ART DIGGIN' / CRATE DIGGIN' AT ROUGH TRADE
Alongside our curatorial approach to music selection, Truth & Lies work alongside visual artists who we believe bring a ‘digging’ approach to their own practices. Whether it be stalwarts such as cut-outs, found objects and collage or web-based and digital work, these artists pick and sample from the already existing to create new works and their own fresh vision.
For the next three weeks we'll be showing video work by Wayne Burrows. A writer, journalist, artist and film maker often working with found 20th century footage referencing popular culture, kitsch, consumerism, exotica and music.
Wayne has written extensively about music for both arts titles and national media and is currently researching the influence of 1950's kitsch exotica on seminal jazz artist Sun Ra.
Test footage using re-cut segments from a 1970s American sci-fi public information film, 'Safety: Harm Hides At Home', directed by Roger Lanoue. The opening sequence features the heroine, a 'successful freelance architect', transformed by aliens into 'Guardiana', a female superhero with the power to reverse time and explain safety to young children in her suburban neighbourhood.
The Serendipity Loops (Wayne Burrows, 2012)
This film runs in six sections, made up entirely of still images, and draws on a large archive of print material produced on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War period, sequencing Western and Eastern Bloc material in ways that emphasise their essential similarities. Each section is edited to accompany a piece of music, ranging from Tom Dissevelt’s ‘Whirling’ and Dick Mills’ ‘Purple Space & White Coronas’, early experiments in sequenced and atmospheric electronic music; to the late Graham Dalley’s ‘Pacifico’ and ‘Surf Ride’ (both from his privately pressed 1966 LP ‘Graham Dalley At The Barn Restaurant, Solihull’); ‘Elusive’, a Studio G production for an Avon marketing flexi-disc narrated by Patrick Allen (who also did voice-overs for the British Government’s notorious ‘Protect and Survive’ series of 1970s Nuclear fall-out public information films); and the anonymously produced Radiophonic Workshop alien invasion scenario of The Cimex Corporations’s advertising 7” extolling the value of their industrial cleaning services. The introductory sequence, built around machine-like heartbeats and Andre Bazin’s 1946 comment about cinema returning to its origins, reflects this film’s own status as a kind of digital magic-lantern slideshow.
Out Of This World (General Motors, 1964)
A beautifully made commercial film produced by the Frigidaire division of General Motors and based on their exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York – a piece of corporate Cold War marketing that seems to echo the identical tendency in the Soviet Union at the same moment to promise a utopian future. Its vision is – as such visions usually are – both seductive and slightly terrifying.
Village Sunday (Stewart Wilensky, 1961)
In contrast to General Motors’ corporate and technological vision of the future, another strand of the Cold War narrative is seen in an early form here, as Jean Shepherd narrates a whimsical portrait of New York’s Greenwich Village, just on the cusp of its decisive transformation into a counter-cultural byword. Painters, small theatres, musicians, beatniks and drop-outs – all ending with some great footage of the Beatnik/Surrealist poet Ted Joans giving a recital with free improvised jazz-flute accompaniment at a Greenwich Village artists’ hang-out.