Scratch's Third Body: Video Talks Back to Television 2015-12-30
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Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Leo Goldsmith Scratch's Third Body: Video Talks Back to Television 2015-12-30 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14135 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Goldsmith, Leo: Scratch's Third Body: Video Talks Back to Television. In: VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, Jg. 4 (2015-12-30), Nr. 8, S. 114–126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14135. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: https://doi.org/10.18146/2213-0969.2015.jethc097 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 Attribution - Share Alike 4.0 License. For more information see: Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 finden Sie hier: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 volume 4 issue 8/2015 SCRATCH’ S THIRD BODY VIDEO TALKS BACK TO TELEVISION Leo Goldsmith New York University Tisch School of the Arts Department of Cinema Studies 721 Broadway, 6th floor NY NY 10003 United States of America [email protected] Abstract: Emerging in the UK in the 1980s, Scratch Video established a paradoxical union of mass-media critique, Left-wing politics, and music-video and advertising aesthetics with its use of moving-image appropriation in the medium of videotape. Enabled by innovative professional and consumer video technologies, artists like George Barber, The Gorilla Tapes, and Sandra Goldbacher and Kim Flitcroft deployed a style characterized by the rapid sampling and manipulation of dissociated images drawn from broadcast television. Inspired by the cut-up methods of William Burroughs and the audio sampling practiced by contemporary black American musicians, these artists developed strategies for intervening in the audiovisual archive of television and disseminating its images in new contexts: in galleries and nightclubs, and on home video. Reconceptualizing video’s ‘body,’ Scratch’s appropriation of televisual images of the human form imagined a new hybrid image of the post-industrial body, a ‘third body’ representing a new convergence of human and machine. Keywords: scratch video; TV sampling/remixing; British video art; appropriation; found footage; video- processing; interactive spectatorship; posthumanism. 1 Appropriation, Remix, Sampling From the NSA to Facebook, animated GIFs to fan edits and supercuts, practices of appropriation occupy a central, but distinctly ambiguous position in contemporary culture that’s not simply widespread but serves as a sort of default aesthetic mode of internet culture, as Lev Manovich,1 among others, have claimed. At the same time as media- sampling and remixing have become more commonplace (in the form of YouTube supercuts and fan-culture memes), practices such as piracy, torrenting, and file-sharing have come under increased scrutiny and restriction by the content industry and government bodies. In contemporary internet culture, appropriation is everywhere: both in social media content-sharing and in the practices of government and corporate bodies to manage and monitor our activities online. In effect, practices of sampling and reuse have mutated from radical modernist aesthetic strategies to common activities embedded in our hypernetworked everyday lives. 1 See, for example, Lev Manovich, “What Comes After Remix?”, manovich.net, 2007. 1 L. Goldsmith, Scratch’s Third Body Photo 1. Scratch logo, The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video, Vol. 1 (1985) In order to better understand the recent history and mutation of the aesthetics and practices of appropriation, I would like to examine an earlier moment in the history of moving-image appropriation, one in which these strategies were enabled by the emergence of professional and consumer technologies of videotape. Scratch Video, a loosely defined, somewhat short-lived, but no less influential video movement that arose in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, offers some insight into the ambivalent development of pre-Internet styles of moving-image sampling and remixing. Born at the intersection of recently established art-school video production programs, urban dance clubs, and post-punk music subcultures, Scratch situated itself at the nexus of a number of distinct but related media, including video art, music, and performance. But its primary foil was broadcast television and via the medium of videotape and new technologies to edit and manipulate it, Scratch refashioned TV’s images into an unstable union of mass-media critique and music-video/ advertising aesthetics. By using television images as its raw material, Scratch positioned itself, and video more generally, as the medium for a more dynamic, more interactive mode of image-consumption, and even a more networked mode of viewership—as the group Gorilla Tapes later put it, Scratch was a way of “talk[ing] back to television.”2 Enabled by the development of innovative professional and consumer video technologies (including home video systems, video synthesizers, flexible editing platforms), artists like Gorilla Tapes, George Barber, and Sandra Goldbacher and Kim Flitcroft deployed a style characterized by the rapid sampling, editing, and manipulation of dissociated images drawn from video archives and broadcast television. Exploiting this newly available battery of tools, Scratch Video artists warped, composited, windowed, posterized, keyed, colorized, and superimposed these images, exploring uncharted aesthetic terrain that in many ways anticipates, and has strongly influenced, the types of image-manipulation made possible by today’s digital image software and practiced by the pirates and professionals, VJs and YouTubers alike. And yet, while the work of Scratch Video frequently displayed a satirical bent, lampooning contemporary political figures (such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and hacking television’s own modes of address, its own fast and 2 Quoted in Dessa Fox, “The Duvets Scratched Me,” New Musical Express 15th June 1985. 2 L. Goldsmith, Scratch’s Third Body Photo 2. Scratch logo, The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video, Vol. 1 (1985) colourful aesthetic strategies made it a seductive — and therefore suspicious — style, itself ripe for appropriation by television advertisers and commercial media. Scratch Video courts this ambivalence, highlighting some of the paradoxes inherent in a new media landscape marked by interactivity and participation, one with both utopian and dystopian connotations, in which blurs boundaries between the professional and the amateur, the mainstream and the underground, the commercial and the politically engaged. Here, I will argue that Scratch Video’s reuse and remixing of television’s representations of the human body, recomposed and re-engineered through new technologies of video editing and processing, reveals an image of a new spectatorial relationship with media, embodied by a new kind of producer/consumer. Video 1. Tilt (dir. George Barber, 1984). Go to the online version of this article to watch it. 2 Influences and Antecedents Scratch’s strategies of reuse and remix are part of a long history of appropriation in the arts in the twentieth century. The modernist tropes of collage and montage are especially evident in Scratch, and in other media forms of a period newly invigorated by the accessibility of new technologies of appropriation and manipulation. Simon Reynolds, writing about the late 1970s and early 1980s from the perspective of popular music, writes: Those postpunk years from 1978 to 1984 saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme technique.3 3 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Penguin Books, 2005, p. 2. 3 L. Goldsmith, Scratch’s Third Body While postpunk bands like Test Dept and Cabaret Voltaire would pay explicit homage to Soviet Constructivism and Dada, Scratch artists were also quick to pay tribute to their forebears. Nick Cope, who has written extensively on his work with Scratch video, explicitly cites as important influences the de´tournement strategies of the Situationist International and the cut/up and fold-in methods of collage developed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs while they were in London in the 1960s.4 Exploring these strategies using both written text and audiotape, Gysin and Burroughs, in their book The Third Mind, advocated a hybrid form of authorship in which two consciousnesses could be held at once, an aesthetic program for the juxtaposition of discordant elements to form new unities and release latent, even revolutionary potentialities. Some years after the mid-eighties heyday of Scratch, Gorilla Tapes (Gavin Hodge, Jon Dovey, and Tim Morrison) would pay tribute to the World War II-era artist John Heartfield in their experimental documentary feature Zygosis, which they made for Channel Four television in 1991. Heartfield’s works constituted a rare political challenge to Hitler’s rule through the absurdist collage and juxtaposition which the film’s title likens to a process of conjugation among gametes. In the early 1960s, the content and apparatus of the television became the targets of interventions by US-based artists like Wolf Vostell (Sun in Your Head, 1963) and Nam June Paik (Magnet TV, 1965),