George Barber

Kill Your TV: Jim Moir’s Weird World of Video Art

Sebastian Barfield

Vic Reeves, Isaac Julien

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

Taxi Driver Two

George Barber

This revolves around Tim West, an advertising executive who is developing a Channel 4 programme on cooking for terrorists. Disillusioned by the hyper-reality of the media world, he joins Robert de Niro evening classes, but also falls under the pastoral influence of Johnny Morris. From the opening images of night-time, car-ridden streets accompanied by languorous sax on the soundtrack, through to the sub-Chandleresque voice-over narration, Taxi Driver II strikes you with its clever knowingness. But it's more than just a clever nod in the direction of contemporary film noir, just as it's more than an incestuous joke at the expense of the London based media world: it's a telling comment on the contemporary media culture of postmodernism.

The Freestone Drone

George Barber

An unmanned drone deviates from its destined flight path, as it wanders through time and space its camera surveys its surroundings and the robot narrates its findings.

Scratch Free State

George Barber

Scratch Free State has great energy and straddles an interesting line between a popular culture and fine art sensibility. This piece was made at the same time as Tilt. It is probably the best example of what an artist can do re-cutting and processing David Attenborough's Life On Earth programmes.

Tilt

George Barber

Made using footage from USA Olympics in Los Angeles 1984 and snippets of Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States. The footage was combined at Goldsmith's Art Department using an unusual Grass Valley mixer that had oscillating wipes which created the signature colours and wiggly lines. (Modern Art Oxford) Barber was always the most polished of the Scratch video artists, and Tilt shows his ability to make seductive, easy-viewing pieces, while maintaining a subversive undercurrent.

2001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of

George Barber

A remixing of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints.

Absence of Satan

George Barber

A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and cliché. George Barber is one of the pioneers of Scratch Video which emerged in the UK during the mid-1980s. Scratch video makes use of found images from films and television, cutting seemingly incongruous imagery together to make a new meaning; it has been compared to the record-scratching techniques of hip-hop music, hence the name. (lux.org.uk)