George Barber BEYOND LANGUAGESelected Video Works 1983 - 2008

George Barber BEYOND LANGUAGESelected Video Works 1983 - 2008

George Barber’s work presents a complex and highly

personal strategy of non-conformity that defines

appropriation, collage and parody as the essential

forms of contemporary art-practice. Barber’s work

is often categorised in three groups: Scratch videos,

slacker videos and more recently performance videos.

However, his voice is most coherent when his work

is viewed as a single artistic project. His consistent

use of parody at the meeting points of culture is more

than flippant humour; in satirising the platitudes of art

and culture the work grapples with the postmodern

condition and addresses the legacies of Duchamp and

Warhol, Barber creating a unique position in relation to

artists such as Sturtevant and Richard Prince.

Scratch Video is a visually exuberant yet politically

subtle form of détournement consisting of film and

television footage cut with a rapid montage of graphics

and repetitive sounds. Tilt (1983) is the most painterly

of Barber’s work. Absence of Satan (1985) extends

film time and illustrates underlying psychologies by

repetitive montage of minute moments from Hollywood

movies. These videos present trapped hero figures

inhabiting false worlds, a plethora of aspirational

images repositioned in the blissed-out zone of video

graphics and dance beats. In response to a culture of

egoism and pseudo-spiritualism, Barber constructs a

dialogue between sanity and insanity, parodying culture

and language, reducing art to essential experience and

ironic banality. Barber speaks of an instinctual present

moment where our personal experience must traverse

a wasteland of cultural and artistic follies. The work is

humanist and real precisely because it is constructed

from a plethora of superficiality. It is corporeal, but

negates materialism.

Barber effortlessly journeys “beyond Warhol” in the

deadpan video 1001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of

(1989). Here, Marilyn Monroe is shown as a video

image that cycles through a cascade of colours that

Warhol neglected. The video reverses the Warholian

strategy of making unique what is banal and endlessly

reproducible. Schweppes Ad (1993) places a casual

voice-over of the disenfranchised and unemployed to a

montage of early 90s lifestyle advertising. Advertising

is the subject of Hovis Ad (1994), where Barber

reduces heritage nostalgia to the trivial musings of

a child’s voice-over. The Story of Wash & Go (1995)

demythologizes the genius of Vidal Sassoon in one of

Barber’s most brilliantly casual works. In The Venetian

Ghost (1988) 1980s Californian beach life is told through

the eyes of a hip deceased Venetian Doge played by

the US stand-up comedian Stanley Myron Handelman.

Little known amongst Barber’s work, The Venetian Ghost

stands out 20 years later as one of the most prescient

of his videos. The self-deprecating humour could be

straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the culture-

jamming aesthetics foreshadow artists such as Mark

Leckey, Lucy McKenzie and Nick Relph and Oliver Payne.

The ‘slacker’ video, which along with Scratch Video,

Barber is credited with having pioneered, is exemplified

in the confessional slacker piece I Was Once Involved In

A Shit Show (2003). Here Barber recounts the story of

The Venetian Ghost

1988 13’ 25”

What’s it like being a Renaissance man when your host

is a jerk-of-all-trades? What’s it like being obsessed

with memory when your host lives in the perpetual

present?

George Barber’s The Venetian Ghost has as its hero a

former ruler of Venice who, as a result of a semantic

boo-boo, finds himself catapulted from the High Culture

of Venice, Italia, to the High camp of Venice, LA.

Barber plays up these oppositions in his usual offbeat

style; having the figure of the ghost keyed in cartoon-

like with Charlie and family - good-time Californians to

a fault.

1001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of

1989 2’ 26”

1001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of takes the scratch

genre to a postmodern extreme by processing and

colouring Andy Warhol’s Marilyn prints. Warhol’s famous

print undergoes intense changes of tone, as a whole

spectrum of colours slowly slide across the screen to

the lush, over- the-top muzak on the soundtrack.

Schweppes Ad

1993 2’ 19”

The longing created by advertising is satirised in this

remix of Schweppes advertising.

Hovis Ad

1994 52”

Barber’s witty deconstructions of advertising and

product (like Schweppes Ad and The Story of Wash and

Go), merge here with the voice of his monologue films.

In Hovis Ad we’re offered the inside story of the long

running Hovis Ad as Barber’s voice over highlights the

psychological emptiness of the narratives delivered

daily by consumer culture.

Passing Ship

1994 6’ 34”

As in earlier tapes, Barber appropriates popular film

culture and engages with it on his own terms. He

reclines in his bath narrating, in a loosely constructed

monologue, an account of how he survived a plane

crash over water and the events which led up to it. A

montage of 1970s American disaster films accompany

and interact with his tongue-in-cheek account. Passing

Ship is concerned with ambiguity in the representation

of events. Is he concocting a story inspired by watching

too much television? Is he contrasting personal

experience against the mass media as a critique of the

latter? There is no single answer as the tape works at

many levels.

Tilt

1983 5’ 37”

George Barber is associated with Scratch Video, the

no-budget political video-collage movement of the early

1980s. Barber was always the most polished of these

artists, and Tilt shows his ability to make seductive,

easy-viewing pieces, while maintaining a subversive

undercurrent.

Absence of Satan

1985 4’ 46”

Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the

famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door

cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is

probably one of George Barber’s best Scratch works

and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and

cliché.

Arts Council GB Scratch

1988 1’ 34”

‘Rodney Wilson commissioned this as a celebration of

all the work that his section of the Arts Council did. It

is the best thing Rodney ever did.’ GB

The Story Of Wash & Go

1995 2’ 54”

A lo-fi dramatisation of Vidal’s Sassoon’s momentous,

groundbreaking invention of the shampoo Wash and Go.

The Weather

1995 1’ 29”

Barber’s adventures with graphics are here exploited to

the full as a TV weatherman commands a very exciting

weather report. Actor Brian Hickey performs a hilarious

parody of a TV weatherman in a film which reminds us

just how mannered most weather presentations are. (It

is worth noting that this piece is almost a pre-image of

what weather forecasts were to become, with moving

satellite views of the Globe. The piece was made well

before weather shows took up this form.)

I Was Once Involved In A Shit Show

2003 6’ 56”

I Was Once Involved in a Shit Show is a monologue

recollection of an art event that tallies with what many

artists experience when they are involved in putting on

unfunded group shows.

Refusing Potatoes

2003 5’ 45”

Barber constructs a curious biography around his

father’s relationship to his nephew Alan Rickman who

he dislikes one Christmas for refusing to eat potatoes –

and the Barber family are later shocked at the Premiere

to find that Rickman has ripped them off and used their

father’s speech in the movie Michael Collins.

Following Your Heart Can Lead to Wonderful Things

2008 6’ 03”

Following Your Heart.. uses off-air adverts, minor films

and manipulates them into a new artistic experience.

The adverts all relate to the ‘heart’ in some way, either

through health or in the usual capitalistic fashion

asking people to consume by appealing to their

emotions. A variety of adverts are used, ranging from

mobile campaigns, credit cards, bread, new DVDs, to

Fantastic Voyage, the classic film about a miniature

craft inserted into some poor soul’s blood stream.

a hapless artist compromised into exhibiting in a show

sponsored by a concrete manufacturer. Arts Council GB

Scratch (1988), a short Scratch piece remixes tabloid

television and The Southbank Show’s reactions to Carl

Andre’s Equivalent VIII. Barber’s recent video Following

Your Heart Can Lead to Wonderful Things (2008) returns

to Scratch methodology and continues the critique of

advertising started in Schweppes Ad.

Barber paints a picture of a world obsessed with

uniqueness, but only capable of producing banality. He

is a chronicler of contemporary culture, a soothsayer

of aesthetic discords and a philosopher of spiritual

decline. The works in this programme demonstrate the

singular voice of George Barber, an artist concerned

with artistic integrity and the complexities of language.

Matthew Noel-Tod 2008

George Barber

George Barber was born in Georgetown, Guyana and

went to St Martins and The Slade. His compilation “The

Greatest Hits Of Scratch Video” is internationally known

and has been featured in many galleries and festivals

across the world. His two contributions to the tape,

Absence of Satan and Yes Frank No Smoke (1985) are

still screened regularly and are important in the history

of British video art.

He has had an installation at Tate Britain 2006 entitled

Automotive Action Painting (2006) and recently showed

his video sculptures, The Long Commute (2007) at Jack

the Pelican Presents Gallery Brooklyn, New York in

2007. He has also been part of numerous programmes

at Tate Modern and had retrospectives at the ICA, New

York Film & Video Festival and recently at La Rochelle

Festival, France. He has been written about by Paul

Morley. Mike O’Pray and Gareth Evans, the Time Out &

Vertigo magazine critic.

Barber is eclectic, his ideas varied. Narrative and

found footage seem to be at the centre of much of his

work, either deconstructing it or trying as an artist to

evolve an approach that is contradictory to the maker’s

original intention. Barber’s skills as a writer have

led him to produce many lyrical works too, including

Walking Off Court (2003) and Withdrawal (1997) and

various monologues like I Was Once In A Shit Show and

Refusing Potatoes (2003). His recent work, Following

Your Heart Can Lead to Wonderful Things, Welcome,

To Autumn and Losing Faith (2008) go back to using off-

air adverts and TV films, mostly American. The central

conceit is to take found footage and manipulate it into

a new artistic experience. The ingredients of television

are inverted and put to new purposes.

Beyond Language is a touring programme curated

by Matthew Noel-Tod for LUX on the occasion of the

publication of the DVD George Barber Beyond Language

Selected Videos 1983 – 2008 published by LUX.

George Barber’s videos are distributed by LUX

www.lux.org.uk

More information about George Barber can be found at

www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/george_barber

Supported by the University for the Creative Arts

Research Fund. LUX is supported by Arts Council England