28 October 2010
Pioneering video artists reunite for Dundee show
Photo opportunity: 8pm on Friday, November 5th at Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts. The Duvet Brothers will be performing their legendary 1986 show.
Influential 1980s video artists, the Duvet Brothers, will perform together for the first time in over 20 years when they appear at the Visual Research Centre in Dundee Contemporary Arts next month.
From 1984-1989, The Duvet Brothers - AKA Rik Lander and Peter Boyd Maclean - were pioneering Scratch Video artists who produced pioneering music, pop videos, commercials, and TV title sequences as well as becoming known for their riotous live performances. The duo will perform a renowned show they originally presented at the Limelight Club in Soho in September 1986.
Scratch Video was a British video art movement that, using sampled footage and techniques such as fast-cutting and multiple layering, challenged many of the established boundaries of broadcast television and gallery-bound video art. Their work, which the YouTube generation would recognise as ‘mash-up’, laid the foundations for many of the developments in video art to have subsequently taken place.
The Duvet Brothers will reunite for a special, one-off performance of their 18-screen, three-channel show at the VRC, part of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, on Friday, November 5th. Despite the seismic technological advances of the past two-and-a-bit decades, they will deliver the mix live using VHS tape, just as they did in the eighties.
The 18-screen array will run as a gallery installation until November 19th.
Adam Lockhart, one of the exhibition organisers, said, 'I'm really excited to have been able to bring the Duvet Brother’s together again, after more than 20 years, to do a performance. This is something I’ve been trying to do for a while now.'
'George Barber, one of their contemporaries, was showing in the main galleries at DCA and this presented an excellent opportunity for this to happen. There certainly is an appetite for this sort of work again. People are interested in retro technology.'
'They were exceptionally influential in the 1980s and affected quite a lot of mainstream television but have not been properly recognised for it.'
The Duvets were best known for hijacking the New Order classic ‘Blue Monday’ and re-interpreting it as an agit-prop statement on Thatcherism. The video juxtaposed images of the miners strike, NHS hospitals and nuclear demonstrations with news footage of Thatcher and Michael Heseltine to make a political statement.
The duo’s videos were shown at galleries and video festivals around the world, and they also made several influential pop videos, commercials, and TV title sequences. Their editing and hand held camera techniques paved the way for the visual style adopted by youth television programmes such as ‘Network 7’ and ‘The Word’ and became part of the language of television.
They were also well known for their live multi-screen performances in galleries and nightclubs and squat parties around Britain and Europe. Using up to twenty-one televisions placed on a wall made from scaffolding they mixed three channels of video to create a blur of musical abstraction - a living, moving, painting.
The Duvet Brothers will perform their original Live Multi-Screen Scratch Show at Centrespace, Visual Research Centre, from 8-9pm on Friday, 5th November. Entry is free, although tickets are required and can be obtained by calling the DCA Box Office on 01382 909900.
The exhibition will run until Friday, November 19th, and opening times are 12pm-4pm, from Tuesday to Friday, and 12.30pm-5.30pm at weekends.
The Duvet Brothers’ work will also appear in the ‘The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video’, a 1985 production that will be screened at DCA from 6pm on Wednesday, November 10th.
The work is being shown in association with DJCAD research project ‘REWIND! Artists’ Video in the 1970s & 1980s’, and the show coincides with the current DCA Discovery Exhibition, The Long Commute/Arcade by George Barber and Jaygo Bloom. George Barber was a contemporary of the Duvet Brothers.
Notes to Editors:
For more information, images, or to interview the artists, please contact Adam Lockhart on 01382 388272 or email a.lockhart@dundee.ac.uk.
Visual Research Centre is a unique research and production facility run by DJCAD, and based within Dundee Contemporary Arts in Nethergate, Dundee. More information is available at www.vrc.dundee.ac.uk.
Information about the Duvet Brothers can be found at www.duvetbrothers.com.
To find out more about the Rewind project, please visit www.rewind.ac.uk.
For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07854 953277 |
