Output details

The Magpie Index. The Magpie Index is a video installation made up of an assemblage of monologues by singer songwriter Roy Harper, where he narrates his history, and his development as a musician and as a leading figure of the sixties and seventies counter-culture in the UK.

The primary aim of this research was to examine the relationships between subjective world-views, belief systems and social constructions. At its heart is an exploration of how a militant rejection of received belief systems, be these social, religious or aesthetic, might constitute a belief system in their own right. The work traces the construction of the Alternative and Underground approaches that shaped social attitudes in the Counter-Culture and which are now taking on a new import in contemporary cultural discourse.

The Magpie Index develops an art work to allow these ideas to be expressed and revealed through personal and subjective histories. A central intention was to investigate the networks and the hinterland of radical aesthetic expression that influenced and shaped individual and social systems of the Counter–Culture, and to place a specific moment of innovative cultural practice in a matrix of radical and non-conformist history. This was informed by the current engagement with ideas of the counter culture and its British expressions, in particular Electric Eden by Rob Young, (which builds on the approaches of Greil Marcus on punk in Lip-Stick Traces), revealing the histories and narratives of the British Folk and Folk-Rock revival.

The decision to focus on a musician was made as this was the dominant cultural form of the period and the means by which attitudes and ideas were developed communicated and celebrated. The work therefore operates as an important documentation and resource. Formally, the work explores how the 'talking head' might operate both as a barrier and as a conduit: how a cinematic scaled-image of a face is perceived and operates on the nervous system of the viewer as a constant series of invitations and refusals of understanding and interpretation.