David HALL: SITUATIONS ENVISAGED. Richard Saltoun Gallery,
17 July—14 August 2015 London
David Hall’s installation presents a tower of monitors facing the wall; their TV broadcasts appear eclipsed and their original message transformed into an aura of coloured light and musical score (composed by David Cunningham). One monitor, in the centre, shows a 30-line image like those used in the historical transmissions of John Logie Baird in the 1920s. The piece comments on the iconic and magical nature of electricity and communication technologies. …
Continue reading “A Situation Envisaged: The Rite II (Cultural Eclipse) 1989”
“Some of these ideas are drawn out in their purest form by the Sentences series, 1988-93, in various languages and formats. The hints of linguistic philosophy, its word-games and literalness, which permeate the earlier works, are here centred on screen. The sentences in the cycle are self-referential tautologies, near-complete propositions which encompass all their elements – including graphic signs such as full stops. The digital play of letters is complements by a pop-mix soundtrack, so that the austerity of the printed word enters a more demotic or popular sound-space, …
Continue reading “Sentences (1988-1993”
“As a pure example of ‘landscape video’ in Partridge’s output, Interrun is in the larger tradition of landscape art – and on the grand scale. It also shares the radical revisioning of landscape pioneered by such structural filmmakers as Chris Wrelsby and William Raban, but is more specifically preceded by a Partridge-Cunningham landscape video made with singer and performer Mary Phillips, Vide Voce, 1986. Coincidentally, structuralist like Raban and Welsby also questioned the ecological and political aspects of landscape in their films of the 1980’s and thereby took their earlier work beyond their original goal of pure observation. …
Continue reading “Vide Voce (The Threes in The Four)”
‘1001 Boys Games was based on a poem written by the painter John Yeadon in 1983. It combines computer-generated drawings by Yeadon from his Impossible Lovers series, with animation and digital video effects in a stream of images complementing the narration of the poem by the dramatist Tom McGrath. In addition to conventional camera-originated material and artwork, a Quantel Paintbox and a BBC micro computer were used to create the hundreds of ‘cells’ featured in the work.’ …
Continue reading “One Thousand and One Boys Games (1984)”
“Cutting the image down into rhythmic clusters, isolating the fragment from its original real-time context and remixing it, Partridge pushed against the time barrier which he further broke in such large scale pieces as Interrun, 1989, a decade later. In some ways, he was in parallel with Cunningham’s own fusion of live and recorded sound, devising ways of sampling long before the technology was available or even named.
Installation shot at TATE Liverpool
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Continue reading “Interrun (1989 – 34 monitor video wall version)”
