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Transition 1981 - 1982
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In terms of Vida as a project, we were working in both art and documentary forms, realising very early on, that a documentary is only a documentation of the attitude of the maker to their subject at the time of making. This was not the highest level of insight, but it took the independent sector many years to grasp this and now forms the basis of theoretical studies of media practice per see - except that, as Terry Eagleton has noted, the original project of theorising, that of revealing truth, is not the primary point. Towards Intuition was shot in 1980 (edited and finished in 1981).
So we decided we'd buy a colour portapak and go to America, consequently we all three got jobs in the London Stock Exchange (an Education!) and bought the pak, bought tickets and we flew to Washington DC with the intention of searching for the fount of 'intuition'. We bought a car, drove to New York and back (to see what NY and also what driving in NY was like and then started shooting and searching). We went to the Kitchen Downtown Community Centre - heart of video - where key videomakers had been (and years later met up with Steina and Woody Vasulka in New Mexico). After 6 - 8 weeks driving we arrived in San Francisco and searched out Bay Area Video Coalition, then Video West which was a cable TV station, showed them out work, which they said they liked but didn't understand (!) and asked us to make a piece which went out on the weekend that they connected with KABC in Los Angeles and KTTW in Chicago - subsequently that piece Documentary Rape went out on that weekend to half the USA. Anthony decided to go to Peru, and went off. Fired up by our American Adventure we returned we sought out an award of £1200 from Greater London Arts and by 1981 after Antony had returned from Lima via Washington, we bought time at Fantasy Factory and edited together Toward Intuition: An American Landscape. Emboldened by this we got a screening at the Tate and then started approaching people for commissions and suddenly Walsall Council gave us the money to make Going Local with John Wesley Barker doing the music (mostly live as can be seen from the opening of the tape) to explain decentralisation in Local Government to the people of Birmingham. |
BELOW: Documentary Rape 1980 4 minutes 30 secs
BELOW: Towards Intuition An American Landscape 1981 55 minutes
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The next bit is a bit of a blur but: We had to get jobs and I did some visiting lecturing at the London Film School (which still had people from Ealing Films who'd directed work like the Titchfield Thunderbolt - Charles Creighton I think - and I met an engineer Ron, in a brown coat who'd worked with Marconi - he told me about Turret Cameras with revolving lenses plus engineering tips to line a studio up.
I became head of Television within 6 months for another six months stint and then started working with Zakya Powell who did publicity for Merchant Ivory Films and I also did publicity and sold space at the 1st London Multi-Media Market.
I was also freelance shooting (I didn't know I wasn't supposed to given the union, BECTU's hold over work and I shot The Grace Jones One Man Show (you have to remember, I knew nothing except I could do things if I put my mind to them) and there were very few freelance camera people around. Anyway, 1982 sometime, I found myself as 2nd editor and principle cameraman at Green Man Productions on Shaftesbury Avenue. Peter the editor told me how to work the EMS editing kit which could run up to 15 machines - but we had an edit suit with three so we could with the vision mixer in between affect a dissolve between two images - plus Green Man was owned by electrocraft and they had an elementary 1 line time base corrector.
We then initiated the First National Independent Video Festival as a collaboration at the FIlm Co-op and gather a group of interesting people, Dovey, Collinson, Critchely and Alex Graham from the ICA - and we had all shot the punk nights there with Oval Videos new kit and we chained together cameras with one setting the blanking phase and the rest following.,We got covered in spit of course if we shot in the mosh pit. The next two National Festivals ha[pened at the ICA (some books mistakenly credit this to SOuth Hill Park which had their own evcents happening but I think that was from 1982 forwards...
But then we entered our own further transitional phase and Anthony went off to Washington in the US to try other things.
NEXT 3: Early Broadcast work, Triple Vision/Videomakers 1982 - 1985
I became head of Television within 6 months for another six months stint and then started working with Zakya Powell who did publicity for Merchant Ivory Films and I also did publicity and sold space at the 1st London Multi-Media Market.
I was also freelance shooting (I didn't know I wasn't supposed to given the union, BECTU's hold over work and I shot The Grace Jones One Man Show (you have to remember, I knew nothing except I could do things if I put my mind to them) and there were very few freelance camera people around. Anyway, 1982 sometime, I found myself as 2nd editor and principle cameraman at Green Man Productions on Shaftesbury Avenue. Peter the editor told me how to work the EMS editing kit which could run up to 15 machines - but we had an edit suit with three so we could with the vision mixer in between affect a dissolve between two images - plus Green Man was owned by electrocraft and they had an elementary 1 line time base corrector.
We then initiated the First National Independent Video Festival as a collaboration at the FIlm Co-op and gather a group of interesting people, Dovey, Collinson, Critchely and Alex Graham from the ICA - and we had all shot the punk nights there with Oval Videos new kit and we chained together cameras with one setting the blanking phase and the rest following.,We got covered in spit of course if we shot in the mosh pit. The next two National Festivals ha[pened at the ICA (some books mistakenly credit this to SOuth Hill Park which had their own evcents happening but I think that was from 1982 forwards...
But then we entered our own further transitional phase and Anthony went off to Washington in the US to try other things.
NEXT 3: Early Broadcast work, Triple Vision/Videomakers 1982 - 1985
Upcoming Exhibitions in 2024
- UK RWA Open Bristol September - December - Australia, Adelaide July, A Life in Video Art, Retrospective, July - Sedition International, Online Release, Un Tempo Una Volta, April - Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello & Palazzo Bembo, Exhibition titled Visions, Venice, March Between 2008 and 2023 Terry exhibited work in the China, USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Iran, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, France, Norway, Malta, Madeira and the UK - some of these countries many times. A complete list of Exhibitions between 2008 and 2023 can be found on the landing page. |
EXHIBITIONS Between 1978 onwards
In 1978, the Fashion show, (made in 1977) was exhibited at the Long Beach Museum by Kathy Rae Huffman, (curator of moving image work). Next came the Fourth Tokyo Video Festival where Flaxton, Cooper and Dedman's piece (written by Flaxton) Talking Heads, won a prize. From then on Flaxton's work was shown at many festivals, notably the Worldwide Video Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands, but many, many other places including Moscow, Tokyo, Algiers, San Francisco, Locarno, Montbeliard, Paris, Milan, Rome, Seoul, Amsterdam - and many other places around the world. In 1986 the British Film Institute as well as Channel 4 asked Flaxton to Shoot “Out off Order” the 3rd electronically produced and released on 35mm ‘film’ in history (after “Harlow” starring Ginger Rogers, 1965 and 200 Hotels, 1972). Though travelling as a cinematographer and occasionally exhibiting between 1992 and 1998 there was a hiatus in Flaxton's work between Zagorsk (1992 and Skin Deep (1999) Flaxton in fact worked on many artists pieces and brought a high level of lighting to many people's work. Having come across HD in 1990, between 2000 and 2007 Flaxton concentrated on HD as a developing production form and tested cameras for Panasonic and Sony and by 1999 he had shot an HD work in the US which was mastered as a 35mm output at Du Art Labs in New York - and from then on spoke at many seminars including the NFT to speak about the transition form Standard Definition (720 x 576 pixels) to the then low level HD Standards of 1280 x 720, the faux HD of 1440 x 1920 and finally the full 1920 x 1080 standard that we all know today (2023). So in eventually entering academia in 2007 with an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship - where the candidates charge was to discover how technical and creative innovations feed upon each other, Flaxton then began a second wave of production as an artist - where, having spent many years on moving camera cranes and dollies - Flaxton chose to use HD and the camera itself as a window, a portal on, not only the world - but importantly on the very thing that looks: the self. By 2015 Sedition Art had arrived and was a perfect fit for what Flaxton later called his 'Chamber Works’. Flaxton also began producing long form moving image artworks during this period characterised by “Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age” (began in 1992 and finished in 2018) , “To Sand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape” (2011 to 2018) and latterly “Mexico: Landscape of the Heart” (2023). |