Mark Webber

Review of Mark Webber Talk on Malcolm Le Grice and the London Film Maker’s Co-Op 9 March 2017 at Plymouth Arts Centre

I only have a basic prior knowledge of Malcolm Le Grice’s work and independent curator, Mark Webber’s research into artist’s moving image from the last 60 years. Both led me to expect that Webber would show some of Le Grice’s 16mm film works and at least mention the London Filmmaker’s Co-op and Le Grice’s role in the development of that organisation, established 51 years ago. I anticipated that his talk would widen my understanding of the artist’s practice, highlight Le Grice’s position in the chronology of recent art history and offer a specialist interpretation of his work beyond the information available in the galleries for Present Moments and Passing Time.

Webber’s talk did all of these things. His presentation was educational and insightful but on top of that, felt like a bit of a special treat. He had travelled for more than three hours to come and speak to the twenty six of us in a 61 seat cinema, in Malcolm’s home town and one of the audience was Malcolm himself.

Unusually for a retrospective exhibition of an artist in their mid-70s, Le Grice has either been performing, in conversation or acting the anonymous audience member for almost all of the programmed events. Now living in the South Hams, locality makes this possible but it’s Le Grice’s passion and energy which are the true motivation to be so present. Even as we watched the 16mm projection of Little Dog for Roger, a film Le Grice made 50 years ago using footage of himself as a child, I could see the artist’s face still giving away clues that he might be considering another re-edit or just a few adjustments before it’s shown again. He’s not retired yet!

The real high point for me however, came 24 hours after Mark Webber had finished his talk. On Friday evening I walked over to a small community-run space in Plymouth called Union Corner. It was only the second time I’d been to an event there but the second time in two days that I would get to see 16mm film in action. Almost immediately as Matt Davies began his performance, using three projectors, moving lenses and some other wizardry, I was struck by the relevance of Malcolm Le Grice’s work in this moment. Whether organised to coincide with the show or serendipitously timed, I’m not certain but seeing the new work speaking so directly to the exhibition felt like Le Grice’s legacy was visible there and then. Without Malcolm’s pioneering works such as After Leonardo, Horror Film 1 and Threshold I doubt that artists like Davies would be making this kind of work.

The roster of artists Plymouth claims as it’s own is limited and I don’t just mean you can count them on one hand. So why has Le Grice been overlooked until now as somebody that the city can be proud of? Is it because he openly states that he was desperate to leave Devon in the late 1950s to find the culture he felt was missing here? Or is it because his story is one of a modest, hard-working artist who made his work with little money, collaborative spirit and some pretty challenging ideas about how to make art? Le Grice has never sought headlines for fame, wealth or notoriety but he does continue to seek pleasure from making and sharing work and wants more people to do the same.

OJOBOCA and Matt Davies at Union Corner was organised by Marcy Saude and Cinestar on Friday 10 March 2017.

Vickie Fear is a freelance producer and curator based in Plymouth. She is also a PAC Home member and Visual Arts Plymouth Activator.

vickiefear.co.uk

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This evening I had the privilege of attending a performance of After Leonardo by Plymouth-born Artist Malcolm Le Grice and Keith Rowe at the Peninsula Arts Gallery, located within Plymouth University. As an attendee to the breath-taking show, I found myself surrounded by a large audience of other artists and members of the university who felt captivated once the performance began.

Malcolm Le Grice is known as a pioneer in the field of experimental performance art involving the multi-screen process and projection methods of installation. After studying painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, Le Grice became infatuated by the art of film-making and began his path as someone who explores the medium of moving image.

Image: Horror Film, Malcolm Le Grice, 2016. Photo: Josh Huxham

This evening Le Grice partnered up with Keith Rowe who accompanies the two performances with alluring and hypnotizing melodies. Beginning with a performance of Horror Film 1, the live shadow performance explored the technique of using different hues of colour and tone whilst combined with the use of 16mm projectors.

As the film-maker stood in front of the projector, his figure and emotion began to manifest and increase in its capacity, concluding with the performers figure completely consuming the projected space. After a short break, the next performance began to take place.

This performance explored two themes, the world-famous painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Freud’s psychoanalytic monograph of the mind. Entitled After Leonardo, this performance piece has continued to develop over time.

The use of projectors increased for this particular performance, allowing the audience to see a wider perspective of the subjects being transported from the projectors onto the wall being used as a canvas. This performance saw the film-making engaging with the moving images upon the wall, creating a balance between three-dimensional and two-dimensional mediums.

By Josh Huxham

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Showing at Peninsula Arts and Plymouth Arts Centre, Present Moments and Passing Time is a large, ambitious retrospective, detailing the work of pioneering film-maker, Malcolm Le Grice.

Born in Plymouth, Le Grice moved to London after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art, becoming one of the founding members of The London Film Co-operative in 1968. A group that encouraged the making, screening and distribution of experimental film, rather than outright ownership, Le Grice’s philosophy proved to be years ahead of its time.

Le Grice originally began his career in painting, but began to explore film-making by the mid 1960’s. Malcolm’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre and Tate Modern. He has not only been influential during the post-war period, but continues to provoke and challenge, with Le Grice’s Castle 1 (1966) a clear influence on Martin Creed’s Turner Prize-winning Work 227 (2000).

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

In Present Moments and Passing Time, Plymouth pays tribute to Le Grice, with a city-wide celebration of his life and work. Working across several mediums, Le Grice avoids easy categorisation. Unsurprisingly, this exhibition features everything from feature length films to charcoal sketches. Le Grice’s career, as the exhibition title suggests, muses on the effects of time; how time can transform and erode memories, art, opinions and reputations. The Le Grice landscape is concerned with the transitory nature of it all. But what is found in this exhibition is not a dry treatise. Le Grice’s art buzzes with an electric force that is eternally youthful. It questions, but is not afraid to feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Le Grice’s film Little Dog for Roger (1967).  The film short is based on fragments of a home movie, found by Le Grice in the 1960’s. Fragments of film are spliced together, with gaps in the film allowed to show through. Sprocket holes whizz across the screen; a narrative interrupted.

The film shows Le Grice’s family during a day out at Hexworthy, Dartmoor. The family dog is the centre of attention, bounding energetically across the moorland. Despite the age of the film, the subject matter captures something immediate and familiar.

Le Grice experiments with the film, by going beyond the immediate source material. The nostalgic feel is dislocated by Le Grice, who adopts a multi-projection technique, so we see several versions of the dog at the same time. It is a play on the elusiveness of memories, even when captured and laid down on film. The ‘truth’ – such as it is – gets overlaid with half-remembered fragments, things we believe to have happened. The dog appears in several realities, and each is as true / untrue as the other.

Le Grice resits chronology, both technically and thematically. Little Dog for Roger strides across the years to meet us; it is a subject both of and beyond its time. The screen lends an illusion of immortality, but Le Grice reminds us that even film, the observer and recorder, is built on moments, passing, present and gone.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

The exhibition takes advantage of Le Grice’s extensive back catalogue, showing several of his short films. Some just a few minutes long, they offer an insight not only into Le Grice’s process, but the ideas that have preoccupied him over the years.

In DENISINED – SINEDENIS (2006), we see a triptych of a man’s face; three views of the same subject. As the film begins, the soundtrack makes its presence felt. Featuring JS Bach’s Crab Canon from a collection of canons and fugues called The Musical Offering,  the crab canon is a musical device that features two musical lines that are complementary and backward; a musical equivalent of the palindrome. The dizzying baroque soundtrack uses the same motif over and over again to produce a layered effect, mirroring what is happening on screen, as one image of the man projects itself onto the previous one. The triptych, at first sharply defined, begins to blur as we are presented with kaleidoscopic viewpoints of the subject. Pinning down a definitive image becomes impossible, with Le Grice creating a film that dances to the rhythm of Bach’s tune.

Le Grice’s reputation as an innovator is coupled with a strong connection to art history. References abound in this exhibition, not hidden away for the viewer to discover, but there on display for all to see. The work and legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci, Andy Warhol and Edouard Manet is explored in After Leonardo (installation 1974-2015; collage 1993); After Manet (charcoal on paper, 1985; video 1975) and Self Portrait / Weeping Artist (pencil on paper, 1984-85).

Le Grice’s extraordinary career is laid bare in these works; an acknowledgement that an artist can be everything at once. Le Grice’s willingness to move from ‘traditional’ art techniques into experimental film and video, asserts the artist’s right to resist limitation. Le Grice’s self-actualisation galvanises the viewer; we never see the same artist twice, and the exhibition really serves a purpose in outlining not only the output of Le Grice’s career, but also its breadth.

In Self Portraits / Weeping Artist, Le Grice produces a series of tiny hand-drawn sketches. The repetition of the images, on first glance, echo Warhol’s iconic screen-prints. Reproducing the same image, each subtly altered, disrupts the grid-like pattern in which the portraits are placed. The neatness, like Warhol’s prints, is illusory. Look again, and the images begin to fragment. Le Grice also references Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937). The nightmarish painting, an emblem of suffering, was itself part of a series, with Picasso revisiting the same theme several times over. With Le Grice’s portraits, the dismantling of the facial features is not so much homage but recognition of how art history informs contemporary artists. Picasso’s dissembled face is so ubiquitous it has become a type of shorthand; a rich vein to exploit in itself. Le Grice’s Self Portraits / Weeping Artist does this by subverting the male gaze so prevalent in the Picasso. Le Grice instead puts himself at the emotional centre of the piece, playing on pre-conceived notions of the artist and the viewer. The artist here is also the participant, and the viewer, by the act of looking, becomes part of the process too.  It’s a theme Le Grice returns to many times in his work, most notably in his 1971 work Horror Film 1. Using three projectors, Le Grice films himself standing in front of the projection screen, arms outstretched. As Le Grice moves away from the screen, and towards the projectors, the distortions create shadows and blurring. The performer’s image is multiplied, as Le Grice’s role as performer and artist begins to merge.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionAfter LeonardoPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

In After Leonardo (triptych and installation), Le Grice creates a collage of the Mona Lisa image, interspersed with text from Sigmund Freud’s monograph ‘Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality’. Le Grice chooses his text carefully; the essay itself is a rarity, not freely available in book form in Britain since the 1930’s. It has now been made accessible – and been endlessly reproduced – in electronic PDF format. Le Grice displays a paperback copy of the text in a glass display case, along with a delicate, fragmented copy of the Mona Lisa head. Both are tattered and beyond repair, they are given the reverential treatment normally reserved for precious artefacts. On the wall behind the display case, a series of images are projected: snippets of text, fragments of Leonardo’s most famous work – that enigmatic portrait –  is broken down into pieces, endlessly reproduced until nothing discernible is left. After Leonardo debates how meanings and theories are projected onto art, even the pieces where (you would think) everything has already been said. Le Grice’s work shows us how the meaning of art can alter with these readings. Freud’s analysis of Da Vinci remains ground-breaking. A reading of Da Vinci’s career without the inclusion of his sexuality, and how it coloured his work, is to read him with a piece of the puzzle missing.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionAfter LeonardoPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

However, Le Grice goes one step further and suggests that these readings are ultimately temporary. Despite the attempts to dismantle Da Vinci, (it has been suggested that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of the artist himself) our ability to understand him remains elusive. He / She is at once instantly recognisable – and utterly unknowable.

Le Grice’s After Manet (1975) is a 50-minute video that takes Edouard Manet’s painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1862) as its starting point.  A piece of art with a unique place in art history, Manet’s painting of two clothed men having a picnic, accompanied by a nude woman looks, even to our eyes, strange and incongruous, and that is entirely the point. Manet’s juxtaposition of two elegant men-about-town and the classical female nude lifts the Impressionist painting out of any easily-identifiable context. All the signifiers are there, but they’ve been jumbled up to create a painting that plays with convention. Manet turned his back on the traditional modes of representation, and in the clamour by authorities to censor his painting (which unsurprisingly met with great scandal on its debut), Manet became one of the first modern art celebrities. Manet’s work lends itself to reinterpretation, and Le Grice’s video borrows from the bold, questioning spirit of Manet’s painting to create a piece that is similarly disjointed. Filmed on four cameras, Le Grice had each camera operated by one of the actors appearing in the video; Annabel Nicholson, Gill Eatherley, Willian Raban and Le Grice himself. The artist becomes a performer, and the performers become stakeholders in creating the final piece. The performers recreate a picnic scene, and each person’s film is projected onto a screen, giving four views of the same subject. Switching from black and white, positive and negative, After Manet inverts the rituals of daily life; skimming through a book, drinking a glass of wine. It, like the painting, becomes otherworldly and unreal. Le Grice is well-known for his love of jazz music, and After Manet is a perfect example of how his art work riffs on established themes, in order to create something new. It is more than a reproduction; it is a new piece of art, with its own life. The piece then takes on its own history as it ages; meanings, readings – art viewed through a selective lens. Le Grice’s work, as viewed across this retrospective, admits that the temptation to grade and objectify is an impulse that is all too human. But maybe, suggests Le Grice, art should be more than the sum of its parts. This may be an exhibition of many moments, but in the end, there is one thought that binds them: perhaps there is no such thing as the last word, or final cut – and that’s just how it should be.

Helen Tope is a freelance blogger working and living in Plymouth.

@scholar1977

The post Exhibition Review: Malcolm Le Grice: Present Moments and Passing Time appeared first on Plymouth Arts Cinema | Independent Cinema for Everyone | located at Arts University Plymouth..

The exhibition celebrates the innovative and ground-breaking work of Plymouth-born Malcolm Le Grice, and how he pioneered the ‘British Expanded Cinema’ movement with multi projection and performance works, as well as making the UK’s first computer art films. These breakthroughs can be traced in his early paintings incorporating flashing light bulbs and more recently in his 3D video installations.

Present Moments and Passing Time is a dual site exhibition at Peninsula Arts and Plymouth Arts Centre, delivered in partnership with the History Centre and Plymouth City Council (Arts and Heritage). It is free to attend and runs from 20 January – 18 March 2017.

Gallery of Photos from the preview of Present Moments and Passing Time by Bethany Ditchburn at Peninsula Arts and Charlotte McGuinness at Plymouth Arts Centre

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