LONGER FORM ARTWORKS

Longer form moving image art is the most difficult of all forms - shorter works can be compared to chamber works in music, symphonic poems maybe a little longer, 10 - 15 minutes multi-screen extrapolations of long forms work to change the way an audience views - multi-part works get over the issue of long extended extrapolations of themes - and then there's the longest form itself which so few video artists try because often only one idea is being worked through and the short-form chamber lengths works best. So here are a set of variants on the above - if 5 minutes equals short form then a multiple of that - say 3/4 times can be a longer form work, below though you'll see variants running up to 75 minutes.

​The issues/opportunities with durational art become quite difficult at longer forms because this is a length  expected of both drama and feature films and so there are sometimes uncomfortable issues that come up that cross over into that of narrative (episodic issues for instance). Drama is driven by narrative - moving image art requires other strategies to take the audience into a different reflective or contemplative state  where they are not dependent on 'interpretive mind'. Viola's aphorism is "Light is to the eye as Duration is to consciousness" - meaning that as light excited s the eye - so duration of a shot (for instance) can open up a different way of viewing. A function best known to filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Sergei Parajanov.

• ​Longer Form Artworks
• ​Installations 1992 - Present
• ​Short Works With a Life of their Own
• Collaborations Terry Flaxton & Shawn Bell
• Collaborations Terry Flaxton and Emily Burridge
• Collaborations Terry Flaxton & Al Lethbridge
• Documentaries from the mid '70's to early '90's
• Moving Image Art Resources
• Blink 2003 - 2012​
• Work on Racism 1976 - 2000
• Short Dramas
• ​Music Industry Work
• Music and Sound 1969 - 1975
• An Early History of Video Art in the UK​
• Theatre Work

TALKING HEADS 1977/1978 - 20 minutes

This was the first serious and delerious piece on analysing the methods and intents of the media - but done in a creative way. We realised that the treatment of the ideas was where the issue of 'art' was buried within. And then that started to power what kind of art we were then to make win the documentary form. The 'Talking Head' is what people in the media call the news reader.

Towards Intuition: An American Landscape 1980/1981 - 55 minutes

​Having worked to get the money to first buy a colour portapak and then go to America - we (Vida) went in search of intuition - hoping that as we crossed America, the issues would be made available to us, and their 'solutions' would be revealed. This work is affected by the unstable video system that captured the colour and strangely degenerated over time. People who are fascinated by the video image allow degeneration as a useful commentary on the subject of the work itself.

Eurythmics 1983 - 22 Minutes

Sometimes an opportunity presents itself - there you are actually shooting and you start to realise that the footage you're gathering is so much more than it's original intention as it speaks to the time you're in  (in this case as a piece for MTV for hype reasons) and you know that it has relevance, like found footage discovered later - but what if you find it and you can go back into the past to influence the shooting and you yourself continue shooting with an end in mind - that the shooting and the editing is a formality - that the piece has formed itself already and you simply have to complete your task?

The World Within Us 1987 - 16 minutes

The World Within us was voiced by Johnathan Pryce and was a set of my poems to new digital imagery - this won prizes at Montbeliard and Locarno - There were going to be three parts to this work making an hour long piece but time and circumstance changed things.

Part one  originally prompted by a  series of events, seeing Tavernier's Sunday in the Country (about a successful artist who contronts the fact that he'd never been authentic and true to his talent), reading A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper-Powis and the impending death of a thirty year old friend from cancer...

Signs and Symbols of the Human Condition  2010/2019 - ​14 minutes

​A Symphonic Poem - originally 30 minutes due to my original symphonic composition, I then cut this down. The Good and the bad of being human represented in a metaphorical manner

Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age 1979/2018 - 75 minutes

I received a commission from Channel 4 after writing to them to enable me to challenge some ideas proposed in a piece of work a friend had made for La Sept, L'objet d'art dans l'age electronique from Baudrillard and Virillio - and then the Arts Council chipped in after I'd shown the work at the Tate (where I added a  second work) and the work became three parts to be exhibited in the 1991 Bonne Biennale... then I made 4 more works... and then three more and eventually around 2018 I concluded the work (I'm not sure how many pieces are in there now).
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To Stand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape 2011/2018  - 62 minutes 

After pulling off a project entitled Monumental Portraits of the Working People of Somerset - a collaboration by myself, Charlotte Humpston and our son Jack Flaxton - and again in search of a Platonic truth, Charlotte Humpston and I, with the help of Josh Randall, took the original footage and started to gather more as we then began looking for the meaning of the Digital, via the analogue...

The Human Gaze in an Age of Quantum Entanglement 2022/2023

​40 Minutes (8 parts)