Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Anglia Ruskin University
Colour Field Films and Videos.
Two film programmes commissioned by Tate Modern, and shown in November 2008.
These two film programmes were shown at Tate Modern, coinciding with the Mark Rothko exhibition in 2008. Through researching various works Payne devised two programmes that looked at ways in which ‘colour fields’ have been explored in artists’ films and videos. The work spanned the history of experimental film and video, from avant-garde films of the 1920s to contemporary digital abstraction. The accompanying notes and introduction explored links between the selected films and videos and certain trends in abstract painting, from constructivist aesthetics through to certain colour field painters. The first programme, ‘Kinetic Colour’ focused on works in colour has been manipulated by animation or printing techniques, and generated by electronic processing or digital synthesis. The second programme, ‘Contrasting Surfaces’, explored works that involve an ambiguous relationship between the surface of the projected image and ‘filmed’ imagery. In these works the coloured surface of the screen is often accentuated by filters or mattes, and in some the subject matter refers to a flat coloured surface, but the prominence of grain or pixels, and the effect of printing processes or compositing, often sets up a tension between the perceived layers in the projected image. All of the works that Payne sourced for these programmes were shown in their original formats: 16mm and 35 mm film, and SD/HD video.
Besides constituting a research output in itself these two programmes allowed Payne to reassess his understanding of the aesthetics of colour in experimental film and video, specifically in relation to his own video practice, which has involved different permutations of colour fields. He wrote about colour in experimental film for a peer-reviewed on-line journal Inflexions (issue 4, Nov 2010), and was also subsequently commissioned to introduce a related programme, Colour Field Frames, at Modern Art Oxford in 2010.
