Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Newcastle University
Polytechnic. A curatorial project focusing on video, installation and tape/slide work made in the UK in the late seventies and early eighties. Staged at the Raven Row Gallery, London, it featured 12 artists: John Adams, Ian Bourn, Ian Breakwell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, David Critchley, Catherine Elwes, Roberta Graham, Steve Hawley, Susan Hiller, Stuart Marshall, Cordelia Swann and Graham Young.
The main focus of 'Polytechnic' was to research video, installation and tape/slide work made in the UK in the late seventies and early eighties by artists developing new relationships between 'experimental' media and ideas of narrative. The complex and hybrid works developed bridged autobiography, television, diaries, sexuality, popular culture, fictions, soap operas and murder and reflected a culture and practice undergoing a profound change marked by the emergence of Thatcherism.
The project interrogated ways social and economic shifts and technological change shaped these approaches: the emergence of the domestic video recorder saw artists gaining increasing access to video cameras and recording decks, and how this was shaped by the development of media departments in art schools and polytechnics, where many of the artists studied and taught.
The research was directed by the following questions:
Might a strand of British time-based and video work be convincingly identified which built on the approaches of earlier structural film practice but which sought new engagements with narrativity?
What of this work remains? How might it be located and found?
Who were the artists who were developing these approaches?
What were the conditions shaping this engagement?
Does this work shape or alter our understanding of the history of British contemporary art practice?
How might these approaches inform our imagining of possible engagements today?
How might a show be developed to represent these practices in a way that in sensitive to the conditions of their initial production and exhibition but which allows the viewer to encounter them as art works as well as historical artefacts?
This was the first contemporary exhibition of this work and area of concern. Polytechnic is widely seen as an important initiative bringing an occluded and important strand of experimental practice into view and into current debate.
