 Mae gelled y gallwn arddangos yn gondol gyrfa, yn cael ei ddweud chyffr. Yn hygrif stunned o y pethau yn ymlaen. A fyddwn ni'n gwahodd gyffredinol gan gyda fforddol â'i glun, i fynd i gynnal ar hyn o'u allan, oed gyda rôl, ac rôl'n i gael eu hannu gwiaith. OK, well, I think we will begin. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Sarah Turner and I am the Deputy Director for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Arts. I want to start by extending a very warm welcome to everyone joining us for the first day of cutting edge collage in Britain 1945 to now. And we're delighted that so many of you could join us today and we hope that you'll come back for more as the event unfolds over the next two weeks. And I know many people are joining from around the world and it's great to have you with us today. Some of you might already be familiar with the Paul Mellon Centre, but some of you might be joining us for the first time. Physically, we're based in Bedford Square in central London and we're part of Yale University. Many of our activities and resources can also be accessed online through our website. The Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and an educational charity that champions new ways of understanding British art history and culture. And as such, we're a place of debate, conversation and we hope experimentation where ideas can be researched, shaped and tested out. This event is part of that wider endeavour and we're delighted to have collaborated with Rosie Ram, visiting lecturer in curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art and Eleanor Cripper, curator, modern contemporary British art at Tate. And I want to extend my thanks on behalf of the centre to both of them for bringing together such an innovative approach and generous spirit of collaboration to all of this programme. And all PMC events are indebted to our events team, especially Shona Blansfield, our events manager and Danny Convert, our events assistant, for actually making a programme of this scale happen and you can meet them virtually through the chat function as we go along. We always really welcome your comments and interactions, so do reach out and get in touch with us via the chat. This conference was originally programmed to take place at Tate Britain in spring 2020, but for obvious reasons that had to be cancelled due to Covid. But we decided that the programme was too rich to disappear as an unrealised project and using our experience of hosting online events. And I'm delighted that Anna Reid, who is head of research, during when the pandemic broke out and actually really shaped moving PMC events online, is here with us for this first session. So thanks to you, Anna, we're learning a lot from that online programming experience. And so we completely reimagined cutting edge as an online gathering of events. There is, I think, something quite appropriate about the relationship between subject matter and format here. The cuts, copies and creativity of the virtual world of Zoom might add a different or new perspective to our discussions as we meet in our conference collage together over the next few days. But before we get going on that programme, let me just walk you through some of our housekeeping guidelines. So for today, this session will begin with a keynote, actually papers, and that will follow, well that will last for about 45 minutes followed by Q&A. This will be followed by an artist presentation and discussion for 45 minutes and there'll be another chance for Q&A. And again, like I say, please do get in touch with us, ask questions, give us feedback. And you can ask questions to our panellists by using the Q&A function, which you'll find at the bottom of your screen. The session is being recorded and will be made available to the public via our website after the event. Close captioning is also available and you can use that by clicking the CC button on the bottom of your screen to enable those captions. So now let me hand over to one of our co-conveners, Rosie Ram, to say more about today's programme and the overall shaping of the conference. Thank you Sarah and hello everyone. Welcome to the first day of our conference and workshop programme, Cutting Edge Collage in Britain 1945 to now, which will be unfolding online over the next two weeks. I wanted to start by saying a huge thank you to Sarah Turner and to Shawna Blanchfield at the Paul Mellon Centre for all their work in realising this programme in online form. We sent the call for contributions to this event back in November 2019. And as Sarah mentioned, it had been due to take place in person at Tate Britain in late March 2020, but for obvious reasons at that point it couldn't go ahead. We had an incredible response to the call for papers that we circulated for that event, not just in terms of the quantity and quality, but the energy and originality of the scholarship being proposed was truly staggering. So we're delighted to finally be able to present what promises to be an intensive interrogation into the art of collage over the course of the next two weeks. And we also wanted to sincerely thank all of our contributors and chairs for bearing with us so patiently and for tailoring their presentations to suit this online format. The thinking behind this programme and the interest behind that call for papers that we initially circulated emerged from a set of questions around how we might define collage, whether materially, technologically, aesthetically or conceptually, and why collage seems to gain a particular currency at moments of political tension or social turmoil. When the tectonic plates of culture appear to be shifting, why is it that collage offers itself as a mode of practice through which to navigate or even catalyze cultural change? As I think will become ever more apparent across the next two weeks, collage is a challenging term to define. Whether understood as an object or as a kind of method, it names something that is inherently contradictory, something comprised of internal fractures and produced by processes of rupture and recombination. And yet, despite these complexities, there's also something beguilingly simple about a notion of collage, something that can accommodate more makeshift, informal, amateur and collectivised ways of working that threaten the power structures that legitimise and valorise artistic work. Collage is also a proliferous practice that can sustain multiple voices simultaneously. And I think this will not only be analysed but also modelled by the breadth of subjects and perspectives that we will encounter together throughout the presentations and debates over the course of our conference and workshop programme. So, please do join us each day this week for an extended two hour collage lunch break for those of you who are in the UK between 12pm and 2pm, beginning with today's session which is entitled Collage Dreamings and Collage Hauntings, which will be followed tomorrow by a session on cuts, copies, clips and the curatorial. Before we move on to collage as method manuscript and moving image on Thursday and finally collage politics and punk practices to close the week on Friday. And next week, I believe there might be a few places still remaining to join us again on Wednesday and Thursday between 2pm and 4.30pm UK time when we'll be hosting interactive workshop sessions in which attendees can engage even more directly with new research through discussion and debate. I also just wanted to mention how thrilled we are to be able to present artist film practices as part of this online programme with Elizabeth Price Today and Judah Attila on Thursday. Through their work, not only can we see collage implemented as a method of filmmaking, but we're also invited to think about the temporality of collage in moving image and to encounter the cuts of collage within the materiality of film itself. Engaging with all of these presentations online will I think also elicit questions about the future of collage in relation to the digital, where exponential cutting, pasting and linking practices increasingly structure our interactions with online space. So, with all of these and many more questions in mind, I'm now going to hand over to my co-combeiner, Eleanor Cripper, from Tate Britain, who will be introducing and chairing our first session today, collage dreamings and collage warnings. Hi, everyone. Hello, finally appearing. Thank you, Rosie, and thank you, Sarah, for the introduction and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our session on collage dreaming and collage haunting, and just to recap, we will start with a double bill, two keynotes, have a short comfort break and reconvene at around 10 plus one for Elizabeth Price's film and presentation followed by a Q&A. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the keynote speakers of our first session, and I will be very brief here, but please refer to our biographical notes online for more details if you wish to do so. So, speaking first will be David Alan Mellow, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. David has written remarkable essays that have examined and reconfigured our understanding of the work of David Hockney, Cecil Beaton, David Bailey and Pauline Boathe, among many others. And it's also been involved in many curatorial projects, and I think especially relevant to his presentation today is his co-curation of the Bruce Lacey experience with Jeremy Deller in 2012 at Candelab Centre in 2012. His writing on Richard Smith and Frank Hauerbach is due to be published as part of his work coming monographic publications, I think hopefully next year. Our second speaker is Thomas Crowe, Rosalie Solo Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where his research and teaching on European and American art spans the 17th century to the contemporary. His influential publication includes his first book, Painters and Public Life in 18th century Paris, and the recent Long March of Pop, Art, Music and Design 1930-1995. And Thomas is currently working on the forthcoming book, The Artist in the Cancer Culture from Bruce Connor to Mike Kelly and Other Tales from the Edge, due to be published in October 2022. So David and Tom have both played incredible roles in shifting paradigms and in situating art making within larger cultural and historical developments. And we are absolutely thrilled to have their contributions to ISAs into beginning to think about the conjunctions and collisions of collage. So the two keynotes will be delivered back to back and we will then have some time for discussion and questions. So over to you, David. Well, hello everybody. Right. Well, I'm going to talk a bit about the weird times and strange things that come out of English assemblage and collage. Primarily in the 1960s. Here's something to begin with. What I noticed as I began to look at this more carefully was in relation to the artists and the objects that Tom Crowe wanted to look at was the overlaps between the work of people like Bruce Connor, George Hermes, and with English artists. And one of the themes that comes through one of the commonalities is the macabre and the eccentric comic grotesque. And I thought what better way of addressing that than seeing this image here, which is very badly captioned by me. So it's my incapacity. For which I apologise. This is a photograph from 1968. It's actually from a film which the newsreel company British Pathé put out called Nightmare Robots. And it's an image which, quite apart from this rough technological beast that's striding down the street in Listen and Grow, I'm also fascinated by the sense of wear and tear and batteredness. Which I think is there in the West Coast artists that Tom is interested in. So this beautiful comma van here in a very dilapidated state. Let me continue. How do I move this on? That's wonderful. Beside this grotesque and the sense of relics of the future and how battered they are, I draw attention to the fact that many of the artists involved in collage and assemblage in England have been through national service. They've been, they were enrolled in the military. And apart from those conspicuous examples like David Hockney, who become conscientious objectors. But the people we might be interested in are artists such as Bruce Lacy, Richard Smith, who becomes a colourfield painter, and Peter Blake. And they are all persons who've been through training in the RAF, the Royal Air Force, and specifically in the Signals Corps, the Royal Corps of Signals, which was most, which is a kind of a place where technology electronics comes together. And here's something that Peter Blake was involved in. This is a teletype printer. So the ability to deal with coded messages and then pass them on. This is something, in fact, coding itself is crucial. It's crucial. It's the bedrock of the English spy novel. Could we move on? Thank you. Moving between codes, between parts, and it's no coincidence that Eduardo Palazzi is very interested in Wittgenstein and the idea of units that build up meaning. And this is from his 1962 publication Metaphysical Translations, where, and if you like, the look of this thing takes us back into that junk world of rather battered forms. And this, if you like, is the decor of the period, and it's very much a decor for English art at the time. I know it's something that Tom wants to begin with to talk about is the difference between the immaculate work of St Martin's and the sculptors at St Martin's and the, if you like, the West Coast, the American response to that. And the English response is already priced in, it's packaged in, and it's this, this text here, fragments that we, in a sense, are grotesque in themselves, are half-formed. We move on one slide please. London really is a focus at this time. It's where William Burroughs is living in the very early 60s and actually through most of the 60s in fact. This is a diary, a French diary as you can see, which he's repurposing. And if we talk about language, just have a look at the kinds of allusions that Burroughs is putting into that text. And this general feeling of what we call in England a lash-up, again that comes out of actually, again military English, the idea that you tie down tarpaulins to cover over and hold together objects, you lash them up. And in this diary, you see the sellotape holding down various clippings that Burroughs has put together. And the text itself, Burroughs hugely in the shadow of T.S. Eliot, is an aggregation of other texts and indeed popular music. This is not my God's 38, but it is old 97, which is a twisting of an American folk song. Overall with it is this apocalyptic sense, technology creating a world, a frightening world. You like the world where a robot will stagger towards you down, listen, grow. We move on one more, please. Someone who is part of a loose coalition of William Burroughs and Eduardo Palazzi is Jegi Ballard, Jim Ballard. Ballard is thought of primarily as a novelist. He also made collages, and this is a collage part of a large screen which he erected in his garden, which puts together clippings from American scientific and medical journals with these, again, ominous texts. You remember he's trained as a physician. He wants to be a psychiatrist. But rather like John Keats, who studied medicine before he went on and further became a poet, that early involvement in the science of the time. The other thing is the layout of this collage. It looks like the tabulated nature of it. You run through different possibilities. And it bespeaks a world of which has been coordinated, and yet that world seems to be under the infuse with terror. Again, we move on. Well, it wasn't all terrible, was it? Those of us who remember that period. It wasn't terrible all the time. And if you like, this is where the moment of English consumer culture acquires a spectacular dimension through the publication of the Sunday Times colour section. We could spend all of our time just examining this. This is actually the publisher's file copy of that first issue, where Jean Schrimton shares space with a footballer. And you see the way in which it's put together as a grid. And one thing that collage does is reveal to us those processes that are everyday processes. Again, if we move on. It wasn't just the Sunday Times. It was a world of high definition colour printing. If you are able to look at that extraordinary document, what goes the easel, you will see Pauline Boatie, Peter Plake, discussing different colour reproduction processes and their sources, whether it's in Harry Match or the Sunday Times colour section. And this is sadly after her death in 1966. This was the second iteration of the giant collage which she constructed. The first one you see in Pop Goes the Easel, it forms the introduction, so you have a wall montage, a collage, which then becomes the opening credit sequence for Pop Goes the Easel. And if we, maybe we should move on. That world, that kit of parts that Ballard, Paolozzi and others referred to. Kit of parts which will display to you just as Pauline Boatie's wall collage showed you various media celebrities. So in what is, again, one of the landmarks of the period, the Sergeant Pepper Tableau. We see an archaeology of 20th century culture pinned around dummies and faces. This is Peter Plake in the middle with Michael Cooper, the London photographer. And most importantly perhaps is Jan Hayworth, who is beginning the decoration of the dummies called the Sergeant Pepper Tableau. And if we move on again, and he arises again, that ominous aspect of, it's a cliché of the history of Dardar and Surrealism, that the dummy stands proud and stands over it. This is from a little noted short film by Lindsay Anderson, but a screenplay worked on by Sheila Delaney, that wonderful northern writer and poet. And it shows the return home to a northern industrial town, which is becoming derelict, again that great thematic. Well, if you like it's a thematic of collage at the time. And Patricia Healy plays the part of an art student who looks in an estranged way at the estranged panorama of this northern industrial town. And in one scene Lindsay Anderson directs the film, and in one scene she's confronted with these figures from her hometown. And here it is. Again dependent very much on, if you like, where are the roots of this, possibly in films like Zero de Conduit, French Surrealism, and so on. If we move on, one aspect of that, that face of English assemblage or London assemblage is the junk store, and the junk stores on the Portobello Road are, if you like, the epicenter of English pop. And the person who exploits them considerably is Peter Blake, and here he is featuring in late 65 on the front of Life magazine. Now, I talked about the, we talked about technological nightmares, the robots, but there's there's another thing that comes into this, if you like on the junk store in the junk store universe. And that is the thoughts and jetsome of empire. If you go to a flea market, if you went to a particularly today, you would find these things, for example, in the foreground here, wearing Florence of Arabia drag, and then this racist image of a servant black person behind. And for Blake, all this is an immense exercising nostalgia. So we're in the territory of the morbid. And much of, I think of English collage is in this zone. If we move on once more, for example, you know, forgive me the Getty Images logo there. Continuing this theme of the imperial residues that make up the this this panorama of English assemblage. This is actually we're in the back of the, the EMI building where the Beatles are photographed for their first LP and for their one of the last ones too. And this is an English jazz ensemble called the temperance seven. And they're from they come out of the Royal College of Art. And they begin in the late 50s. And but what I want you to notice here is, and this is this is the the way in which they are dressed as if members of say the say either Lord Kitchener's army. I mean, not his larger army in the First World War, but the punitive expedition to put down the Mardi. And again, this phantom phantom of of the camel, which is actually borrowed from Bruce Lacey's collection. We move on one war. How lots he is so prolific. So inventive. And that we've been talking about the 60s. But really, as you can see from the date of this, how lots he having negotiated the trauma of losing most of his family on his father's side during the war. Is is so fully integrated in that in surrealist culture and produces again these these lashed up take together scrapbooks. He was he was in the habit. And I was a beneficiary of what of this of tearing books pieces and then lashing them together again and giving them to people as gifts. And it was it was great remarkable because it was also. And there we see Palots in relation say to to William Burroughs and they they. The gift of the cut up. And this this is from it's in I think it's in the Victorian Albert psychological Atlas, which is this. It's in a extremely delicate condition, falling to bits. And so from one walrus stranded in front of a American colonial mansion to another one. I have the next slide please. And one of the threads running through what I've just I just noticed I should have noticed before was was different forms of popular music. It's very important and Tom is going to talk about this in in in a moment. This is the the culmination of the magical mystery tour on an RAF airfield in Kent. That's a blast screen to shelter people from bombing or fire or. And this gathering of figures from John Lennon's imagination, the egg men. In white. The policeman balancing on precariously on the blast concrete blast screen. So that's really all I've got to say. There there we've seen different kinds of trophies. We've seen the property box of photographic portraits of celebrities that Peter Jan Hayworth and Peter Blake put together for Sergeant Pepper. This this has a kind of elegant feeling and indeed magical mystery tourism is is supremely elegant. And that's all I want to say. Thank you. Shall I stop video. Yes, thank you David. Thank you so much and I think we are moving straight to Tom's presentation now. Let me thank you very much for your kind introduction and everyone who's contributed to putting this on probably my best path here is to just get going and make the most of our time. And thank David for this lead in which does indeed dovetail with a good deal of what I had intended to say and probably more particular and compact version. I thought at first to begin with some generalities about collage tendencies that linked Britain and California. In the same period the late fifties and the 1960s something about collage techniques as a way of reshuffling the deck in the face of inhospitable circumstances encountered by insurgent younger artists in both places. But Rosie has really done that very well so it doesn't really matter that I came across in the meantime, a specific case, I think that illustrates that convergence in much more vivid terms. That is by showing the bonding between two masters of collage in the two places and into different art forms. Now, in an anti collage statement by the new generation sculptor David Anasly, we can see a certain direction. He's considering whether the term assemblage might be applied to Anthony Carroll as part by part method of composition, and by extension to his own method of composition. And entertaining that idea he instantly rejects it says, if you use a word like assemblage, everyone immediately thinks of freaky west coast shit. So it has bad connotations. He wonders how much of such distasteful California assemblage he might actually have seen probably very little, but with the probable exception of one show, mounted by Robert Fraser in December 1964 of Bruce Connors assemblage films and sculptures. The dance arrow, say a piece like this one, a suitcase that accrued collage over time as Connor carried it back and forth across the Mexican border the motive candles, being a later kind of ceremonial addition. Connor had been on hand in London to collaborate with Fraser on the installation. A combination of which attracted starry crowd for the private you and a glowing review by John Russell in the times. Remote holes bags and pockets half hidden in the assemblage like the dark mouth of a cave in the woods, tempt the spectator to explore Russell opined. In spite of the multitude of objects used each work is not a heap of treasure but the comment of a man obviously involved in the world today. Now it's germane to our theme today and this entire series that Connor insisted on calling his sculptures collages, which very few people do as a matter of course but that was his term on which he was quite insistent. And this one, which will also be highly relevant here. He described as a report on the sensations of bodily disintegration that came with the rush of a peody high. Now harking back to David's presentation Connor paid a visit to Peter Blake and the Los Angeles born Jan Hayworth. There, what he thought of as a disconcertingly Southern California and flat. But he also reported that for the moment Fraser did not yet know any of the Beatles. A shame for him and one or two of them might well have rescued Connor when he found himself in a state of awkward isolation at the party for his exhibition. He said later there seem to be a certain hipness. That is to Fraser's connected friends and clients, but it proved in his words to be just stuck on top of glacial class consciousness and kind of mortifying alienation on his part. So go back on his old dancing soul loving persona. He said, I was playing Ray Charles very loud and expecting everyone to party and jump around, but I was comparable to visiting Aborigini. So that recourse cut no ice. Some who attended Fraser's screening of Connor's films might have forgiven some impression of cars. Say, the outsider status to normal social norms. As he chose to project report his film montage on the Kennedy assassination and its television coverage. His own blood caked into the celluloid. He said, I had the blood taken out of me by a syringe then put it on the film. It was sticky. My hands kept sticking to the film every time the film was shown some blood would flake off and the projector would have bits of blood on it. The film had a strong effect on me as well as other people even after years I'd sometimes have to leave the room and quote. Well subsequent to those events 1964 the missing Beatles evolved their own collage techniques. As they sought to exceed the pop formula on which their first fame have been based. Their initial use of purely electronic sounds including tape loops and recorded instruments played backwards and so on arrived in August 1966 on the last track on their revolver album tomorrow never knows. John Lennon sitting here in this Robert Whitaker photograph with some kind of red celluloid over his face. He's consciously been seeking to channel into music Timothy leary's trip manual the psychedelic experience. So when he intones at the start of the track, lay down all thoughts surrender to the void it is shining that aspiration would not have been lost on Connor. For one thing he contributed the end papers to the book, the psychedelic experience. And when he was searching around for a musical score to accompany his montage film looking for mushrooms, filmed largely in Mexico and partly in Timothy leary's company. He settled on the beetle track. Now one question remains as to whether he had done this before or after he actually sent the film to London in London. He said was, once I sent a print of looking for mushrooms to John Lennon and some cards that Mike McClure and I had made. But those, those gifts made an impression as Connor received a reply from Lenin, likely in June 1967 the date reads June moon spoon. This portion of this type written missus assumes the voice of a besotted female fan named Vera button. As in London's words a Connor maniac prone to misspellings and professions of undying devotion. Below which is a drawing by Julian Julian London the four year old son of the beetle, a sunflower face with a dark kind of insect shape for a mouth signed JL for indicating his age at the time. His blue ink embellished by his father using the same yellow marker with which he signed the letter below the succinct personal message. Thank you for films. Thank you for cards. Thank for you. And the beetle signs off with a matey must think of beetle production. That is when we're through a small cycle. I remember it's lonely hearts club at it only just been released the month before. So, plainly, there were, you know, tasks to be performed in relation to that. In the mention of a beetle production, we might be seeing the sign of a Connor Beatles collaboration that never came about. Or it might instead indicate a proceeding bond over looking for mushrooms. But at the least, the exchange attests to a special application of 1960s collage to the willed dissociations that accompanied psychedelic drug experiences in which both artists were deeply committed and in fact the pursuit in which Connor had long preceded Lenin, going back to the end of the 1950s. Fraser confirmed all this in a note to Connor that he sent that same month. Quote, John Lenin was knocked out to receive looking for mushrooms. If you'd be kind enough to send five further copies of the movie, I'd be grateful as apart from the three other Beatles, there's me and another fanatical admirer who would be eager paying customers. End of quote. So, a testing, and this kind of concludes my object lesson with which I thought to begin the proceedings here. Three years since Connor's mortification at Fraser's party with no one understanding really is his project, his attitude, his persona. He's just moved on to deference and recognition really at the highest levels of the ascendant, insurgent culture of London. So I will leave that there with with, you know, with the hope to be able to say more in response to your questions. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Thomas and David. This was just a truly wonderful way to begin thinking of collage in a very material way and in terms of the very special relationship that was redefining London and the UK in relation to America. And I think this was an incredibly useful beginning to think about the repositioning of this relationship. I also very much made me think about your examples you gave in terms of other European developments, particularly, for example, Jean Tengeli or Arman, the signing of the new realism manifesto in 1960. And I was just trying to think about what you have discussed and what maybe feels to me like the specificity of your examples. Then in a way to me they have this nearly jarring tension between the junk related, the macabre, the butters on one side and a fascination for celebrities for the contemporary music and this pop world that is completely alien to that sort of French milieu that I just referenced. And I just wanted if you want to say more about the, what to me you have described as these two seemingly incompatible sides of the work coming together in the examples you provided. I don't know if you're talking David, but you need to unmute you, sorry. I was going to say to him, do you have any comments on that? I wonder how incompatible they are. In fact, I think that there is, if you think sonically, not only are we talking about tomorrow and everyone knows I'm revolver, but things like for the benefit of Mr kite on on Sergeant Pepper or indeed I am the walrus from magical mystery to her. The literature and accounts of this are luminous what went on in the studio what did George Martin, the producer do what did Jeff Emrick, the engineer do in terms of cutting up bits of audio tape and then throwing them up in the air and splicing them back together randomly. The old surrealist techniques of the kind that David was adusing, you know, in relation to burrows or Ballard and so on, that there's a way in which just the sheer extraordinary commercial success and following say that the Beatles had achieved that I think creates an impression that this is all been smooth over and is kind of glossy and so on but in the textual making, it has a huge amount in common with the rough and ready stuff that David was emphasizing in this presentation. Now absolutely and maybe what you said it's it's very true that in a way that aspect of pop art has been iron out and makes liquor then he actually originally works and it's making. I think it's, it was a very rough and ready. And that this. It's interesting the. Those people who had a foot in both camps. That montage of the camel and the people dressed in desert army kit. On the right was Paul McDowall, who stage name with with this trad jazz band was whispering. Paul McDowall and McDowall and his colleagues are Royal College of Arts students. They're they're involved in the the ongoing changes in it. The density of the culture is extraordinary. I don't know if there are parallels there Tom that you want to pull out about American about West Coast pop and pop. The reasons to music are always underestimated by people in the visual arts who don't have a lot of curiosity or enthusiasm about it but in fact it's so adjacent in so many ways and Bruce Connor is incomprehensible without it he was fanatic for blues and gospel based music. He's a wonderful letter from his friend Wallace Berman, written from LA where he writes to writes to a mutual acquaintance that Connor was just here, kind of doing the twist like a maniac to scream and Jay Hawkins. The juncture though that I think is worth I know that say one of John Lennon pet hates was trad jazz. Yeah, even though he was originally a skiffle musician which you also also the old 97 you also really alluded to the skiffle movement which had come out of trad jazz but then took on a life of its own that turned out to be almost in opposition to it. Because it tapped the, the, you know the more down home blues musicianship guitar based music, as opposed to New Orleans, you know jazz instrumental music and that, you know that certainly change the, the valence of what one could do. As a, as a, as a hip younger artist in 1964 Connor couldn't get the Fraser crowd to dance to Ray Charles I expect if he'd been back in 67 he would have succeeded. So we actually have a few questions now from the audiences, and I realize we are running out of time and so I will just read out a couple for you. And the first one is good Tom and David talk more about what happened to collage in the counterculture people like borough and a ballard seem to write comfortably through the transitions between the collage forms and the late 50s and early 70s. So yeah I guess it's more about the connection between the collage and counterculture in relation to literature particularly and how it transitions between the 50s and 70s if you wanted to add anything. It is the common, a common platform. We were talking about, we moved, we were talking about popular music and would be, if you like, where everything meets in London is in the ITV program ready steady go. And so every week, promotions by various musical groups, but on the walls on the scaffolding all around. And in the dance hall and on the floor itself, you'll be finding Derek Boche and Pauline Boaty and the artists are dancing, and they are alongside. And there's there's of course the extraordinary conjunction of at the dawn of all this in 1962 this visit of Bob Dylan to London and staying at where Pauline Boaty is in the house. And so it's, it's so interlocked. It's very hard to to pull it apart. Yes, and it's the same up in these relationships really give a very different feeling of the way these individuals were connected. We am another. I just have one little thing to that. By 1967 back on his home ground. And one or more or less gives up gives up making objects for a considerable period, and goes to work with a light show outfit, who, who do the illuminations at the Everland ballroom with all the great luminaries of pop rock music of that period and he says it's so great to just make up a film on the fly. Across the whole expanse of the auditorium rather than trying to induce people to come and sit in a room and stare at a little image for however long it would, it would require so in a way the counterculture took. That was one very strong way that the counterculture took the collage aesthetic for its own and expanded it. In every way, as a, as a signature feature of its central rituals, you know, the rock dance concert. Absolutely. We also have a question to that in a way ask you to think of that moment in collaging. Beyond that historical moment and particularly refers to the example of naturalist like Elisa. I'll draw the in other scientists and artists work with collections and collecting monsters and other big creatures. So the question is about the influence of the very act of compulsive collecting and the practice of collaging as you described it. And if you want to comment on that. I guess you already spoken about the down here. The almost maniacal collector is Peter Blake, who surrounds himself by with with again that that junk store aesthetic and Blake is himself extremely connected to and goes on being I think that there's, there's, there's a great temptation that I can understand of wanting to have a horizon here to have a stop in the 1970s but of course it goes on and Peter Blake's liaisons with with London music with Peter punk. And that that that so that that's right. It is. It's an ongoing. It's more than a dialogue it's an ongoing embedment of the two. Tom, did you want to add anything, maybe relation to Bruce Connor. Well, it would, it would go back really, I think, in his case to more to the origins of this practice right at the end of the of the 50s. He spent time making objects in the premises of the San Francisco mind troop, which was really important force in the in the emergence of the counterculture in that city and the politicization of street theater theater in the parks. But it really was interested in, well, minds are like going back to the origins of European comedy and the comedy del Arte and all the stock figures and costumes. And the profusion of strange and, you know, kind of sensuous materials and in Connor's early collages was in part because all of these this cat all of this, these get ups and ornaments and rhinestones and everything we're surrounding him. And it was, in effect, the kind of accumulative trove of stuff that he sort of filtered and condensed into now is very famous earlier collages from, say 58 to 62. Thank you, Thomas. We have quite a few more questions, but I assume we probably need to come to an end for this procession to allow a short break before our next one. I would just like to thank you very much for offering such a wonderful and rich beginning. And I think we are now stopping for around 10 minutes and resuming by 10 15 past. Hi everyone. I think we might wait another minutes possibly for everyone to reconvene. Maybe just as a little bit of filler as we wait to begin our second session. I just want to say of course I'm a terrible multitasker so I wasn't quite able to keep track of all the wonderful comments in the charts but there were many. There were some remarks for Tom and David, and there was also some very interesting notes regarding the spoken word, taking on a life of its own and montage and editing and the fact that neither would truly exist without collage and the practice of collaging texts and words. And it seems that those comments really offer a wonderful segue to our keynotes and a bridge into our next session dedicated to our first artist presentation with Elizabeth Price, which we are absolutely delighted as agreed to take part. In a way of course her work is very much about exploring the processes of assembly and instruction that come into play in the making of her intricate moving image installations. So this session coming is chaired by Anna Reid and following the screening and conversation we should have time for discussion and for questions. I will now briefly introduce Anna Reid, who in terms will then introduce Elizabeth and begin the screening. Anna is fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, where she devised and produced the conference British Art and Natural Forces, which connects back to her doctoral research on Paul Nash and the question of a geological way of seeing in the British landscape. And she also instigated the British Art Talks podcast, which are available online at the PNC website. And between 2006 and 2016, Anna was director and curator at Pavilion in Leeds, where in 2010 she first worked with Elizabeth towards the installation of her user groups disco from 2009. So thank you very much for being here with us today and over to you Anna. Thank you. And thank you to Rosie as well and to David Miller and Thomas Crow for such a great start to the session. For this second panel today, I'm very thrilled to be in conversation with the brilliant Elizabeth Price. And there'll be time for questions at the end of the session, as Anna said, so please put those in the Q&A box and I'm sure we'll connect back as well to two things that we've already kind of been mobilised. But first of all, what we're going to do is we're going to put a Vimeo link in the chat box because she'll know it's going to help with that. And we're asking you to watch a 15 minute film by Elizabeth that showcases questions of collage as they are apparent in her recent works. So if you go now and watch the film, you can follow the link that's come up in the chat box. And if you have real problems with that, I think do write a note and we'll help along. And then Elizabeth and I will hold a discussion. But as many of you will know, Elizabeth Price's moving image installations are intricate digital architectures where voice, event, edifice and artefact are summoned, gathered and assembled. Turner Price winning the Woolworth's Choir of 1979 made in 2012 is, for an example, an immersive installation as auditorium for the narration of a tragic event by a multitude of testimonies. And it's of a devastating fire which killed 10 people at the Manchester Woolworth's department store. Her most recent works, the 2019 slow dance, was produced with Art Angel film and video umbrella and the Whitworth, and it's a trio of installations which we'll reference today. Alongside her work as an artist, Elizabeth is an academic, and she's currently professor of film and photography at Kingston University. At present she's working on a commission for the Hunterian in Glasgow. I'm very researching for a video about Luton, the time she grew up in, about the coincident histories of music and riots there, and it's called Loud Perfume. So welcome Elizabeth, and now let's all take the 15 minutes to watch the film. This is my computer. Here I'm opening the edit of a recent work called Slow Dance. With all of my compositions and video, it depends upon many thousands of separate digital artefacts, including photographs, sound objects, animations, graphics and moving image captures. Many of these things were not originated by me but sourced from varied contexts. Indeed, my moving image works often emerge out of research into archival materials and their social or institutional histories. The graphic and photographic images animated here are from the collections of the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums of Oxford University, commissioned to make an artwork about these museum collections. I chose to focus upon their documentary images. One's made in the course of excavating, collecting, restoring and curating museum artefacts. And these are a collection of photographs of the sun owned by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These images were made as part of a project to systematically photograph the sun initiated in the 1890s using glass plate negatives and continuing without interruption until the mid 1950s. These images here are from my own video capture of every slide in the collection. Because I'm interested in how archival artefacts migrate through the digital, I usually place such materials in compositions that also include elements drawn from other, other different and perhaps alien cultural contexts. So, for example, I presented this scientific photography alongside digital animations of contemporary hosiery looms in a two channel video made in 2015. Sometimes we project an image of the sun as part of the ritual. While very effective synthetic images of natural light sources do exist, we use an animation of photographs of the sun taken daily throughout the 20th century. So, as we dance, the sun shines on us, just as it shone on certain historic events. On fantastic and terrible things, this helps us understand the gravity of our work and the provenance of our profession. An earlier video, the Woolwood's Choir of 1979, brings together photographs of Gothic architecture with documents produced during a public inquiry into a fatal fire. Both of these films also feature archive footage of predominantly female pop performers. And along with all my other works in video, they include significant use of percussion, hand claps or finger snaps, bum slaps and mouse clicks. But also sounds associated with digital technologies, keyboard clutter, spacebar taps, mouse clicks. I use these sounds to mark an edit point to announce the arrival of an image upon the screen or to emphasise its departure. To indicate that it is, but it remains distinct. I do this to remind the viewer that my work is an assembly of many different things. If we go inside the editing software, you will see more clearly what I mean. This is the edit for a restoration, a two-channel work featuring the collections of the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums. And this timeline here is for one of the two screens. For those unfamiliar with this editing interface, a quick tour. These objects arranged on the timeline are different photographs. This here is a monitor in which you can view these photographs individually. And this monitor here shows the composition of the edit. As the cursor runs along the timeline, you will see the action unfold. When I start an artwork, I don't write a script or make a storyboard. I gather together all the materials that I think are relevant and place them on the timeline. There I group and stack them up, sift and organise them, building up a stratigraphy of materials. The creation of these dense piles and stacks then influences the formation of the composition. For example, in this section here, I gather together one of the very few types of objects that occurs in every single department of those two museums. If you look at every example of that object, you necessarily move through every category and department of the museum, experiencing a kind of accelerated tour of its entire collection. The object in question is a drinking vessel and the passage is accordingly intoxicated. We start with Minoan ceramics and conclude with the Jacobite wine glass. So we gather them and bring them all here. We bring all the jugs and the flasks and every kind of cut for drinking. We move through each part of the collection to gather the beakers and tankards, goblets and glasses. Yes, we take them from antiquities and anthropology, from Eastern art and from Western. We bring them all together here, not one was made for a museum. Although I work in digital moving image, I don't think my work really belongs in a category of moving image art. It has greater connection to the history of image and text. I don't think my work really belongs in a category of moving image art. It has greater connection to the history of image and text. To histories of the graphic arts, collage and photo montage of the 20th century, and to the text and image configurations of conceptual and pop art. Indeed, my videos predominantly feature still images, albeit often animated in post-production and sometimes in production. I started making videos when it was first possible to make videos I started making videos when it was first possible to integrate publishing softwares with moving image softwares, allowing me, in effect, to add a time base with a rhythmic soundtrack to a series of still images and texts. And, generally colloquialised as Actually, the sounds of the opening teach and then the closing of a big ancient book. The teachers is a four-channel work, meaning each of the channels is conveyed by a different projector. The projectors are oriented vertically and visible in the space intended as a physical, sculptural expression of the four different voices that narrate the work. These voices occur a synthetic voice and are further distinguished by differently coloured graphics. The opening passage of the teachers introduces those four voices allowing you to hear and see them separately and together. They did use voice which is to say they use patterns of breath vibration of the vocal folds to make distinct repeatable sounds whilst the majority of the group kept silent. They were almost entirely mute used voice tended to make a narrow range of sibilant, spironed utterances and unusual laughs amongst the European-language at least of superglow sounds To some extent, these clips I've shown you exemplify the ways in which I use moving image synchronising text, image and sound in complex edits. These compositions are presented in immersive installations using large-scale projections and loud amplification. My focus in using projection and amplification is upon the elastic sculptural potential of these media. One of the main ways in which I use them is to magnify. Feltit features details of British tie textiles from the 1970s and 1980s which are enlarged to 7 metres high within the installation. This work is typical of how I use projection to permit an analytic attention and also enable an imaginative reverie in response to my chosen subjects which are often marginal or parochial expressing what might be regarded as minor social histories. My work is rooted in the histories of projection and amplification rather than moving image itself because of course projection also has a history of the still image and the graphic document. The contemporary digital projector has replaced three related but distinct prior technologies. The overhead projector which was used for the presentation of data and texts most often used in corporate and academic contexts. The slide projector was used for the sequential presentation of still images and primarily used in academia but also in varied social and cultural contexts from museums to nightclubs. And the film projector primarily used for movies in drama or documentary form along with advertising presented in cinema programmes. Considering the contemporary digital projector as a point of convergence between these varied histories and contexts allows me to move between and combine the different forms of composition and narrative organisation associated. So, for example, I might deliver the content of an art history lecture through the form of a song or accompany the text of a cosmetics advert with the abrupt dissonance sounds of a ghost film. We'll just wait a moment until everybody has gathered again anyone who is watching on Vimeo. And thanks, Elizabeth, for such an expository film. That's enough of your comments. Thank you for such a brilliant and generous film. And Elizabeth, would you like to come on screen and share your PowerPoint? I can't start my video, but... OK, now I can. Thank you very much. OK, thank you very much. Great. And thank you for such a wonderful film that has really given us so much to work with in this conversation. And I wanted to... Let's get started to make the most of the time. I wanted to just go in by just thinking about what is at stake with collage in your work thinking about collage's disruption and about the strategy of reordering and about the redistribution of what is perceptible and tangible and about things appearing and appearing in context where they previously haven't or shouldn't or couldn't. And I wanted to give back to a story I heard you tell years ago when you were working at the Bodleian Library. And I believe you were in the stacks of the library and there was this thrill and this fairly mundane work of finding books and materials that were out of place. Could you recall that? Yes, yeah. I was thinking about that actually this morning during the earlier presentations, I remembered it. I used the library as an undergraduate upstairs and I didn't find it very enjoyable. And then after I finished my degree I worked underground as a book fetcher collecting books that would be delivered to readers in the reading rooms because none of the Bodleian Library collection is accessible to readers in the reading rooms. They have to order the books. But the books were ordered according to their height to maximise bookshelf space. And so the normal kind of categories of the library had become somewhat abandoned. And so, yes, you would continually move through the kind of disciplinary areas of the university's collection of knowledge in surprising ways. And also books were often out of place. Also interestingly, it was just a... I found it as a kind of really interesting relationship to the education I had above ground. It was much more surprising and exciting I think the education I had underground the year afterwards. Just in terms of how I could just move from one area of knowledge to another, how surprising it might be. But also in a sense how the experience hadn't been organised by the institution. To some extent it was occurring in those spaces of the institution's failure to organise or its fallibility, which of course gave it a different resonance for me. That's so helpful. So it's so interesting. Thank you for it. And I was thinking to kind of extend on this idea of things being out of their place. Or you spoke at the end of the film here about an art history letter in the form of a song or a cosmetic advert with the sounds of a ghost film. And I'm thinking about the way that you make conjunctions in your work between the mundane or the marginal and the parochial and the erotic. And I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about your rapport with surrealism and the erotic. Well I suppose in relation to the materials that I often use, they are often to some extent materials that are overlooked. And I think this, my interest in this is partly the sense what you can do with materials to which there has been little, you know, attention. In a sense you have a greater licence to some extent to imagine about them. They're less discourse, they're less, you know, there is less awareness of them. And also in a sense that they often speak to experiences that haven't been adequately represented. And I think one of the things that I'm always interested in in terms of looking at archives of collections is not only the marginal or overlooked things that exist in those connections, but the proximity of those things to things which aren't collected. So the proximity of the marginal things to the things that aren't there. And I suppose it's that sense of that which is immediately outside the collection that isn't collected or excessive to it or deviant of it. That I am always interested in. And I suppose the erotic aspects of my work or the kind of the more deanesion that, you know, the bits when the music emerges or often the humour is touching on, is me trying to find a form of expression for this desire for knowing or understanding that kind of proximal place to the collection or the archive. I'm not really sure whether that answers your question in relation to surrealism. I think it does, absolutely. I was also curious about your experience of gathering and collecting objects of your own collection. So things like the Thai collection or the neck ties and the women's wear. And what is that process for you? Are you kind of, where do you find your objects and what is the encounter like? Well, I guess I often find objects that I'm interested in and begin to maybe gather them. So the Thai's collection of neck ties which feature motifs which I thought when I first saw the first one seemed to be acknowledging the emergence of new technologies in the workplace. Things that look like memory chips or electronic networks seem to be appearing as motifs on ties. And I think I picked the first one up in about 1992 although it was in a second-hand shop that I dated from like the mid-70s or maybe the early 80s. And so I kind of identify these things in a sense which I think are maybe pointing to maybe objects which have contingent connections to multiple other things. I guess I'm always interested in finding things that are going to allow me to in a sense say textured things about them. I often use chorus of voices. I have this idea about a kind of a polyphonic chorus that speaks about the artifacts in way acknowledging that these artifacts can be spoken about in many different ways and belong simultaneously to multiple histories. So I guess with the ties I find this first tie and then I notice another and I notice another and I begin to collect it. But as I said the first tie I've probably found in the early 90s but I made the film about them in 2018. And similarly with the dresses that feature in the teachers that's a whole there all these kind of dress imagery in teachers is taken from high-end fashion magazines of the 60s, 70s and 80s, primarily British Vogue. And once again I started taking these dresses out of the magazine mainly because I was interested in how the dress was used, I mean how the models posing the dresses would take up these gestures which was in the function of the magazine was to illustrate the kind of beautiful luxury of these dresses but once you removed the dresses from the magazine the gesture seemed capable of bearing some other kind of rhetorical power or message they seemed demonstrative, terrifying or powerful or theatrical or whatever they seemed like they could do other work. And so again I collected them with the idea that they would do some work but I didn't know what it was I would ask those gestures to bear or something I guess at that stage. So I do tend to collect things I don't collect loads of things although having said that there are many collections of things which have never really emerged into work but I collect things with a view that maybe at some point I'll find the argument or idea that will be a difference between being interested in these things and then being an artwork. Yeah, yeah. Let's pick up on the idea of the polyphonic and I think this is some incident in your recent work which I think it really speaks of the dynamics of collage and specifically of how class can kind of rear its head or appear in your collage and that was your discovery of a copy of sexuality and class struggle by Raymond Reich and he was the German sociologist and psychoanalyst and can you describe the dynamics of that discovery for us? Oh yes, I found this book sexuality and class struggle and you know it was as an object both in its design its layout and its content it was kind of relatively familiar to me and a fascinating object which I read but one of the things that really struck me about was the particular copy that I had found included an annotation by a reader earlier to me I think probably some time in the 80s and 90s because there were a couple of leaflets enclosed in the book written entirely in felt tip this argumentative disputatious reader commented throughout the book and concluded with this sort of profane declaration like I can't remember it precisely but she says something like somewhere between life and death the sun shines on to her cunt and this was kind of written in the end page of the book and it was just a remarkable one of the things I do collect also is books with notations in them and I'm just really interested in how this postscript by this disputatious reader completely radically altered the experience of reading the book and also reorganised it in terms of in both of our arguments in terms of gender and class and the experience of reading the book and this particular author who wrote this one in purple felt tip is the character that I used to imagine the narrators of the film called felt tip although it's never explicitly referenced the book it was in a sense the attitudinal motivation for making that work which features the ties so yes it was very important and exciting discoveries there are a few other annotations that I earlier found a crystal-gale record and I used quite a lot of crystal-gale imagery and sound often reversed in my films I've used quite a lot of material of crystal-gale and this maybe relates to an early crystal-gale from 1979 where the paper cover on the 7-inch single this young girl reiterates all of the kind of producers and authors crystal-gale, the songwriter, the record label she reiterates them, rewrites them on the sleeve of the record label and then concludes it by saying this record belongs to Jenny England and kind of adds her own name and I was really struck by that name so it's like a punk name like she could be a bassist in a post-punk band or something and it really again this sort of this claiming of all these series of authors and producers of this final word this kind of disputatious listener or reader so I guess it came out of a set of interests I'm a series of finding objects like this which have been really important to me Thank you, thank you Let's just give back to the copies of Vogue and the collection of those images and I assume you kind of cut the dresses away from the bodies How did you do that? If we go through I just removed the dresses from the magazines and then photographed them scanned them and then reprinted them out and then the teachers a lot of them are made into stencils so the teachers is an unusual filming that it's all in a sense all the effects other than the graphics are achieved in camera so it's mainly well it's entirely filmed with these kind of reprinted dresses rotating on a disco ball motor in front of the lights and the camera on one side of the image and the lights on the other and so the kind of changing optical effects that you get during the piece are through these relatively transparent prints and stencils where I laser cut out some of the motifs of the dresses You can see here the original context of the dress and then the image I made several, many many different versions I kind of tend to every dress generated multiple subsequent artefacts that were then used in the film so positives, negatives areas with sections cut out so there are numerous versions of every dress I guess that appear in or don't appear but we're part of the process of production in the film and I guess another thing to say is that I don't film very because I don't have a storyboard, I don't film concisely so I film very promiscuously and I film for hours and hours and hours and hours like playing with the if I've made the artefacts if they belong to me and I'm able to handle them playing with them in front of the camera or moving the camera in relation to them and I usually do this totally by myself and often I'm operating the camera with one hand and the subject with another hand so it's very solitary work and it's creating these proliferating materials so one cut out dress ends up with like 27 different slightly different kinds of dress images it's great to have this sense from your description of the kind of experience of that installation and that very immersive experience and the movement which is almost those kind of spectral kind of brushash images that come at the view and I really was interested to hear I know that you are interested in writing by Isabel van Elferhand which is the fountain voices of the technological uncanny and whether if you could comment on that in relation to this work I suppose I'm interested in her writing because she kind of takes this explores the idea of the Gothic from Gothic literature and writes through to sort of contemporary cybergoth music so it's kind of this theme a kind of a theory of the Gothic running through popular culture I guess and I mean that's very interesting to me because of the ways in which I suppose I think about my work which has relationships to histories of pop music not as popular culture so I'm kind of interested in her putting this together I'm not that interested in the musical references that she draws on but very definitely the I feel a connection with how she speaks about the uses of the Gothic in the contemporary of it being this kind of offering this liminal space beyond uncanny borderland beyond taxonomy and I guess one of my interests in like what lies on the margins of collections or beyond their threshold that which they haven't collected that which isn't represented in them that's why I think about that in relation that's why you know it's interesting to think about that space in relation to the Gothic of this space of this kind of a kind of collision of the past and the future with kind of both transgressive and nostalgic aspects in relation to it but I think my interest in her is because of how she combines popular culture and talks about music particularly in relation to literary histories the history of the Gothic novel which is both of these things I am very interested in and there are questions coming forward now so I really want to get these in but it would be good to just talk briefly bit more about the Gothic and the relationship between the Gothic and collage which seems to be so palpable in terms of this undetermined fallible this kind of experimentation and overreach is that something that you feel is apparent in the collage of your work the Gothic and the collage kind of have this rapport absolutely I mean one of the things that I try to do in my work and I suppose why beginning to work in making video was so emancipating for me when I started to do it although I don't really think of my work as moving image was because of the way in which it enabled me to connect, to bring together very very different things and so it's this sense of I mean I always think of what I think in sculptural terms often about assembly and collage in relation to the compositions that I make and one of the reasons I often show my timelines is because although the videos present themselves they are very concise and they are very dense and they are very they are highly crafted I work on them for a long time and I am preoccupied with them having a certain kind of disposition when they are finished but actually for me they are held together almost like with spit but I think that there are a lot of things of things that I've I mean on these projects are dependent on millions of separate digital artefacts that never feel for me as though they have fully assembled and so there's always a kind of technical horror that attaches to the work such intricate work you know it's not as well as single objects no matter how much they become exported as a single digital file and I guess one of the things I'm preoccupied with is trying to convey this and I think that's why I'm always although I'm preoccupied with the Gothic I would never really make my films appear Gothic in style I would never really make my films about Gothic architecture and that also features a Shangri-Lars which is about as Gothic as I get in terms of music but I suppose I always want to in a sense shift things into a different style so I suppose I'm kind of more interested in making an art history lecture Gothic or making it have a Gothic attributes so I suppose I'm trying to always in a sense make an object that doesn't rest I suppose in terms of genre or in terms of form and that's really hard in art because once you make it it's kind of you've defined it as art but I guess I'm trying to make things that don't that to some extent exceed or the some formal expectations and I would relate that to to the Gothic I would relate that to this kind of desire to show that these things are these are ultimately these kind of complex and unruly assemblies I mean also another thing to say is they never are really finished so although they get baked into this file and exhibited that is only ever temporary and that file gets destroyed and then usually the next time I show it it is changed sometimes slightly sometimes significantly so they I do feel very attached to the idea of the experience that I have in making them that they are these collages these assemblies and that they remain restless because of that I was wondering if you could move your slides to the Rutherford images which I just feel I know that your kind of animation of the Rutherford photographs of the sun have appeared now in several of your works and that they're very restless in a sense and it feels like they really introduced this what really introduces a kind of like an ontological dimension to your work that keeps coming up again and again but I'm going to go to the question boxes here and Sean Vickery is talking about your premier timeline felt like a visual score representing the stratigraphy of materials rather being a neutral tool sometimes the dynamics of the editing software influenced the shape of the outcome is this something that you consciously work within your process to the dynamics of the editing software yes I mean definitely I suppose because I don't really regard myself as a moving I regard it as a space that I'm using in order to think about things so I don't the timeline is a place where I gather lots of materials and start to sift and organise them as I explained in the the kind of short clip but so it always exists to me as a kind of the kind of underside or the underground bit of the work or a score for it and I tend, I used to tidy up my timelines once I decided on the film but I don't do that anymore because I regret it terribly about my earlier films that I got rid of the things that I didn't use and now I never do it although that does sometimes mean I end up with 100 layers of imagery on the timeline but it's definitely the case and certainly in the restoration that bit where I stacked up all of the glasses so we could move through in 90 seconds through every department of the museum really then provided the imagery for the final part of that film where a single wineglass, that Jacobin wineglass falls off the top of an edifus and I was thinking about the rise and fall of the city the rise and fall of Nossos, the rise and fall of the Ashmolean Museum as imagined by the narrators so I was already, it's not like the suggestion was entirely made through the experience of working with the software but the image of that glass is the very last glass on this step cigarette kind of form that was appearing on the timeline certainly made it concrete for me that that's what the conclusion of the film would be so I suppose it's interesting that through the kind of technologies that I use in a way finding non-programmatic ways that they can be useful to you is really important so in a sense using they're using it excessively or using it as a place or a repository like I do using the timeline allows like non-programmatic decisions or allows you to imagine possibilities I suppose and I guess always artistic method my own experience and also through teaching other artists is hugely important your methods take you to certain places and not to others so those kinds of experiences are always worth noting whether in terms of the destination you arrive at or whether you should have been more interesting I think we're running low on time there's a question from Alice Kirby about whether or not you made use of the material that you encountered in the library stacks which is where we began our conversation I read those books the books I had this policy you didn't have to do much work every half hour you had to go and find some books and then you put them in this weird dumb-waiter system it was a very interesting weird job but I would find books that were out of place and that had been out of place for 50 years and they were often only a metre away from where they should be but they had been totally lost and it was in a place where you could read all of these things and there was much time to do that and I spent most of my time there doing that a book out of place was an instruction to read it so I read these things that nobody had read that particular edition of but I think that experience motivated me and gave me a sense of confidence in relation to the institution of the library or the university or the collection I was able to find a way through that material and it felt emancipating to a limited degree but enough and I think that's what was so I think the thing I really took from the modern library was a sense of agency in relation to that collection rather than any of the individual books that I found it was a sense of I see I can make my way through this I can construct my own narratives through this incredibly vast and dense body of material and I think a final question will be around maybe the idea of the future archive and I know that you're working on a substantial website project at the moment where you're documenting and logging a lot of material and this idea of material moving through the digital and coming through these different iterations and also this sense of obsolescence in the technologies that have been used to do that I feel is moving through here and of course there are these ideas of temporality and stratigraphy and deep time almost at the archive here and the Rutherford do you have a sense of a future gaze on your material and how it might be used? No it's slightly terrifying to think about the things I make are incredibly dependent upon numerous softwares and operating systems so the thing that I actually think is the work which is not just the film itself but the timeline and all of the material this stuff is in terms of conservation incredibly complex and difficult so I try not to worry or think about that and also I think a kind of conservation preoccupation is kind of politically it's not in the spirit of my work so I in a sense I fear it would make it might impose a kind of conservatism if I was worried about those things but one of the things I am really concerned about is I often find marginal materials in collections and make them visible and I guess one of the things I'm very preoccupied with is making them simultaneously visible in a more neutral way and it's accessible to other kinds of imaginings than my own so I guess one of the things about my website is an awful lot of the materials that are in a sense narrated and transformed in my work are also presented without that and it is in a sense one of the things that I think entitles me to do that to kind of bake them into these kinds of complex narratives is in a sense for them also to be available so I am kind of preoccupied with the materials that are the basis of my films which is much much more straightforward to make those accessible but all that stuff I said about held together with spit that really comes together when you think about trying to preserve these artefacts they barely exist they only exist in the interface of many many complicated and temporary things so I have to maintain numerous computers with old operating systems and softwares on in order to be able to open up old projects so it's a boring and interesting aspect of the work Elizabeth, thank you so much I think we're going to welcome back the convenience to close the session Thank you so much Anna, thank you Thank you so much it's been absolutely wonderful to hear more about your process Elizabeth and your way of working thank you Anna for the chairing I really would like to bring the day to a close I would like to thank all of you, David, Tom and Elizabeth for what have been incredibly generous contributions I think it's been a formidable day to begin thinking about excavating collecting and assembling or brickolaging materials and notion of collage in a continuum from the post-war to the present day and thank you all from the audience for joining us and staying with us we will be back tomorrow at 12 noon so come back and join us for a second day dedicated to cats, copies, clips and the curatorial so I think it's time to say goodbye and see you soon till tomorrow, bye