I then decided to move from the offset-litho
printing used in Working Press into the new area of digital publishing. This
promised to allow colour and new forms of distribution with a lower capital
outlay. To retrain in this area, and because I needed an academic qualification
for my new job as a seminar tutor at London Guildhall University, I decided to
do a Master of Arts in Time-Based Media in Maidstone. The digital publishing
became realised in the form of video and I began to make videowork. An interest
in the Exploding Cinema collective was a natural next step but I was also aware
that the collective history I had been part of was not being adequately
historicised. This was when I started to look for institutional support to do a
PhD programme of research on the history of Exploding Cinema.
The achievements of these groups I had been part of seemed, in retrospect, to be significant and influential and yet they were almost entirely unrepresented in the published history of the arts. I wanted to interrogate this invisibility and explore the ways in which collective activity could be recorded, represented and evaluated.
The point about all these
sites of production is that they were all open access in different ways. Open to
anyone without qualification, they were mostly democratically run with open
meetings. Administration was unpaid and they were not reliant for their day to
day existence on grant aid. They reflected prevailing cultural enthusiasms of
the time without the mediation of the establishment and brought sub-cultural
consensii into focus.[1]
They brought collective desire to the surface and found expressive forms that
were often refreshingly human centred and direct.
I would not claim that the
collective enterprises I was a part of from 1969 until I joined the Exploding
Cinema had any special coherence as a set, or were representative of collective
activity in this period. They do however show the diversity of the field and
the problems that confront historical recordings and representations. These
include:
The large number of members
and the complex, changing and often very subjective internal relationships;
The complexity of influences
that large numbers of participants bring to bear on cultural formations;
The responses to activity
are often non discursive in any way that is easy to track with academic
instruments;
The openness of membership
and democratic structure will often serve to discount the value of cultural
productions to those who work from more conventional structures. Quality is
commonly assumed to be dependent on monitoring processes;
Self funding produces
results that are rich due to the large resource of human labour available but
often poor in other material respects, e.g. in terms of catalogues, publicity
material and other presentation paraphernalia;
Sometimes the openness and
autonomy leads to either political positions that are unpalatable to the status
quo or to cultural designs which are aesthetically discordant.
At the beginning
of my research one artist's collective that I had some passing engagements
with, Hull Time-Based Arts, did publish a history of itself.[2]
Hull Time-Based Arts, was established by an artist's collective in 1984, since
that time it has grown to be a major promoter of experimental art in the North
East of England. HTBA shared an important characteristic with the groups I have
been involved in since 1969 in that it was originally open to all and control
was in the hands of the artists.[3]
The book mainly consists of texts and/or images by the artists who have been
presented by HTBA about the works they made there. The articles by the paid
workers Mike Stubbs and Gillian Dyson discuss more general or theoretical
issues. At the end of the book there is finally a very short narrative account
by Rob Gawthrop and a cryptic chronology by Julie Bacon.
The attempt not
to unify the representation of HTBA history with a single account but rather to
leave in the form of the fragmentary accounts of the participants, reflects the
group's democratic ethos. It does not work as well as it might have because
there is no easily perceptible sequential structure and the effect of this is
heightened by an intense and intrusive magazine style design which makes it
difficult for the outsider to form a coherent picture of the groups history. At
least the book cannot be accused of creating any sense of closure.
Some of the above groups do
have a direct relation to the provenance of the Exploding Cinema. Brixton
Artists Collective preceded the Brixton based Cooltan Collective, which was
as we shall see, the birthplace of Exploding Cinema. Mark Pawson who was a
notable member of the early
Exploding Cinema Collective had been a leading mail artist for some five
or six years before he joined the collective. For other groups mentioned above,
such as the Self-Build group the relation is a more diffuse one of simply
being contributors to the broad ethos of DIY culture.
[1] Jurgen Habermas' Theory
of Communicative Action begins to theorise the importance of such processes of coming
to agreements. See later theory discussion.
[2] Out of Time: Hull Time Based Arts, 1984 - 1998, Edited by Andrea Phillips (HTBA Hull, 1998).
"The main impetus for setting up HTBA came from disenfranchised
experimental filmmakers working in Hull. The British Film Institute had stopped
providing funding for the region. Some of these filmmakers are still members,
including Tom Scott, Joanna Millett and myself." Rob Gawthrop in
(Phillips, 1997 section 01.48)
[3] "The
key motivation behind HTBA's structure lay in issues of access, participation,
ownership and autonomy - the democratisation of culture Membership was open to
anyone." Rob Gawthrop in (Phillips, 1998 section 01:51)