Review September 2005
779 words

All For Show: UK video works retrospective
July 15, 2005
Fahrenheit Gallery
West Bottoms
Kansas City, MO

A screening of short films by British video artists was presented at the Fahrenheit gallery on July 15th, 2005. This retrospective of films, curated by artist Lee Campbell, has toured internationally throughout the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the U.S. Selected for the screenings were 19 mid-career and emerging artists (or artist-collectives), many of which refer to British landscape and culture through themes of technology, contemporary art, consumerism, and landscape.

Linking directly to iconic images of English landscape, Anna Boggon’s work Offshoot depicts a narrative of a young tree. Boggon introduces the setting through still and panoramic shots of meticulously manicured topiary garden estate. Utilizing a classical soundtrack, she controls the development of the storyline as the offshoot (looking very much like a dead and abandoned Christmas tree) struggles to find a sense of belonging among its contradicting environment. The petite offshoot is shown scurrying among the rows of trees before it, unsatisfied, rushes out of the garden of topiary and into adjoining gardens and pastures where the tree examines flowers, ponds, other trees, and sheep in an attempts at self-definition. After a time, the shoot seems to realize that the place he originated is where he belongs, even if his outward appearance causes him to stick out. The film ends as he finds his place between two towering trees. This film was among a series of over twenty commissions for the Museum of Garden History in London for summer 2004.

Representational of another facet of British culture is the video Trilogy, by the artist collective Beagles and Ramsay (first names: John and Graham, respectively), illustrating British comedy through a performance of its quintessential dry humor. This artist collective, recently featured in the Venice Biennial, announced in an early artist, “we’ve strenuously attempted to create a large body of work capable of reflecting the absurd, grotesque and humorous character of British culture. Starting from the belief that art isn’t autonomous from mainstream culture, that nothing about it makes it innately superior, we’ve developed a practice which fuses the best aspects of art with those of cinema and music.” Their work has included parodies of the criminal Uncle Chop Chop, inflatable self-portraits, and gallery performances of the creation of blood pudding from their own blood (a piece which they refer to as self-portraiture). In Trilogy the Beagles and Ramsay depict themselves as old men (the costumes including bald-head caps) sitting together on a couch, in the bathroom, and in bed. As one sits with an exaggerated frown, the other monotonously recites lyrics from late 80s American pop songs by Madonna and Prince.

Elly Clarke’s film Standing Still consists of one continual shot of a ski slop scene from a single viewpoint. Its simplicity, use of available sound, and comparatively lengthy timeframe aids in the overall beauty of the piece, which seems to give the sense of window-gazing and day-dreaming. The dark forms of the skiers and lifts contrast sharply with the white landscape, an effect causing the forms to become visually abstracted into raw shapes lingering throughout the scene.

Subtlety also becomes a key element in Marion Coutts’s film epic. Coutts, a video and sculpture artist, has become one of Britain’s most innovated contemporary artist after participating in one of the most prodigious artist residencies in Britain, the Kettle's Yard Artist Fellowship (2003-2004). In her film epic, Coutts utilizes Super 8 film to depict a mythic performance by four somber adults who carry a black fiberglass horse. Traveling through the streets and gardens of Rome, the horse recalls heroic equestrian monuments and sculptures of past.

In one of the final films in this retrospective, Juneau Projects (an artist collective that includes Phil Duckworth and Ben Sandler) is represented through the short performance video A Richer Future is Still Ours. In this film, a young man is shown creating a simple microphone, attaching it to blank sheets of paper, and then processing the sheets (and the attached microphones) through a paper shredder. The amplified resulting audio is a static white noise interlaced with the crunching and zapping extracts of the microphone being destroyed. Recalling a similar project installed by Juneau Projects titled Motherf**king Nature which included the documentation and performance of a wood chipper consuming tree branches, •A Richer Future• seems to continue Juneau Projects’ artistic interest in documenting the destructive capabilities of technology, and inventing new ways to depict the joined roles of the creator and destroyer.

Also shown in this collective were works by Alex Baker, Sophie Brown, Sarah Collins, Alexander Costello, Douglas Fishbone, Angela Hicks, Adrian Lee, Jasper Joseph Lester, Paul Masters, Elizabeth McAlpine, Miller and McAfee Press, Harold Offeh, Diane Timmins, and Sarah Turner.