George Barber

BEYOND LANGUAGE
Selected Video Works 1983 - 2008
George Barber BEYOND LANGUAGE
Selected Video Works 1983 - 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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
Schweppes Ad
1993 2’ 19”
The longing created by advertising is satirised in this
remix of Schweppes advertising.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.