Stephen Partridge

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.

Art film part of the REWIND + PLAY, An Anthology of Early British Video Art box-set.

This is a single-channel version of the installation Chimera first exhibited at the Society of Scottish Artists, Annual Exhibition, Royal Academy Building, Edinburgh, 1998. It is the first manifestation of a collaborative programme initiated in 1997 between the two artists, bringing together experience and ideas from still and moving image-making.

An early film work influenced by structural filmmaker Michael Snow and minimalism in sound (Reich/Glass). Camera is fixed on a tripod and is tracking constantly around in the landscape with the artist coming into frame randomly. Sound Treatment by David Cunningham. Super8 Ektachrome film cartridge. This film was lost from the late 1970s and was recovered by the REWIND Lab in 2022 to digital file. It was a collaboration between the artists SP and David Cunningham (Flying Lizards) – both pioneers in their respective fields.

A four-minute video intervention by Steve Partridge, commissioned for Channel 4's Television Interventions during Glasgow’s year as European Capital of Culture. Blending close-up visuals, spoken word, and animated text, the work deconstructs the TV trope of the talking head to explore language, communication, and identity through a gendered and distinctly Scottish lens.

"The tellingly titled Dialogue for Two Players, also 1984, moves into quasi-dramatic space, in which the seemingly spontaneous relationships, are revealed not just as a construct but also as a complex puzzle. It implicitly comments on and critiques the 'confessional' modes of video and its illusion of real presence. It thus rejects that was at the time a dominant style in artist's video, turning on its head the simpler versions of the slogan that 'the personal is political'. At the same time it is a political work in a different sense, questioning the popular TV format of the in-depth personal interview which it ironizes. As such, and with Partridge himself playing the part of interviewer/director, it is his most overt 'intervention' into documentary drama even as he subverts it." - Al Rees