Richard Hamilton - Protest Pictures
at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

SIGHTS UNSEEN:  UNFINISHED BRITISH FILMS
Editor: Dan North

"Many British films never make it to the screen. Obstacles of finance, censorship, distribution or creative breakdown can appear in their way, and they might even fail to get beyond the script stage. This book collects new essays by leading scholars that use archival resources to reconstruct the stories behind a range of films by prominent film-makers. These thwarted productions are all too often excluded from histories of British cinema, but the accounts of their unmaking contained in Sights Unseen provides an illuminating insight into the factors which have served to undermine the stability of the film industry in Britain." 

Click here for a Link to more info about the book that features a chapter on James Scott

3/4-7/16 2007:

NIGHTCLEANERS SCREENED AT MOCA:

The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965–80, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 120 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of Media —including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. http://www.moca.org/wack/

Making History: Art and Documenarty in Britain from 1929 to Now

TATE LIVERPOOL
England
Feb 3 - April 23 2006

Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now surveys the impact of the documentary form on art and artists and vice versa. Encompassing film, photography, painting and installation art, the exhibition focuses on works where a dialogue between art and realist documentary occurs. It seeks to question the traditional opposition between art and documentary, and to ask whether this is really a false dichotomy.

The documentary movement that Grierson helped establish was in the liberal and Fabian tradition, sympathetic to working-class people but nevertheless incorporating something of an establishment point of view, and one can sense that connection in the Free Cinema group. Yet from its inception this history has also been the subject of contestation in more militant film-making, both in the 1930s and in the subsequent work of British documentary groups in the 1970s and 1980s.

Amber, Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Film Collective were groups that began work in the 1970s. Both Amber and Cinema Action were concerned with the empowerment of their working-class subjects. Amber perhaps was the more Griersonian, being concerned with the documentation of working-class life, whereas Cinema Action was concerned with supporting and publicizing political struggles, whether in the factory or against the occupation in Northern Ireland. Berwick Street was the most engaged with the debates on the role avant-garde cinema could play in producing a political cinema - ideas associated with Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker in France and publicized in the UK by Screen magazine amongst others.

Berwick Street's Nightcleaners 1975 is a film that has aged extremely well. Its exploration of a durational aesthetic recalls of course the experiments of Warhol and others, but within a framework provided by both experimental cinema and conceptual art (Mary Kelly, who was working on her 'Women and Work' project at the time, was part of the group). This film documents a struggle for a living wage by marginalized women and migrant workers, a subject that is as topical today as when the film was made in 1975. The repetitive nature of the work is reflected in the form and experience of watching the film itself. The audience is drawn into the world of its subjects, as well as being presented not with a representation of reality but (in Godard's phrase) with a reality of representation.

- Excerpt by Mark Nash

www.tate.org.uk

Nightcleaners screening!

Thurs 10 Feb, 7pm 2005
Film - Seminal works from the 20th century: Labour

The machine age equation: advertising, new leisure, unionisation. Len Lye’s enthusiasm for automation, Free Cinema’s exemplary recording of a night out at Piccadilly Circus, Berwick Street Collective’s seminal experimental documentary.

Birth of the Robot, Len Lye, UK 1936, 16mm, 7mins
Nice Time, Claude Goretta & Alain Tanner, UK 1957, 16mm, 17mins
Nightcleaners, Berwick Street Collective, UK 1976, 16mm, 90mins

The film programme is curated by Ian White.

Whitechapel Art Gallery
Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

More info: www.whitechapel.org

Eight new paintings that James Scott has been working on have just been added to the artwork section.

Update on James' painting Still Life in Provence #3 (part of the Inner-City Arts auction in September 2004) was sold as part of the lot to an individual collector.

Follow up to Thomas Starr King installation story - James and Paloma's piece, now called "Yellow Lion", was successfully installed on the second floor of the Bungalow Building. It is located in a walkway between two classrooms. On May 13th, 2004 the school is having a special event called 'A Celebration of Art' - which will celebrate the six tile mosaic murals (and also a painting mural in the hallways). All six tiles were created by local/neighborhood artists.

We have finally moved and almost settled into the new house. My new studio is nearly ready, which is part of the house now. At the end of May I will be moving from 725 North Western, where I had my studio for nearly eight years. Unfortunately, not much work has been done lately, mostly just packing.

My most recent project "Cracks" (a tribute to the Resistance Movement) is almost finished. As I see it, the artist's job is to get his fingers into the crevices and prise them open.

That's not hard when the contradictions are so gaping. I was going to call it "Cracks, Cream and Crevices", the "Cream" being the effluent for covering the cracks when they get too extreme but that all seemed too much - "Cracks" seemed to say it all. The project comprises over fifty paintings, all twelve inches square and has evolved over the last three years.

  Alongside "Cracks", I have been working on a series of "Family Portraits". These are more character vignettes done on  a large scale - all eight by seven feet. While not exactly traditional portraits, searching for a likeness, they are intended  as an emotional representation and include my Mother, Father and Brother. A self-portrait will be the last. Maybe more will come later?

 And this year I have also embarked on a long thought about Book Project which will ultimately comprise six books of drawings from the following catagories: animals, flowers, self-portraits, portraits, face, head or body parts, abstract, still-life, interiors, tableau, family, nude figure, erotic, landscapes, anti-war, psychic states, etc.