VIDA 1976 - 1981
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I made my first 16mm film and came across photography as an arts practice at Wimbledon College of art in 1971. Between that time and 1976 I learned more about sound and mixing and recorded an album on 2 inch tape and performed many sound experiments. I came across video in 1976 and edited Opening Up then and formed Vida with Antony Cooper and Penny Deadman in early 1977 (that's me on the left). We realized that we needed a 'face' for the world. I knew that vida meant 'life' in Spanish but also Video meant 'to see' in Latin - so Vida also became an imperative: 'look at this'. Over the next 4 years we made work and presented these works at over 150 shows which we arranged and hosted. My favourite exhibition from that time was at the 1979 Birmingham 'Comicon', where we showed our documentary 'Inside Comics' featuring the story of Neil Adams suing DC Comics for the pensions of Siegel and Shuster who he found being doormen at DC (whilst he was drawing the angry phase of Superman). When we showed this it was on a 28 inch tv set to 400 wildly interested fans. BBC2's Arena, though feigning disinterest when I showed them the doc, then quickly flew to New York and made their own documentary on that subject. This episode taught me not only about ownership and intellectual copyright, but if people have a vested interest in a subject, then they'll go through a lot to realise that interest. Also, in 1978 I became involved with London Video Arts (now Lux) and organised exhibitions for a year with Dave Critchely and Chris Meigh-Andrews at the Air and Acme Galleries. In 1980 we saved some money and went to the USA and shot Towards Intuition: An American Landscape.
1976 Opening Up, (Flaxton Edits)
1976 PRESENTIMENTS 1977 -U238( (Cooper directs) 16mm 1977 - 1978 Talking Heads 1978 Inside Comics 1978 THE FASHION SHOW 1978 Gong 1979 Chinese Comics (Dedman directs) 1979 Eisenstein: Programme of Attractions (6 projector tTape Slide, converted to Video in 1983) 1979 - 1983 Money Talks 40 minutes 1980 Documentary Rape KQED SF, KABC LA, KTTW Chicago, The Tate 1980 - 1981 Towards Intuition: An American Landscape |
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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. I went on to co-organise the first National Independent Video Festival at the Film Co-op and the Second National Independent Video Festival at the ICA (I think this was 1981 and 1982). South Hill Park later took this initiative on in its set of video festivals. Later, Vida metamorphised into Triple Vision when we were asked by Channel 4 to take over a failing project - 3 x 1 hour programmes about UK Video Art which we re-titled ‘On Video’.
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).
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).
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
Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art
Roseberry Road Studios
From 6th October through to 5th November 2023 28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX