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| War Machine by The Duvet Brothers 1984 |
What influenced you to start making video montage and in
particular politically explicit work?
When I started making moving images I (1983) I had no access to a
video camera. They weren’t on every phone like now. I started using Super-8
film and loved the explicit way I could see that moving images were made up of
24 frames a second. I made films that explored how we look and how time is
constructed. Later when I met Peter Boyd Maclean and we started the Duvet
Brothers we had access to video cameras and editing as I had a job as an
engineer for a TV company. We started making scratch with TV images because
they were readily available to hand and started to mess with the time construction
of images. That unleashed a hidden meaning in the images.
Then, as now, TV only represented certain views. We had a tory
government hell bent on making the rich richer and marketising all aspect of
human life. The miner’s strike was a war between the government and the workers
with the police as an instrument of the state. TV was full of partial truths
about what was happening. Scratch was a way of exposing the half-truths and
revealing political biases in media. It was effectively counter-propaganda. Our
videos were being shown at the ICA and the Tate as well as nightclubs and
miners clubs all up and down the country.
Were you influenced by Video art or more DIY influences?
I had seen some video art at that time. It tended to be long,
ponderous, subtle; in my view, tedious. The Duvet Brothers were profiled in the
popular press and magazines because we could be represented as making art for
the MTV generation. We were hated by much of the video art world, who
considered the work superficial. As this was pre-YouTube it was hard to see the
work of other artists. Journalists started calling us and telling us we were
part of a movement called Scratch. When we saw the work of Gorilla Tapes, Peter
Savage, Kim and Sandra and George Barber it was uncanny how we had all been
separately exploring aspects of re-editing existing media and messing with the
time frame.
How influential was your video work on pop video at the time and do
you think this watered down the strength of the political videos you made?
Scratch was picked up my mainstream media very quickly, but mainly
they just used the repeat edit, which was only a small part of the scratch
toolbox. I knew it was all over when the Milk Marketing Board made a TV ad for
milk that used scratch techniques.
We did OK out of it all and made TV title sequences and pop videos.
Most promos were expensive and hideous. We made low budget arty promos that
were highly influential.
Did you make a point of exhibiting work out of a mainstream gallery
environment?
Various groups put our stuff onto compilation tapes that were
distributed all over the place. Also clubs like Heaven used to show our videos
on their TV screens. We were also shown in galleries and museums. We didn’t
push any of that, people just chose to show the work. We had a live multiscreen
show that we toured all over the world. It was three VHS sources and up to 21
TV screens in a sculptural pile. It was a way of taking art out of the
galleries and into clubs.
How did you get your hands on the footage and technology to edit at
the time?
We borrowed an early domestic camcorder to make our first promo in
1983 or ‘ 84. Then I got a job as an engineer and had keys to the edit suite.
We’d borrow the cameras, shoot stuff, then edit all night, stopping at 7 to
waft the smoke out. Then I’d do a full days work.
Can you talk about what happened on the back of the scratch video
period for you?
After the Duvet Brothers split I began making a series of
installations that place the viewer into a narrative. Today I am making a form
of theatre that uses technology to give the audience a role within the story.
It mixes media installations with mobile technology and live performance.
Scratch was disarmed for me by its assimilation into mainstream media. These
days it is hard to make video that doesn’t look like it could be a TV ad. The
live element is important in creating media that is harder to assimilate. I’m
interested in offering agency to the audience, giving them a role in the
creation of their own experience.
Where do you see the medium moving now in interactive user/app age?
I find great parallels between 80’s scratch and the post-broadband
rise of Mash-up. There is so much pleasure to be had in re-editing footage and
changing it’s meaning so I’m not surprised it’s such a phenomenon. I have seen
some very funny and pleasurably mindless stuff and some great political attack
videos.
What work will you be showing at Bunker Mentality?
Limelight opening / War Machine multiscreen (composite) 1986
This is the first screening of this video version of War Machine in
England since the 80’s. It is a composite of the three channels of our
multiscreen show. This was a live show played from 3 VHS decks onto 21 screens.
Harry (composite) 1986
This was a commission from the Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno. It was our
first attempt to introduce narrative into scratch and was part of our live
show. Some of it was filmed in Berlin before the wall came down where we’d
presented the multiscreen show in a tent during a riot. Put simply, it is a
video about how some ideas are so powerful that despite surveillance and
oppression they cannot be contained.
Virgin 1985
Blue Monday and War Machine are the best know Duvet Brothers videos,
largely because they are the only ones that have been available in the archive.
Virgin is the follow-up to Blue Monday and is about how western economies
benefit from the trade in weapons that kill people in the developing world.
