Page 41 - Studio International - December 1972

One: 10th February 1971; an event by I.B. at the Angela
Flowers Gallery, situated then in the West End of London.
'A number of men are situated around the perimeter of the room
each has a shovel; in front of each man is a mound of earth; each
man shovels a shovelful of earth onto the next man's mound. They
all shovel simultaneously and continuously until exhausted: all rest;
all restart, etc., etc. Transmit via TV. Record via film.
(from I.B.'s original working notes)
The whole eight-hour event was transmitted on closed
circuit TV from the second-floor gallery to a window front-
ing onto the street below, where it was watched by passers-
by. Various ironies were involved: (1) the sea of mud to
which the all-white gallery space was reduced; (2) the
material (large quantities of farmyard earth) and the
activity (rustic manual labour) in the heart of Soho; (3) the
'working-day' length of the event (8 hours); (4) the fact that
the event was carried out on the same day that the
Apollo astronauts were digging up rock samples on the
surface of the moon: every TV shop was transmitting
pictures live from the moon. Gradually during the course of
the day the pictures of the digging event and the pictures
from the moon became almost indistinguishable from each
other. M.L. was filming the whole thing and describes it:
'The 16mm camera recording everything : the event live, the event on
the monitor, the event in the street and later as the farcical parallels
began to make themselves apparent, the event on the moon as
manifested on the other television sets in the street. When working
on the subsequent film it was found that when the original footage
was re-filmed using a straightforward non-sync. camera off a
back-projection screen, phasing occurred between the camera
shutter operating at one fiftieth of a second and the projector bulb,
causing a flickering similar to the phasing flicker that occurred when
filming off the monitors; thus any of the original footage inside the
gallery could be turned quite easily into genuine "moonshots". A
faulty • hutter on the camera produce its own "moonshots" too'.
NINE
Video tape actions 1971.
TEN
Nine ilms: 16mm, black and white, silent, 1971. A series of
very short films, varying in length from 30 seconds to
120 s:conds. A typical film consisting of a 10 second black
stencilled caption which describes either objectively, or
subjectively (e.g. ironically), the single image which
occu des the remaining 30 seconds of film-time. Mostly
one-s ot with a fixed camera. These films were joined
toget er on a single roll, one to nine, for showing at
Prosp -ct 71, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; their deliberate crass
banality seemed to me to be ideal for showing within the
generaI context of cerebral/conceptual high-seriousness.
ELEVE
Yes/No: sequence of eighty 35mm colour-slides for Inter-
Action's FunArtBus, London Festival 1972.