Herb Shellenberger
htshell.org

Even the Good Times Were Bad: The New Pluralism Revisited
March 19, 2015
Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London)
London, UK


Co-programmed with Laura Bleach, Ekaterina Cheryaeva, Alberto Danelli, Leah Millar, Alice Pozzoli, Camila Revoredo & Arron Santry

Students in the MRes Art: Moving Image programme at Central Saint Martins/LUX present a screening in response to "The New Pluralism", a mid-decade survey of British film and video art held at the Tate Gallery in April 1985. Curators Michael O’Pray and Tina Keane selected nearly one hundred works for the exhibition in an ambitious attempt to map the pluralistic practices and politics that emerged as a reaction against the Structuralist aesthetic of 1970s British experimental film. Revisiting this exhibition as a moment rather than a movement, the students will reactivate some of these works within a contemporary critical framework. Works shown as part of this programme will include Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher’s Scratch video supercut Night of a Thousand Eyes (1984) and Mark Wilcox’s surreal, proto-Lynchian videotape Calling the Shots (1984).

Part of the symposium Now That's What I Call Pluralism, presented as part of the Strangelove Moving Image Festival at Central Saint Martins.

Blue Monday, Duvet Brothers, 1984, UK, digital, 4'
Silent Film, Michael Maziere, 1982, UK, 16mm, 15'
Scratch Free State, George Barber, 1984, UK, digital, 5'
Calling the Shots, Mark Wilcox, 1984, UK, digital, 12'
Visual Art Songs for the 80s (#2: Beatnik), Marty St. James & Anne Wilson, 1984, UK, digital, 5'
Night of 1000 Eyes, Kim Flitcroft & Sandra Goldbacher, 1984, UK, digital, 28'

https://htshell.org/files/gimgs/th-80_blue-monday.jpg
https://htshell.org/files/gimgs/th-80_calling-the-shots.jpg
https://htshell.org/files/gimgs/th-80_visual-art-songs.jpg