Chance, History, and Art . . . (1980) (45 Minutes)
More than 90 U-matic, analogue video cassettes were shot to make James Scott’s 1980 documentary Chance, History, Art…. And yet the finished work is amazingly lean and precisely crafted, with each interview with the five profiled artists appearing to consist of just one sustained sequence with only minor interruptions. That the interrelationships between these interviews and the supporting illustrative materials sparks with such vibrancy is quite something to behold, signalling Scott’s intuitive, broad appreciation of the artistic process in all its variations and whatever the context.
Ostensibly the film is an enquiry into the longevity of surrealist ideas and their contemporary manifestation in the 1980s. Or, as the film puts it: ‘Conversations with Five Artists. Or a film originally about surrealism.’ The art movement, and Georges Bataille in particular, did see a revival of sorts over the course of the decade but the piece also opens up ideas that had been developing by way of the legacy of the 1960s, focusing on liveness, politics and spatial dynamics. Stuart Brisley had already established his name as a performance (or live-art) artist going back to the mid-1960s and John McKeon and Anne Bean here debate how unique their individual performances are, or should be.
It also probes the social usefulness and context of art with questions being raised about its institution context and labelling. For Brisley this meant partially needing the institutional framing for his art, so as to provide a context for and make sensible its form-busting qualities; whereas Jamie Reid here celebrates the opportunity to present his Sex Pistols graphic designs all around the country, on the streets and in shop fronts, via posters paid for and distributed by the record company. The sound of the Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ playing over tracking footage of the 1981 Hayward Gallery Surrealism show – probably the starting point for the film – explodes the context for pretty much all the work featured, while also tracing lines back to the situationist international détournement collage techniques that had first inspired Jamie Reid and Malcolm McLaren.
The whole film is built out of collage and juxtaposition. Scott had used 35mm to shoot his own video footage as it played on TV monitors, highlighting the sampling that has taken place, and the work’s larger shaping and conceptual reception. The pulsing video light, with TV lines sometimes showing, plus computer graphic intertitles, lend the film something of a sinister, sci-fi feel, connecting it with fantasy and genre films from later in the decade. Chance, History, Art...’s looped, brittle electronic music provided by Simon Brint, latterly of Raw Sex from TV’s French and Saunders, provides further curious, unexpected twists, especially when played over footage of Jackson Pollock daubing wet paint on the ground in long, stringy blobs. Art’s strangeness and unpredictability, plus the artists dynamic relationship to their audience, are all successfully brought out. The film premiered at the 1980 London Film Festival, before then opening the brand-new ICA Cinematheque in March 1981 in connection with a retrospective of Stuart Brisley’s work in the ICA gallery.
– William Fowler
William Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive.
