The Boy from Georgetown: George Barber's Stations of Video

by Gareth Evans

The consensus on the work of video artist George Barber is that it falls snugly into two distinct genres. The first of these centres on his pioneering and extremely influential 'scratch video' experiments (works such as Absence of Satan, Tilt and Yes Frank, No Smoke ) -- bravura sound-and-image confections using appropriated and re-edited footage, whose visual élan and feel for music and syncopation is also found in a related series of more or less abstract or patterned pieces ( 1001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of, Arizona, Effervescence etc). A second, parallel strand of activity, on the other hand, revolves around a number of narrative micro-dramas, generally in monologue form -- works such as Walking Off Court, Passing Ship or The Venetian Ghost , which take a moment in Barber's or another's life and, by describing it in some detail, reach out towards larger, shared truths about the nature and challenge of being human. These, and a concurrent series of real-world physical 'experiments' - resolutely actual, unmediated events in which individuals are pitched into everything from extreme shouting contests to inverse suspension from vehicles (Shouting Match , Upside Down Minutiae) - are also distinguished by the way they reveal the nature of their construction, but are each many miles away from the manipulated virtuality of his scratch tapes' pop-cultural source material.

Underneath this (all-too) neat schema, however, are shared, often overlapping, preoccupations and themes. Prominent among these is an emphasis on the contingent nature of 'truth' and perception, whether expressed in the deconstructive basis of the scratch video works or via the eccentric, unreliable narrators of Refusing Potatoes and I Was Once Involved in a Shit Show. There is also an ongoing tension between image and experience, between self-determination and the alienating effects of modern commercialised life, which is manifest in the normally concealed pressures of Walking Off Court or the parodic escapes of Taxi Driver 2. This, and a certain eye for the fugitive beauty and latent possibilities of the discarded and overlooked (whether demonstrated in the use of junk material in the scratch works or in the throwaway asides of the monologue/narrative pieces) makes Barber's body of work fit together in a way that belies its surface differences.

In an essay published early in 2005 by the independent British magazine Filmwaves, Barber traces a remarkably candid picture of his development as an artist while offering equally illuminating insights into some of the autobiographical roots of his work. This voluntary disclosure of personal details seems to invite us to consider his early years in the aptly named Georgetown, Guyana, as a kind of carefree childhood idyll, in which his infant wandering through the vibrant light and dazzling colours of the city that mirrors his name translates itself, in his later artistic life, into an equally relaxed appropriation of images from the wider territories of media and cinema.

Similarly, when his Caribbean idyll was abruptly curtailed with relocation to grim private schooling in England, you can sense him chafing against these newly imposed social codes and hierarchical systems of control and, like many others before him, transforming them into a tellingly creative subversion (think again of Taxi Driver 2 and the poignancy of its 'Englishness', its Perrinesque modesty). In his calm, amused delivery, Barber comes across as a particularly convivial tour guide of cultural detritus (with its attendant, surreptitious beauties) as well as an understated map-bearer of possible ways out of the socio-spiritual slum. Gleaning eagerly on the landfill sites of contemporary culture and with an equally sharp ear and eye for archaic, obsolete phrasings or marginal individual storylines, he's in search of the shard -- material, mental or metaphorical -- that catches the sun on a brisk and bright day's outing. It might be the filmic or experiential equivalent of a tin can rusted almost completely to the colour of an old boot, but under the right gaze it becomes the snatch of gold dropped by a hightailing partisan after a rush run on the provincial vault. Either way, litter or loot, there is a moment of surprised glory in it.

Scratch, this re-ordering of popular artefacts, of thin images, into something stranger and more ambiguous, was, and in many ways still is, the perfect tool for the times. It both satirises and salvages, pleases and provokes. It offers a c arnival parade of icons and images, where the holding of power briefly changes, becomes democratised and diverse. Rhythmic, electric-hued, passing from the street to onward gaze, the c arnival becomes resistance, first by simply being, and only then, once it has been experienced, by how it can be read.

Barber's use of a sampling technology that encourages the subversion both of itself and the values (consumer and otherwise) that have bought it into being, can be seen to echo some seismic shifts in contemporary art, where production and ownership are unstable elements of a process that does not necessarily result in a saleable artefact. Barber is more interested in tagging, graffiti-style, the images that he finds, signing them off with his own intervention, rather than claiming any fresh ownership. Often taken from star actor vehicles, these image sequences become, under Barber, a brake on the mass-produced image environment, not least because they challenge, in video, the idea that an artist must bring a wholly new artefact into the world.

Scratch codes its own will to reuse and recycle into the very veins of its aesthetic. It looks deeper and closer at what is already here and made, seeking revelations of wide import in the most trivial exchanges of bad acting, dialogue or staging. It is intended to view the world differently, to avoid automatism. It is a call to re-imagine the common arenas of perception and experience, in both virtual and real-world spaces ; to shuffle the co-ordinates, as Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1966) and BS Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) did for the written page of the novel.

From Barber's early cut-ups, to the dynamic camera and protagonist movements of the performance films and the inverted gaze of the harness volunteers, things are given a shake and stir, all the better to perceive reality as it could be, or is already, elsewhere. Upside down, our conventional priorities are usurped. If only we knew how to look. And this new looking seeks to reclaim lost control -- individually, collectively, artistically and ethically; to fight the powerlessness of living near motorways, being tugged and shoved in shouting seats, neutered by answerphones, tied up and swung. It's about taking the means of production to change what the production means. In this sense, scratch and its later performative compadres make a utopian proposal.

It's no accident that the primary, and driving, samples in Yes Frank, No Smoke, (1985) Barber's densely woven masterwork of scratch, come from that staple of television filler, 'The Deep'. Feature film fodder that is anything but profound, this adaptation of the Peter Benchley novel nevertheless allows Barber both to make enjoyable verbal wordplay around the flotsam and jetsam of purely surface images while highlighting video's essential materiality. As Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset swim naked through the tropical waters or knock (more than twice, of course...) on Robert Shaw's door, their actions remind us that video is, in a way, both wave and particle : a moment on tape that can be isolated and copied into high-rhythm repeats ; and an almost marine environment, where actions, expressions, dialogue and sound exist in a swell of currents. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the whole work unfolds within another kind of ocean, a coloured ebb and flow of pixel wash. The cast of 'The Deep' are joined by the young orphans of 'The Blue Lagoon', amongst others, all of whom share problems with communication, whether bad phone access or a constantly alternating 'yes' and 'no'. Roy Scheider's gifting of Barber's title, becomes an articulate -- but narratively concise -- summary of scratch's impulse to call and response, whether verbal or visual.

That Andy Warhol's appropriation and redirection of the mass-market artefact would appeal to Barber is of little surprise . In 1001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of (1996), his take on Warhol's 'Marilyn' (1962) -- a homage to the artist who in a sense originated the scratch technique, albeit in a different medium -- brings the fluidity of video dissolves to the fixed material dimensions of the original image. Using wipes of saturated colour across the face of the iconic actress -- a constantly changing visage of multiple garish hues scored to dreamy electronica -- Barber provides one of the clearest examples of his desire to be immersed in the abstracting potential of technology, a dream of the shifting surface that suggests the ephemerality of both subject and signal. Only his Arizona (1995), with its landscape of morphing forms and ambient passages , delivers this particular strain of the Barber project as effectively.

Another of Barber's works, Withdrawal (1997), skilfully weaves the material with the metaphysical. Originally made for the Channel 4-supported experimental animation strand 'Animate!', a commission whose only prerequisite is some form of manipulation of the image , Barber's accumulating digital erasures, formally simple but thematically 'animating', fit the brief like a body does a coffin. Here we are presented with a seeming pastoral idyll, a green meadow stretching to trees and mountains beyond, all under the perfect blue of sky, its drifting clouds offering no threat of rain. In a series of short scenes, a relaxed (and probably extended) family group walk happily towards and past the camera. Each time they do so however, their number reduces, along with certain features of the landscape, until finally we are left with a single boy, walking on the earth itself, devoid of flora and foliage. Accompanying the entire progress have been fragments of dialogue on mortality and the passing of things from voices of all ages. As the boy leaves the frame for the last time, the camera pans slowly up from the empty planet to the constellations far above. The measuring of human time and its stories against such vastness is conveyed precisely and poignantly, with the sense , of course, that the universe itself is given meaning by those very creatures whose lives seem emblematic of insignificance. The narratives of stars do not diminish our being; rather they cast greater, lasting light on its value.

How we might be situated, as individuals, is considered also in Upside Down Minutiae (2001). In this work, three individuals, strung upside down on a scaffolding frame attached to the back of a truck, are taken on a short drive around everyday streets, a microphone recording what they see and hear. Later the participants are interviewed by Barber, who asks them a series of personal questions about their childhood and other significant events in their lives that, with hindsight, they see in a different light. Is it too simple to suggest that this momentary repositioning of their bodies, in relation to the world as it is, has unlocked a previously inaccessible chamber of deep-seated responses? Could these rushes of blood to the head echo, albeit more optimistically, certain of the other jolts to reappraisal that surface throughout Barber's work? How does the beauty of the street foliage fit into all this? What is abundantly clear is that, yet again, Barber has managed to let us consider afresh the images and sites of our being, green shoots of thought bursting through the defaults we allow to dominate our actions and reactions.

An epic of everyday loneliness and institutional oppression, Barber's understated 'road rage' drama, Walking Off Court (2004), deploys 'big' music and sweeping, often inverted, panning shots to emphasise the significant emotions and psychological trauma concealed behind the concrete aprons of the suburban. Drawn from an article in The Times about a tennis pro's breakdown after a major motorway was built outside his house, the film is a quietly devastating attack on the various alienations created by modern life, whether the distancing nature of domestic technology (answerphones controlling, and blocking, all communication) or the monstrous insensitivity of bureaucracy and overwhelming infrastructure projects. As Barber narrates James Goodman's story, the fable of a man driven to crisis point by the road's construction and his inability to make contact with possible tennis partners, the camera arcs and dives like an extravagant top-spin lob or a high-kicking power serve, finally flipping completely as Goodman's universe is turned upside down. In a significant final shot, we find ourselves at the edge of the known world , down by the waterline on a gently sloping beach, as Barber ups the stakes to highlight parallels between tennis and the in/ability properly to live, even to survive as a species. What could be cod philosophising is poignantly anchored by the actual individual journey that has led us to this point, and closes one of Barber's most significant enquiries into the melancholy nature of things.

A comparable sense of alienation can be found in Shouting Match (2004), the most recent of Barber's endurance films and the leftfield cousin of the environmental artifices prevalent in so much 'Reality TV' programming.   Here contestants converge on the abandoned shell of a former supermarket, caught in the limbo of ring roads and retail parks, in order to shout at each other in a highly orchestrated competitive ritual that could perhaps be considered a 'Rollerball' of the throat. Strapped into chairs that run on rails towards each other, and propelled forward or back by off-screen volunteers, the contestants seek to out-shout their opponent, thus remaining in-frame, in the action. As the clock ticks from day to dusk and beyond, in a low-rent nod to the durational aspect of 'Reality' machinations, the scenario becomes both a perfect metaphor for the underlying nature of much archetypal human behaviour and a deceptively simple incarnation of the forward impulse of contemporary cultural, social and political exchange. More Nauman than New Man, Shouting Match also throws down the gauntlet to broadcast television. Barber's quiet, private dream is perhaps that certain of his filmic 'exercises' become the springboard for an entirely new wave of celebrity involvement in the mediated spectacle, the pillories of the post-modern. And why not? Surely it's just the case that Barber, in his relaxed generosity, would be 'giving something back'.