Absent Narratives
Malcolm Dickson

Although there are significant differences in the ways that the image is reproduced, the distinctions between film and video within the visual arts as tools of expression have dissolved in the approach of many current practitioners - Luke Fowler, Torsten Lauschmann, Dalziel + Scullion, Smith + Stewart, and Douglas Gordon, amongst the more well-known exponents. Whilst this is welcome, it is important to stress that this should not be at the expense of critical clarity regarding materialist precoccupations with medium specificity, areas that many younger artists might be either uninterested in, or just ignorant of. It was therefore refreshing to see The Map devote a feature report by Isla Leaver-Yap’s titled ‘Can Video Thrive as a Marginal Activity’, in the Autumn of 2006, coinciding with both the Douglas Gordon exhibition at the National Galleries in Edinburgh and the screening and discussion at the Edinburgh Film Festival around new productions by artists who had benefited from the Scottish Arts Council’s dedicated video art fund. However, there were gaps in that piece that indicate something of a critical absence in the visual art narrative, and which throw up the urgent need for an archive of Scottish experimental moving image culture to fully appreciate the diversity of approaches and events that have helped shape present circumstances.

In Scotland the history isn’t recorded yet and is much more fragmentary, but a few names and events might give some indication of a potential chronology that such an archive could embrace. A critical forerunner can be found in Margaret Tait, a pioneer of a poetic and experimental tradition of Scottish cinema whose works date from the late ‘50s onwards. Preserving and re-presenting the Margaret Tait collection is currently being undertaken by the Scottish Screen Archive, and through this attention a 16mm touring programme was curated by LUX, and screenings held at the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. In 1971 the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) commissioned English artist David Hall, who presented a series of radical conceptual interruptions on Scottish Television, not only credited as being the first artists’ interventions screened on British TV, but which many regard as the beginnings of ‘British’ video art. In 1973, an exhibition titled ‘Open Circuit’ was held at the SAC gallery, which included video installations by David Hall and Tony Sinden, alongside photography and film by other artists. In 1976 another exhibition at SAC’s premises in Charlotte Square called ‘Open Cinema’ included work from artists associated with the London Filmmakers Collective. In the programme introduction Deke Dunsiberre stated that ‘this programme of “expanded cinema” offers Edinburgh the opportunity to see recent examples of an area of international avant-garde filmmaking… By inviting film artists to present new work… the SAC is opening new perspectives on the cinema; perspectives yielding film installations which should be viewed not in the narrow context of conventional film history, but in the general context of art history’.

In Glasgow in 1976, the first major exhibition of video installation took place at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow. ‘Video: towards defining an aesthetic’ argued for specific codes of consideration in the medium of video with David Hall’s article in the accompanying catalogue beginning with the challenge: ‘A brief attempt at some of the distinctions between video and film may be useful’. It was organised by Tamara Krikorian and Steve Partridge, with SAC Officer Lindsay Gordon in active support. In parallel to the exhibition, a symposium was held called ‘The Future of Video in Scotland’. ‘An Ephemeral Art’ by Tamara Krikorian took place in April 1979 at the Third Eye Centre and then in October ’79 at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. This exhibition, which the catalogue states consisted of ‘7 TV sets, silk screen and live butterflies’, was therefore not the first exhibition of video art in Scotland, as Leaper-Yapp’s piece states, and although it is important to the chronology, this is more symptomatic of the lack of a visible historical continuity than a case of revisionism on the writers part (a ‘plotting’ of events was also discussed in a piece in Variant called ‘Moving History’, Autumn 1998). It wasn’t until 1986 that the next major examination of video occurred, EventSpace I, which took place at Transmission. At the time the Glasgow Herald wouldn’t send a journalist because they said it wasn’t art and it wasn’t TV, a common reproach in the attempts to acknowledge video within contemporary practice

In 1986 and 1987, Pictorial Heroes were included in the Society of Scottish Artists shows at the RSA in Edinburgh, a support in no small way accredited to the outward-looking George Wylie. As a result of lobbying by the ‘time-based’ constituency, in 1987 the SAC established the short-lived Visual Artists Video Bursary, a forerunner to the current scheme. (The equally short-lived ‘New Projects Scheme’ recognizing the emergence and convergence of moving image work, installation, and performance followed this). Also in 1987, another major video installation show called ‘Interference’ was staged at the Seagate Gallery in Dundee. In 1989, the video section of the National Review of Live Art took place at the Third Eye Centre, which included a number of dazzling installations furnished largely by equipment and expertise from the video department in Dundee. In 1990, the multi-media video installation ‘Well of Patience’ by Daniel Reeves was staged the Pearce Institute in Govan, an ambitious exploration of video poetics.

In the late 80s and early nineties a number of single tape packages targeted at galleries and cinema venues appeared which were shown widely in the UK and abroad: Fields and Frames produced ‘Made In Scotland’ I, II, and III, profiling the ‘best’ video art being produced in Scotland, ‘Passages’ in 1991 (Three Women Artists) and ‘Semblances’, another touring programme of video art from women artists in 1993. These were funded by the Scottish Arts Council, in an attempt to elevate the profile of video art, and included subsidy for U-Matic playback equipment which was offered to venues, thereby addressing the problem of access to the technology to show video art. In 1989, two issues of Variant Video were produced, one of which included some of the stylish work being produced in Dundee and a number of interviews with media artists, curators and theorists, shot at the first Video Positive Festival in Liverpool in 1989. In 1990, as part of Glasgow Year of Culture celebrations, ‘19.4.90 Television Interventions’ inspired by the 1971 predecessor were commissioned and broadcast on Channel 4; and in 1991, ‘Not Necessarily’ was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Scotland (a co-production with the TV Workshop in Dundee) and included ten 8 minute programmes of new video work by Scottish based and English artists.

The reference to the demise of the Fringe Film and Video Festival also carries some significance. In 1991 the festival added ‘Video’ to its title and at that point the first video art proper appeared in the festival. FFVF and its sister festival, New Visions in Glasgow - who staged festivals in a number of Glasgow venues in 1992, ‘94 and ’96 - were part of a growing climate of plurality within Scottish film and video making, which passed under the radar of dominant mainstream concerns over art on the one hand and industry driven film on the other. They established grassroots initiatives for the production and exhibition of creative video, experimental film and new media, activities that led to an increase in popularity. Both these festivals were project funded and as demand increased, a review was instigated in or around 1996 with a need to ‘target resources to ensure that provision is made for future initiatives to be developed in an effective and strategic manner’. The SAC then took the area seriously, as was evidenced in their commissioning of two separate consultancies, one looking at a possible new organisation and the other on an equipment resource (using Liverpool’s MITES as one inspiration). The former resulted in the Moving Image Art Agency, which then morphed into New Media Scotland, which also marked a shift in concern into new media and web-based art and away from what might be perceived to be the more traditional media arts of gallery practice and film and video festival models. The latter report concerning an equipment bank for the arts sector was updated by New Media Scotland, but this still remains unresourced and problematic.

Video, however, has had a higher profile in the major art institutions, despite the fact that in the eighties there was only one show in Edinburgh of video work – Marie Jo Lafontaine in 1989 at the Fruitmarket, followed by Marina Abramovic in 1995, video work in the British Art Show, and Bill Viola in 1998. Most of this activity, however, included work by artists already made famous by the international art market, with the credible and important exceptions of Dalziel + Scullion at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Smith + Stewart at the Fruitmarket in 1999.

A number of books have just been published examining the origins and evolution of video art: ‘Experimental Film and Video’ by Jackie Hatfield; ‘A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain’ by David Curtis; ‘Video Art - The Development of Form and Function’ by Chris Meigh Andrews, ‘Video Art: A Guided Tour’ by Catherine Elwes and ‘Video Loupe’, ‘Analogue’ (eds Meigh Andrews and Elwes), are just some of these. Some excellent research has resulted in some online resources which capture the same field of activity: Luxonline, The British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, and of course, REWIND – one of many European equivalents is ‘40 Year of German Video Art’ which has been "rescuing" and "preserving" what they deem as a significant art form in their country. Some of these concerns have been reflected in two international seminars organised by Street Level: ‘Video>Art>Scotland’ in 2005 and ‘The Work of Media Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ in 2006, both of which were timed to coincide with the Glasgow International Festivals in those respective years. ‘Test Transmissions’ at the CCA in Glasgow, and the REWIND exhibition at the Visual Research Centre in Dundee restaged a number of installations from the formative period of video art’s history, and despite the fact that these events were underpublicised, in particular the CCA show, there was a remarkable freshness and vitality to the works on show, especially in REWIND, which suggests that much video work that populates galleries is rather lacklustre in comparison, a presumption that shrinks in the face of what Steve Bode of the Film and Video Umbrella says about the health of the practice:

‘The video aesthetic is not single but multiple. Within today’s visual art world, video inhabits a multi-channel moving-image landscape that stretches from artists’ film to new forms of digital media (where works from these still-distinct practices are regularly shown side by side in large-scale survey exhibitions). Some of the specificities of video may have become increasingly blurred in this expanded arena (in the same way that the VCR is being slowly sidelined by advances in digital technology), but ‘video’ as a generic term for much of this work is proving surprisingly versatile and enduring. Artists’ video, however one might choose to define it, continues to go from strength to strength’.
Contemporary magazine, special issue on video number 71.

Alongside the lack of a publicly accessible archive, what has also been lacking is the continuous tradition of writing and reviewing, in order to track activities but also tackle the diverse philosophical and critical discourses around the practice. Sean Cubitt, in the catalogue to ‘Analogue’ has written: ‘Piled up in one-off little mags and catalogues, mimeographed sheets and letraset layouts are the fragments of a thriving culture swept under the carpet of history by a sad confusion of missed opportunities, crossed wires, confused responsibilities and overcrowded archives. Given the technological savvy of its practitioners, film and video art in the UK has been for the most part an oral culture, every time one of its old guard dies, like the African adage about fathers, it is like a library has burnt down.’

Image references, top to bottom:

'Video:towards defining and aesthetic' catalogue, March 1976
'Open Cinema' catalogue, August 1976
Pictorial Heroes, installation, 1986 part of Eventspace1 at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow
'Made In Scotland' catalogue , 1989
Daniel Reeves, 'Well of Patience', Pearce Institute, Glasgow, 1990

This article references some points raised in a discussion between Malcolm Dickson and Chris Byrne in a piece called Moving History which appeared in Variant magazine, issue 6, volume 2, Autumn 1998. The piece attempted to start plotting a history of the profusion of film and video activity in Scotland:

"There is currently an absence of real discussion in Scotland about what we might call Moving Image art. Video art, experimental film, screen-based art displayed on computers or via the internet, it is all out there, happening. It's just that no-one seems to talk about it much. There is a sense of operating in a relative vacuum: ideas and influences appear from elsewhere, outwith Scotland. Yet there are traditions of work in these fields by artists within Scotland. It seems that very few know much about them. It is essential to begin the process of mapping a history of these areas of practice, with a specifically Scottish context..." Chris Byrne, http://www.variant.randomstate.org/6texts/Moving_History.html