London's Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde PDF Download

Author: David Curtis
Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
ISBN: 0861969804
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This is the story of two short-lived artist-run spaces that are associated with some of the most innovative developments in the arts in Britain in the late 1960s. The Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967–69) was home to the first UK screenings of Andy Warhol's twin-screen 3 hour film Chelsea Girls, challenging exhibitions (John and Yoko / John Latham / Takis / Roelof Louw), poetry and music (first UK performance of Erik Satie's 24-hour Vexations) and fringe theatre (People Show / Freehold / Jane Arden's Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven / Will Spoor Mime Theatre). The Robert Street 'New Arts Lab' (1969–71) housed Britain's first video workshop TVX, the London Filmmakers Co-op's first workshop and a 5-days-a-week cinema devoted to showing new work by moving-image artists (David Larcher / Malcolm Le Grice / Sally Potter / Carolee Schneemann / Peter Gidal). It staged J G Ballard's infamous Crashed Cars exhibition and John & Dianne Lifton's pioneering computer-aided dance/mime performances. The impact of London's Labs led to an explosion of new artist-led spaces across Britain. This book relates the struggles of FACOP (Friends of the Arts Council Operative) to make the case for these new kinds of space and these new art-forms and the Arts Council's hesitant response – in the context of a popular press already hostile to youth culture, experimental art and the 'underground'. With a Foreword by Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern & Contemporary British Art and Archives, Tate Gallery.

Author: David Curtis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838714162
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing all won the Turner Prize (in 2004, 1996, 1999 and 1997 respectively) for work made on video. This fin-de-siecle explosion of activity represents the culmination of a long history of work by less well-known artists and experimental film-makers. Ever since the invention of film in the 1890s, artists have been attracted to the possibilities of working with moving images, whether in pursuit of visual poetry, the exploration of the art form's technical challenges, the hope of political impact, or the desire to re-invigorate such time-honoured subjects as portraiture and landscape. Their work represents an alternative history to that of commercial cinema in Britain - a tradition that has been only intermittently written about until now. This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart. Written by the leading authority in the field, A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004 brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organisations that have supported the art-form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of 'British cinema' and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history.

Author: David Curtis
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500776784
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Artists’ Film offers a lucid, accessible account of artists’ unique contribution to the art of the moving image in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. International in scope and accessibly written by a renowned authority on the subject, Artists’ Film is an introductory guide to the exciting and expanding field of artists’ film and an alternative history of the moving image, chronicling artists’ ever-evolving fascination with filmmaking from the early twentieth century to now. From early pioneers to key artists of today, writer and curator David Curtis offers a vivid account of the many creators who have been inspired by the cinematic medium and who have felt compelled to interpret and respond to it in their own way. In doing so, Curtis discusses these artists’ widely differing achievements, aspirations, theories, and approaches. Featuring over four hundred international moving-image makers and drawing on examples from across the arts, including experimental film, video, installation, and multimedia, this generously illustrated account offers an incomparable introduction to this continually evolving art form. A perfect read for anyone with an interest in the intersection of contemporary art and film.

Author: Simon Matthews
Publisher: Oldacastle Books
ISBN: 0857305360
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Between 1967 and 1970 Italian auteur Giovanni "Tinto" Brass directed four feature films in London, each starring a woman as the main character. Exploring the political, cultural and sexual ideas of their time, often in a deliberate pop-art style, they contain much priceless footage of now forgotten neighborhoods, galleries, clubs and events as well as an abundance of contemporary music. A fascinating blend of social history, pop culture, cinema, music and TV, Free Your Mind! examines the films, their stars and how they were made. Based on interviews with many of the surviving participants, Matthews argues that at this stage of his career, before Caligula, Brass was as significant a figure in cinema as Antonioni, Godard and many other better-known directors.

Author: Doryun Chong
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 0870708341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.

Author: Peter Gidal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317917510
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book. Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader to deal imaginatively with the contradictory issues produced by experimental film. Each concept is explored in conjunction with specific films by Andy Warhol, Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Rose Lowder, Kurt Kren, and others. Peter Gidal draws on important politico-aesthetic writings, and uses some of his own previously published essays from Undercut, Screen, October, and Millennium Film Journal to undertake this concrete process of working through abstract concepts. Originally published in 1989.

Author: Marc Burrows
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399008463
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Rock 'n' Roll fanatics, mods, beat group wannabes, underground hippies, glam rock icons: David Bowie and Marc Bolan spent the first part of their careers following remarkably similar paths. From the day they met in 1965 as Davie Jones and Mark Feld, rock 'n' roll wannabes painting their manager's office in London’s Denmark Street, they would remain friends and rivals, each watching closely and learning from the other. In the years before they launched an unbeatable run of era-defining glam rock masterpieces at the charts, they were both just another face on the scene, meeting for coffee in Soho, hanging out at happenings and jamming in parks. Here, they are our guides through the decade that changed everything, as the gloom of post-war London exploded into the technicolor dream of the swinging sixties, a revolution in music, fashion, art and sexuality. Part dual-biography, part social history, part musical celebration of an era, The London Boys follows the British youth culture explosion through eyes of two remarkable young men on the front lines of history.

Author: Marc James Léger
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1789380901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

Author: A.L. Rees
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838714197
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In his highly-acclaimed history of experimental film, A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between the cinema and modern art (with its postmodern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse. In this revised and updated edition, Rees introduces experimental film and video to new readers interested in the wider cinema, as well as offering a guide to enthusiasts of avant-garde film and new media arts. Ranging from Cézanne and Dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British film and video artists from the 1990s to the present day, this expansive study situates avant-garde film between the cinema and the gallery, with many links to sonic as well as visual arts. The new edition includes a review of current scholarship in avant-garde film history and includes updated reading and viewing lists. It also features a new introduction and concluding chapter, which assess the rise of video projection in the gallery since the millennium, and describe new work by the latest generation of experimental film-makers. The new edition is richly illustrated with images of the art works discussed.

Author: Lisa Tickner
Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre BA
ISBN: 1913107108
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national brand—all nurtured and promoted the emergence of London as “a new capital of art.” Extensively illustrated and researched, this book offers an unprecedented, rich account of the social field that constituted the lively London scene of the 1960s. In clear, fluent prose, Tickner presents an innovative sequence of critical case studies, each of which explores a particular institution or event in the cultural life of London between 1962 and 1968. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of an exuberant decade in the history of British art.