The Video Show – Serpentine Gallery, London – Conflict

Conflict was a video-work based on an installation with performance elements. Exhibited at The Video Show, Serpentine Gallery, London in 1975, along with two other works, Emotive Progression, and IamDead. Unfortunately all three works were lost and only photographs of the making of the works survive.

 

 

The Video Show was Europe’s most comprehensive video exhibition at the time.

The Video Show was a festival of independent video with performances, artists’ videos, video graphics, community video, closed-circuit installations, a tape library, a giant TV screen, and live participatory events.

The exhibition included a combination of British and international programmes to offer a comprehensive survey of world video (13 countries were included). Only a small proportion of the British videos had been publicly screened before, and the show was an opportunity to see the variety of work undertaken in Britain over the preceding few years.

A series of closed-circuit installations and live performances from artists working in the field were commissioned to demonstrate the ‘live’ qualities of video. Many of these programmes required audience interaction.

The exhibition itself created a space to debate the relationship between what was viewed as Video Art and what was viewed as Community Video. David Hall attempted to make a distinction between these two uses of video with a focus on the distinctive form of each in issue four of Film Video Extra published by the GLAA in Spring 1974:

‘Video Artists are, by inference, undoubtedly equally aware of the potential of the Popular Medium as independent political and community organisations yet their methods and objectives are usually quite different. Such work takes on two forms, though the two often overlap. One is the production of videotapes, the other live performances and closed circuit installations’.

The Video Show exhibition marked a moment in video’s short history, since its arrival in the UK, where video art and community video momentarily converged as distinct yet complimentary forms. The curators of the exhibition invited ‘all independent tape makers working in Britain’ to show up to an hour of their work. As a result of this open submission process they had over ‘100 hours of tape from different sources’ covering ‘both artists’ and political/community video work’ with only a small proportion screened publicly previously. It was the first time many UK video practitioners working with video met and were able to see each other’s work, described in Julia Knight’s survey of the distribution and practice of alternative moving image by David Critchley as a ‘revelation’. A number of the video artists involved in the exhibition including David Hall and Stuart Marshall went onto form the London Video Arts (LVA) in the summer of 1976, which went onto become what LUX is today. Very much duplicating the model taken up by the London Filmmakers Co-op, the LVA focused on creating a dialogue between interested parties: distribution, the setting up of independent workshop facilities and the organisation of future screenings and exhibitions.