THE PRESENT AND THE PAST |
Music & Sound 1969 - 1970, a variety of projects
|
|
AN OVERVIEW
Since 1976 I've made photographic and moving image art works to exhibit (I made a small film in 1971 and sound pieces before that). From the first works which Vida made in 1976/1977 (myself, Penny Dedman and Antony Cooper) we would always exhibit work in as many different kinds of places as possible - no matter what. From a gallery to a University students event to the Birmingham Comcon in 1979 with a 28 inch monitor, a decent sound system and an audience of 300 (and here we realised there was no point in making work unless it is seen - and importantly: that good sound quality is crucial). In the early days we created a mix of experimental works, such as Presentiments, though to works of democracy, for councils such as Going Local (for Walsall Council) and started to try to earn money so that we could broaden our ability to make work with better and more varied and advanced equipment - so that we might educate ourselves in the medium... |
'The Past' is spilt into 9 areas:
1: Vida 1976 - 1981 2: Transition 1981 - 1982 3: Triple Vision/Videomakers 1982 - 1985 4: Triple Vision & Channel 4 1985 - 1992 5: A Trip Sideways to the BBC 1988 - 1990 6: Cinematography & Scripts 1992 - 2006 7 Academia 2007 - 2016 8. CineFest 2015 - 2016 9. Sedition Art 2015 - 2023 10. Makersplace & NFT's 2019 - 2022 11. 2025 and Beyond? |
|
In the early days equipment was not available from Arts bodies such as London Video Arts (I can't remember the exact date but LVA put in for an award into Arts Council and Greater London Arts Association - for some edit equipment around circa 78/79). Places that did have equipment were generally community video outfits such as Andy Porter's West London Video and Nick Fry and Jon Dovey's Oval Video (and naturally commercial outlets hired whatever you could afford). The only problem was that Arts and Community were seen in the UK as two different behaviours - whereas in the USA the work was much more integrated - plus the difficult issue (then) of film vs video was pushed by film people who said that video was not as good as film (both qualitatively and also aesthetically) a line which soon had to change in the 80's when Channel 4 had budgets that could not often support film production - that's when we (by then Antony wanted time out for other things and Kez Cary joined Penny and myself and the change to Triple Vision happened end of 1981) so then we were being asked to inform film people how to accommodate those more limited budgets - by film people. Ironically in Vida/Triple Vision we had all shot film before in Vida/Triple Vision (U238 and Antony Cooper liked super 8 and shot a fair amount of it) but we responded to the excitement of video - later I was to shoot a lot of film for commercial bodies such as Time & Universal. I always believed - from the first moment of walking into an LVA meeting - that the artist should be able to use their medium of expression knowledgeably - just as a 15th century painter would know how to pix their base medium and use pigments on that medium.
To that end we exhibited in over 100 maybe as high as 150 screenings from 1977 to end 1981, I sent The Fashion Show to Long Beach Museum and that was shown in exhibition there - plus that artwork had a soundtrack by Kraftwerk and the BBC contacted us to use it on Top Of the Pops but in the end dropped it because Kraftwerk sent them a film. We also received a prize at the 4th Tokyo Video Festival for Talking Heads in 1979 and when we went to NY, Washington, SF and LA in 1980 we put shows on in a few communities - one of which was a dance community in Washington - and we also made some work for Video West in SF which was broadcast out of KQED, KABC and also WTTW on the same night which covered about half the USA. So by the end of 1981 we'd exhibited our work in around 150 exhibitions, organised with several others (Oval, Berwick Street Film Collective, Film Co-op and we were LVA's representatives in The First National Independent Film and Video Festival at the Film Co-op end 1981 which went on into an iteration at the ICA in 1982 and then became South Hill Parks festival strand for some time (and was important at the time). We also exhibited Towards: Intuition: An American Landscape at the Tate in late 1982 - my memory is hazy about this even but Jon Dovey wrote a critique of the work which I think went out in a magazine (could South Hill Parks magazine started that early?). We also made a set of 'democratic' works (Going Local for Walsall Council) thinking that whether a work was overtly biased - as with a political piece form a left wing or anarchist viewpoint- or whether it was aesthetically biased (we always advised unions they must speak using the same media as TV) Hence for the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom we created Making News, which got us a visit from the ACTT and the NUJ where we were threatened with having our tickets taken away - which was a bit of a joke as they only gave us Non-Broadcast tickets at the time (the threat was about us discovering something the BBC shouldn't have done). Plus we felt that very experimental works were in and of themselves subversive... By 1982 we were having more works accepted into foreign festivals and meeting people who were not being recognised in the UK as important - but clearly our European brothers and sisters disagreed (for instance the Duvet Brothers, Gorilla Tapes... and also two of us from Triple Vision then started to manage Videomakers - a studio in Soho - where we shot for the likes of Ridiey Scott on casting jobs (because we lit well) and then became MTV stringers because we understood the US tech (the UK worked at a differnet frequency and lighting was often an issue). From that we shot quite a few famous acts. We meanwhile kept making art and also welcomed people like George Barber and George Snow into the studio for little or no money and when Channel' 4s Independent Commissioning Department grew out of the Independent Film and Video Producers Association - and suddenly film makers really needed what we knew about video - then things changed once more. By about 1986 we'd organised an international co-production with 18 groups from across Europe and 4 different TV Companies - the Production was called The State of Europe. Since then, I've had work shown in many international Museums, Galleries and Festivals and my work sits in a variety of collections and archives (New York Filmmakers Co-op, Rewind Study Collection, Milan InVideo AICE, Video Les Beaux Jours Strasbourg, The Lux Centre London, The Harris Museum Preston Lancashire holds 'In Re Ansel Adams, The Arnolfini Bristol holds 'The Fashion Show, The Museum of Modern Art Berlin holds 'Prisoners'. |
Since 2015 I've been represented by sedition, an online platform that sells editions of the work which has a 'watermark', which the collector pays to have removed. Sedition Art. Access is via the cloud and you have a free account to access what you buy - and these works sit in your 'Vault'. I'm the 9th most collected artist of several thousand artists. Sedition Rankings
In October 2023 I had a Retrospective of 50 years of my work which featured more than 50 plus pieces in a series of loops, in a variety of settings, including a large triptych of screens and a set of installations. This ranged over 4 floors of which the Ground Floor was on the subject of The Human Form, The First Floor was concerned with The Landscape (both inner and outer), the intermediate 2nd floor was concerned with early work from 1976 - 2010, and the third floor was concerned with recent collections of work from 2018 - 2023. UBelow there's a small video of a Retrospective of mine from 2010 - created before the public entered.
Latest Retrospective - Bath 2023:
Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art Roseberry Road Studios From 6th October through to 5th November 2023 28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX |