Transition 1981 - 1982
Works in "Transition" 1980 Documentary Rape KQED SF, KABC LA, KTTW Chicago, The Tate 1980 - 1981 Towards Intuition: An American Landscape, The Tate
|
As we had sued our University and won for not delivering on our degree (we had called in the CNAA as some people had failed within a system of continuous assessment and the CNAA said we should be up to degree standard within our Communications Design degree in all 5 subject areas - which common sense dictated a 15 year course to achieve that) the upshot was we were given an extra terms to achieve the degree and by January 1980 we had all finished (some of us had to give up their firsts as part of the settlement - go figure!) So we dec ided we'd buy a colour portapak and go to America, consequently we all three got jobs in the London Stock Exchange (And 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 driuving in NY was like and then started shooting and searching). After 6 - 8 weeks driving we arrive in San Francisco and serached out Video West which was a cabale 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.
When we returned we sought out a grant award of £1200 and by 1981 after Antony had returned 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 wise as can be seen from the opeing of the tape) to explain decentralisation in Local Government to the people of Birmingham. The next bit is a bot 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 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 anf they had an elementary 1 line time base corrector.
But we entered our own transitional phase and Anthony went off to Washington in the US to try other things.
When we returned we sought out a grant award of £1200 and by 1981 after Antony had returned 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 wise as can be seen from the opeing of the tape) to explain decentralisation in Local Government to the people of Birmingham. The next bit is a bot 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 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 anf they had an elementary 1 line time base corrector.
But we entered our own transitional phase and Anthony went off to Washington in the US to try other things.
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 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 follows beneath the section on exhibitions beneath 1978 and 2007. |
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). |