA/ Action Space Drill Hall productions that Stuart Marshall first saw Bruce Bayley perform. They met and from 1979 to 1984 Bruce appeared with Grazyna Monvid in Stuart Marshall videos Distinct (1979), The Love Show (1980), and Bright Eyes (1984). After working with Stuart Marshall, Bruce left theatre and retrained as a drama therapist.

Bruce and I met at the BFI in March 2015 to share material we'd gathered on Stuart Marshall and Gay Sweatshop, and to talk about his experience of working with Stuart Marshall and Grazyna Monvid.

– CM

Conal: What I'd like to take you back to is talking specifically about your experience of Gay Liberation Front and Gay Sweatshop. I really think that Stuart and Stuart's work and methodology benefitted hugely with this interaction between gay politics, gay theatre alongside his existing methods as an artist. The use of historical subject matter to examine the construction of a gay political conscience by these methods was very tangible in gay theatre and gay film and video than perhaps the more experimental film and sound world that Stuart started out in and was coming out of. I'd like you to take me through that, up to the point where you met Stuart and how you met Stuart.

Bruce: My coming out was GLF. I was in my early 20s at Kingston Polytechnic and I did my BSc Sociology there. I went from there to LSE. In that transitional year I discovered that I was gay. Well, I knew I was gay but I just sort of uncovered it while I was in college. I went to the LSE and said I wanted to do research in politicisation of deviant behaviour. A big umbrella term, I was going to hide under. I was working towards a PhD, I was quite young. The politicisation of deviant behaviour became more specific -- into the politicisation of deviant sexuality. Then I had a real struggle, I was doing research in the field, which meant going to GLF discos and GLF meetings These were in Middle Earth which was in Covent Garden. I didn't go to the very first meetings in '70 in LSE itself. But I went to the meeting at LSE where they produced the first GLF manifesto - lilac coloured with a big fist on the front. I think it was 1971. I was very much a part of the GLF after that... The first year it was with other people like David Fernbach and Aubrey Walters. These were the High Priests of the Left. They were Marxists. Very, very Marxist. The development in 1971 to '72- it was all happening very quickly- the radical feminist men, the drag queens, the communes, Bette Bourne, the Colville Terrace Notting Hill commune and the Bethnal Rouge commune in Bethnal Green and the King St commune in King's Cross and the one in Brixton, which then became the Brixton Faeries.

Conal: They're all very well known now aren't they..?

Bruce: I have somewhere, a box full of all this, I was researching all of this for my PhD.

Conal: Oh wow! Interesting...

Bruce: I was going to these meetings and there was a real conflict with my tutor’s position on objectivity and my changing identification. It was a real crisis that year for me and I abandoned my research.

Conal: I'm not surprised actually...!?

Bruce: I'm now gay. It was like that was my coming out and I realised that I was using it as a means of getting in.

Conal: Subterfuge sort-of-thing...

Bruce: But also keeping it at a safe distance so I could control it. I left the research and put myself into gay theatre in one way or another- feminist theatre, gay theatre. I went to drama school, abandoned the whole academic thing... Little jobs as a jobbing actor. I got my Equity card which you had to have in those days before you could work. And then I joined a group called Bite Theatre which was a gay socialist theatre company, very short-lived.

Conal: Was this '73 or '4?

Bruce: '75 I got my Equity card, this would have been '76?

Conal: Little later... Right.

Bruce: '75/'76 something like that?

Bruce: '77 I joined Gay Sweatshop... I was in one Gay Sweatshop show which was As Time Goes By which was arguably the seminal work... And it was the time after As Time Goes By that I got to work with Stuart. 

I got to know Stuart through Jane, his partner. Jane had known some of the lesbian actors that I knew. Stuart said he saw me playing Magnus Hirschfeld in As Time Goes By and he wanted that sort of professorial, academic, lecturing, commenting kind of portrayal.

Conal: Male authority...!

Bruce: When I met Stuart he said, “You know what you did with Magnus Hirschfeld...? That's...! It was that form.

Conal: That's the key to his interest in a way...

Bruce: ...As Time Goes By had that kind of spirit. It was like a panoramic history lesson- you know? Comments... And the comments were either cabaret songs between the acts in the scenes or they were moments where the cabarets would stop and the actors address the audience and give them 'the text' and my portrayals tended to involve those. Where I would stop the action. Certainly Magnus Hirschfeld had a whole monologue to the audience about terminology, words, the use of words, the nuances, between languages. And I think that struck a chord with Stuart.

Conal: Oh definitely. The whole Hirschfeld thing appears again and again not only in Stuart's work. I don't know if you know Guy Hocquenghem, a French academic?  I haven't direct evidence, but I suspect Race d'Ep his 1979 film made with Lionel Soukaz influenced Stuart Marshall while developing Bright Eyes- they're twinned to my mind. Race d'Ep has this big sequence on the Institute of Sexology and Hirschfeld. Obviously As Time Goes By has happened at this stage. I wonder if there's this feedback happening?  I've been reading Gay Left as well- Simon Watney reviews Hocquenghem, and there are reviews of Gay Sweatshop for that matter, which I have here...

(I show Bruce a picture in a review of As Time Goes By from Gay Left No.? )

Bruce: No, I didn't but this is a cabaret. This is Drew Griffiths as Mary Whitehouse and Alan Pope?

Conal: Ah, I really like that image.

Bruce: Alan being Mary Whitehouse. Drew being- I've forgotten her name now? Anita...? Orange County Queen?? She was very fundamentalist Christian, Mary Whitehouse sort-of thing...

Conal: Anita Bryant?

Bruce: Anita Bryant. I've got the audio tape of the cabarets, all the cabarets, yeah.

Conal: Have you, really?

Bruce: I've been listening to them and some of them are really risque material. We did a season at a space called Action Space Drill Hall, which was in Chenies St. off Tottenham Court Road near Goodge St tube station, and we did something called As Time Goes By season. So we presented... At that time they had a very small underground fringe black box theatre and the AsTime Goes By set wouldn't fit in there, we had a wonderfully designed set which covered three big acts. Victorian, German...

Conal: Weimar period.

Bruce: And 60s...

Conal: Stonewall bar sort of thing....

Bruce: So they split it up. They split it up into three weeks so the first week was the Victorian week, the second week was the German week, and the third week was the Stonewall week and at the end of each night we did a relevant cabaret. So the Victorian cabaret was all music hall, Victorian songs and Wilde and all that stuff.

Conal: So it was expanded As Time Goes By... Oh right, OK...

Bruce: So then the second bit was the German bit and then we have all the German cabarets of Brecht/ Weill, the political left cabaret, Pirate Jenny, things like that. And then in the contemporary Stonewall one we had Mary Whitehouse songs which are all old music hall songs, My Name is Mary, Mary- daddle-dee-dah-dah-dah... Anyway, this is not about Stuart.

Conal: On no, no! It is in so many ways. One of my interests is that Stuart obviously came from an art school and experimental sound and video background. And that is a very different scene and a very different history I think... Its not to say Stuart's background is not political, it is. But I think you know John Cage and Alvin Lucier and the experimental sound tradition that that extends from that has a certain politics, what hasn't?

Bruce: Absolutely.

Conal: But its not an out gay political agenda. And that is a very different history I think...?

Bruce: And neither is Stuart's work strictly speaking- you know in those days there used to be that phrase 'Agit-Prop'- you know political theatre or gay Agitprop. Neither was Stuart's work gay agit-prop. It wasn't this (pointing to Gay Sweatshop review). This was absolutely in the front window of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Right in the middle of that. And touring the country and bringing  information, education and all that but in a cabaret sort of way... Stuart's work wasn't anything to do with that. Gay Sweatshop was very, very political.

(Bruce has brought a working script called The Paths of Least Resistance later re-titled The Love Show.)

Bruce: I remember The Love Show was an evolving piece. It was going to be a bit of that, and a bit of that, and then there were a whole bunch of other things. And it was kind of like a melee and it looked like a melee of things...

Conal: And it was based on language, televisual language; conventions within televisual language. So like the news reporter, the news journalist interviewing someone, the children's TV presenter,  the sit com or whatever... ?

Bruce: It was originally called The Paths of Least Resistance when it was written. And its really about sexual relationships and the secrecy of sexual abuse. One character who is 18 years old qualifies as a minor, pre-regulation. You know, there's one brilliant line back in that play, which I think Gryzyna had, which is: “What's gonna happen to fucking after the revolution.” And there was quite a lot of internal-to-the-left disagreement embodied in that. As to whether or not because, if it was considered suitable or would benefit gay people, to allow Socialist Worker or IMG (International Marxist Group/ Trotskyists) to hijack Gay Pride marches. You know a lot of it seemed to be quite deep, about taboo, it was about the place of sex and sexuality. How much can you talk about freedom of choice and information when it comes to sexuality when we're in a culture and a context in which it was taboo anyhow.

Conal: That notion, that ethical/ moral argument goes through all the work...

Bruce: Absolutely, which is why I see it as more than 'political'. I used to see it as fundamentally political. The business of life as opposed to revolution: where are we going with all this...?

Conal: If we can try to merge these differing senses of the political maybe its by saying in a philosophical sense its quite Althusserian/ post-Althusserian. It’s got that very strong emphasis of how ideology permeates society in a very intrinsic way.

Bruce: Discourse mattered a lot to Stuart in his work. Every so often there's a little bit about language and description and the use of words and playing around with the use of words. That was what was terribly exciting about his work. At some point he would say, “Put this line in!” And of course- “I don't know if this is going to work out .” Or whatever? As an actor and a performer that raw editing was really what sold Stuart to me. We knew we weren't going to do Stanislawski, get to the character, tell the story... It was- “Here... You're telling the story...” “Here... You're commenting..”. It was like when I was an actor and you're in that tradition of portraying a character and then next minute you'd be commenting on it, breaking it up. And then you would put it all together in a different way, with a different slant. That was quite obvious in Bright Eyes.

Conal: It demands quite a lot of the viewer I think. The movement in Stuart's work, the zooming in and out of the personal is political is personal if you will, is very informed by his personal trajectory at the time. I mean he's coming out as a gay man, he's making this work which is deconstructing society, the individual, the subject. But inevitably this requires a certain honesty about forming a politics of one's own subjectivity, which was to include coming out, and is about re-identifying as a gay man.

Bruce: It wasn't all that easy for the performers either. I remember Grazyna and I saying, “ I don't understand what this speech is about. Its just the speech- there's no context!” And: “...how am I meant to be presenting this?” And then Stuart would come and he would be very clear with it all... With his directions he'd say. “You know that professor type thing. You know when you're commenting...?” And then I go: “Yeah, well, but, I need a little bit more than that!”

Conal: Yeah, yeah...

Bruce: And there were no stage directions. So at times it was really challenging. As actors we had to get some sense of:“Why are we saying this now..?”.

Conal: Well, what does it actually mean?

Bruce: Yeah. Why am I driving a car while I'm saying this. From an actor's perspective you can deconstruct things up to a point but you have to have some handle on what its supposed to mean apart from some abstract theory on the deconstruction of language.

Conal: Stuart's sat on a roundtable towards the end of his life with four video makers talking about their practices and various elements of their work. Stuart mentions that after Bright Eyes he really stopped making work for a couple of years.

Bruce: He did.

Conal: Maybe you could fill this in a bit. Stuart states that then obviously with the AIDS crisis and with his work being taken up as a cause celebre in the US and North America there was this very, to his mind, significant increase in visibility of the work as people realised that it wasn't just about the AIDS crisis- there was a lot going on in that work. It was as much a history of homosexuality, a deconstruction of sexuality, gender, whatever. I don't know if you have a lot to add to that.

Bruce: In an intellectual kind-of sense, it informs where I am as a therapist. I'm not a theoretical therapist. Its a question of let's look at it afresh and let's take apart what it is that we've got. What I found exciting then and still do about Stuart's approach to these questions is that it shouldn't be a closed resolution because once you have a resolution, its closed and then it needs to be opened up again, because if you keep it open you can keep changing and transforming the universe in which you're going to be looking at all of this. And I really liked that.

Conal: Its a very artistic strategy as well. In Alvin Lucier's short piece from Leonardo Music Journal -a reflection really- looking back at Stuart’s sound work in specific, he writes about slips in language, double meanings or spoonerisms, the importance of this. He writes about how Stuart used that in his mid-period sound into early video work. So its stuff that he made under the pretext of being a sound artist primarily moving into video. He notes that this really informed the later work. It is this semiotic, signifying, deconstructive approach to language. There's a speculative thing at play there an experimental edge. I find it interesting that there was a need on Stuart's part to situate some of this deconstructive emphasis within a political project which became and was LGBTQ rights- but it seems bigger also. Its interesting to see how this develops through his move into television and broadcast media. Really by the end of his life, and arguably well before, he's very much in tune with the queer project.

Bruce: After that my relationship with, or my connection with Stuart went away, never to come back again. Jane got in touch with me to say he'd passed. And then there was the celebration of his life. And then it all went away, and then I went away in a manner of speaking. I did my course in Dramatherapy but always working with sexuality. So even as a therapist I work with queer sexuality. I was working with street homeless sex workers- male and transgender- between 1990 and 1993 and I seem to remember it was during that time- or just after that Stuart died. But since that time a lot of my work has been in sexuality, as a therapist. I have people looking at relationships, looking at identity, their own and our identities, through Dramatherapy. And a lot of it links up with some of the things I came into contact with in that period of theatre. Brechtian commentaries and deconstruction of someone's life story, rather than following set narratives. Most therapies follows this story that somebody has written and re-written themselves. My encouragement and facilitation is to wake up the story and to tell the story by the way of the views of a GP or a social worker... Looking at the story.