| Stefan
Szczelkun
Cultural Groups & Collectives (2nd Draft February 2001) My recent research into Exploding Cinema itself has a history, which is probably as formative as the provenance of underground and amateur film. This is my experience of nine other collective scenes of cultural production that I have been part of since 1968. This other history is both intertwined with the specific provenances of Exploding Cinema and provides an underlying frame for the interpretation made in this thesis. In the interests of reflexivity and to show the continuum of collective activity I will outline this experience. I have repeatedly been drawn to collective cultural production in the last thirty years. In the last ten years I had become aware of how poorly these collective experiences were recorded, documented, written about, criticised, archived and ultimately historicised. With few exceptions these historicising processes have occurred very little. Of course some of these collective endeavours probably need little more than a footnote in history. The lack of historical representations of others is without doubt caused by other factors that are contingent on the formation of historical knowledge. The tendency not to focus on them may be a reflection of history's continual fascination with personalities a simple set of outcomes (a story!) rather than processes, relations, discursive formations and communicative flows, networks and diffuse social contexts. During the course of this research and before it I had been thinking about this and had been gradually looking at the existing records left by these collectives and my own writings about them. Some of these writings have been published. I have gathered these texts as an appendix to this thesis and I shall reference this short account to that more detailed document. In the account that follows I will emphasise the aspects of the collectives that are relevant to this thesis. Portsmouth Arts Workshop I left home in 1967 having gained a place in the School of Architecture at Portsmouth Polytechnic. It was a time of world-wide cultural ferment but not much was going on in Portsmouth. After visiting Jim Haynes's Arts Lab in Drury lane, London and spending a few evening and nights witnessing the body shock of the People Show, enduring the meditative challenge of Warhol's films or the heavenly cacophony of John Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble - I was inspired. "One of the things about the Lab, unlike a lot of spaces, was that people didn't come to see something specific. But they would say, 'Let's go to the Lab and see what's going on tonight.' When they arrived, there would be a big black board, like a menu, showing all the different things going on that evening. Quite often I wouldn't know until the last minute. There would be so many spontaneous events." (Haynes, 1984, p151) The Arts Lab was supported by the underground paper International Times which Haynes had also helped set up and which sold upwards of 20,000 copies every fortnight. In his autobiography Haynes talks about how the events were secondary to 'bringing people together' and how he and Jack Moore would 'play host, look after our guests, introduce ourselves and introduce people to one another'. It was probably this that made the Arts Lab such an influential organisation. "One of the interesting things about the Arts Lab was the number of other Arts Lab-like places that grew up in Britain within six months of our opening. People were arriving from virtually every town in Britain - to consult us about setting up an Arts Lab in their own towns."(Haynes, 1984, p.168) I went back to my provincial town and started a weekly 'Arts Workshop' in some old stables loaned by the 'Poly'. People were doing similar things in provincial centres all over the country. Guests like Roland Miller, The Exploding Galaxy, John Stevens and Mark Bolan came down on a shoestring to lead the evening. Yoko Ono was about to come when she met John Lennon and had to cancel. But the rest of each show was provided by local talent for which we were an open showcase. Each week a booklet collection by a budding poet was published on an old Gestetner spirit printer. The printing plates were waxed paper into which letters were impressed with a caste-iron typewriter. An 'environment' was made with black polythene and whatever we could find. People 'did their thing', whatever it was, it was welcomed. They were a celebration of everyone's creativity. There was a millenarian sense that we were radically challenging culture, society and ourselves with these events. This was the counter culture - the beginnings as we saw it then, of an alternative society. The effort was imbued with tremendous hope, optimism and utopian zeal. Occasionally we broke out and put on some street theatre. Appollonaire's 'House of the Dead' was memorable: Acting like corpses by the War Memorial, being strewn with flowers in public areas. Bursting masked through shopping areas, disrupting the prevailing complacency (Directed by Mark Holborn who was then a local poet/student). The evenings between events were taken up reading American beat poetry, listening to groups like Captain Beefheart, thinking up what to do at the next event and making preparations to do it. 'Do it!' was the hip slogan of the moment. People had ideas and got to realise them. Everyone was welcome to do whatever he or she could dream up. Meeting up with the Exploding Galaxy was the second great influence after the Arts Lab. The Galaxy presented a new form of communal creativity. They had their own form of writing (known as 'Scrudge'), costumes, food, shelters, rituals, play, art work, poems and most of all performances. They were a total living artwork - Life as art. Led by the Philippine David Medalla and the Irish Gerald Fitzgerald they made an instant tribal culture. Made without money from the waste materials of the city. After the Exploding Galaxy David Medalla made a series of participation artworks called 'propulsions': "Ideas originating in the Galaxy period, when a group of people lived and created works of art together, here became focused through physical structures erected in a public space and open for any passer by to enter. They simply grew and expanded by welcoming any number of contributions from any number of people. For me they are the most brilliant works of avant-garde art of the period in Britain." (Brett 1995 p90) In spite of this comment Brett's important book has very little on the Galaxy as a whole. The Scratch Orchestra The next collective that I took part in was The Scratch Orchestra. The Scratch Orchestra was a very prolific group of around 50 people which was defined in its founding constitution as: "A large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music making, performance, edification)" (Musical Times, June, 1969). The Scratch Orchestra came out of a series of music composition classes taught by the composer Cornelius Cardew at Morely College just south of Waterloo in London in 1968. These classes drew some of the more interesting experimental classical musicians of the time, particularly Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. Morely College is an extra-curricular independent arts college and the classes were also attended by artists who were enthusiastic about music. The inaugural meeting was held at St Katharine's Dock next to Tower Bridge, then a complex of cheap studio spaces for upcoming artists, on the 1st July 1969. The first concert had already been arranged by Victor Schonfield for November in the same year. From then on the Scratch Orchestra took off like a whirlwind. A high level of excitement, commitment and an extra-ordinary mixture of skills allowed the orchestra to grow quickly and be putting on almost weekly concerts with 40 to 60 participants within a short while. Its activities were open to anyone regardless of ability. "There were seven concerts from November to January, six during April - May and one in June plus a BBC studio recording of paragraph 2 of Cardew's 'Great Learning'. The culmination of this period was the two week tour, 27th July to 7th August 1970 playing to country audiences in village halls etc." (Rod Eley in Cardew 1974, p17). The constitution was a montage of contemporary practices influenced mainly by John Cage and Fluxus, which were intuitively articulated into a formula by Cardew. The precise and detailed 'constitution' gave a clear sense of where the orchestra stood in terms of cultural practice. This provided the starting point for sub-groupings that ranged from mainstream contemporary music to mobile performance orientated artists who took on the name Slippery Merchants and favoured more interventionist public performance. Cardew was already attuned to the visual dimension of music so had welcomed visual artists. The Scratch constitution stated that concerts should be directed by the youngest first, so I did not have to wait long to be able to put on my first concert. This was a perambulatory concert that took place in Richmond where I was living at the time. The Richmond Journey concert, on Saturday the 16th May 1970, followed a route through the landscape designed to compose an allegorical uprising. We began by attempting to break the claustrophobic spell of capitalist normalcy: Richmond High Street was to be disrupted! We would then pay respects to our ancestors before climbing up through the residential district - recruiting deadened office workers. Our growing ranks would proceed to the top of the hill, to Richmond Park, to celebrate our connection to nature and reclaim the heights. After a break to eat we would descend through the steep Thames meadows and follow the great river on to our destination - that benign archive of the earths flora, Kew Gardens. The allegory consisted of an image of growth, flowering, seeding and dispersal linked to ideas of political renewal. This was to be realised through a series of movements comparable to those in a symphony, which would explore a sequence of moods and emotions. Each stage of the journey was scored by a different individual to meet the overall plan. The first stage, to start at 11am, was scored by Psi Ellison and Judith Euren. A study of the high street had inspired 14 optional instructions including such apparently innocuous things as 'either shout or whisper in conversation' or 'as a group stand and stare in a shop window - hum automatically'. But the final instructions were more radical: 'Produce imbalance in Dickens and Jones' and: 'Sever Marks and Spencers with a quick march in chain formation holding hands'. The 'imbalance' was easily produced by such activity as rolling on the floor and came to a head when a balloon exploded just as the whole staff had reached a state of near hysteric disorientation. Quite harmless but unbelievably dramatic in its effect! Anyway we escaped this excitement to the next stage, which was choreographed by Bergit Burckhadt. Behind the magistrates court in Paradise Road was an old graveyard which was a passage called the Vineyard. Bergit had drawn a sort of double helix spiral as a score with musicians in the inner spiral and 'dancers' in the outer spiral. As far as I remember there were about 12 to 16 of us at this time. The next node of the root map was my own: 'Awakening the residential area'. 'The graveyard of the living? make enquiries. . . door to door knock/ring/tinkle/chime/footsteps/quavers/faces/voices/ slam shut/ road' This was difficult to realise as it threatened to fragment the group, and was seen as a conceptual piece. The next stage was a release from the tensions of confronting the city as we entered the old landscape of Richmond Park. 'Eating Rites' from the Scratch publication 'Nature Study Notes' (ACSR64) and other pieces were directed by Daphne Simmonds. A complex score by Michael Chant, reflected the concentric rings of tree growth. After our picnic lunch we descended through the terrace meadows following instructions by Greg Bright which demanded: 'No conversations Remember 3 or 5 things from the journey and say them at any time 3 or 5 hand-claps'. This became very magical as we encountered a large group of Orchestra members waiting for us silently in the steep meadow. We went on to play Greg Bright's light hearted but intense 'Field Spiral'. His score suggested: 'As each person joins the spiral they should play on flutes, whistles etc Remembering nursery rhymes'. We then followed the tow path without any playing to Kew Gardens. The Kew score was a series of instructions from Nature Study Notes (DJBR98,DJAC92, HSBR34) along with the 'Piece for Sticks' by Christian Wolff. The journey ended with a formal group photograph by a local photographer. Later Cardew wrote that: "New elements
accrued which extended the scope of the orchestra and pointed the way
to the future development of social involvement" The Orchestra effectively came to an end in 1971 after a process of internal wrangling over the purpose of what we were doing. A group around John Tilbury and Kieth Rowe, soon to be joined by Cardew, developed a Marxist-Leninist critique which castigated the open playfulness of the Scratch as at best flippant and at worst reactionary. "Recognition
of the crisis was confirmed with the project to build a cottage as an
environment for activity, designed by Stefan Szczelkun, for the contributions
of the Scratch Orchestra to the Arts Spectrum This cottage was to have housed The Refuse Collection. This was a collection of members old conventional artworks. It was also a place for discussion. A series of 'Discontent' meetings led to a split between a group who identified as Maoists led by Cardew, another group who were unlabeled but broadly anarchist, and a third group of mainly classically trained musicians who were non-political and bemused by the whole affair. I quote from an original m/s by Judith Euren from one of the groups who opposed the hard liners: "All this does not mean that I am opposed to these current beliefs and interests. Things are not so simple. We must structure ourselves to accommodate the complexities of what we are. In order that decisions can be representative of us all I suggest that we might have a trial meeting in which we order our discussion by every person having an equal opportunity to speak in turn. This disciplined structure would slow down our present proceedings enough to enable the valuable function of listening to take place. We would be receptive to the present moment and a collective inspiration might then emerge of its own accord. We see listening as a creative force." Names attached of Judith, Psi (Ellison), Dave (Jackman), Diane (Jackman) and Hugh Shrapnel. Handwritten announcement. The Marxist group prevailed and about sixteen people around this core continued to work as the Scratch Orchestra for a further year or so. But the inclusive, ludic nature of the orchestra had been replaced by an authoritarian judgmental ideology. Most people who were part of the Scratch Orchestra will agree what a deep impression it made on them in its relatively short life. Here are the views of two of the people who had trained as visual artists: "Cornelius enabled us to achieve this unbelievable dream with the Scratch Orchestra. John Cages's notion that all noises, and all silences, can be music was the underlying inspiration. ANYONE who wanted could play and compose music." Carole Finer "Passionate about modern music and art, I joined the orchestra in 1969 and soon found myself thrown into an energetic environment where to my surprise my musical ideas, however tentative, would be taken seriously and would actually get realised." David Jackman. (both ICA 1994) Earth Workshop Whilst living nomadically in a van in 1971 and 1972 I wrote two books on basic life supports, 'Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter and Food' which were published by Bill Butler's Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton (1972). After a spell teaching at the Architectural Association I joined a seven strong eco-commune that had been formed by the sculptor Eric Raven and the architect and Street Farmer Peter Crump who had both been working at the AA. We occupied an Old Vicarage built within a Neolithic circle in LLandeussant on the west end of the Brecon Beacons which was to have been paid for by the proceeds from the sale of Peter Crumps London house. "We intend to use our background experience from the broad based disciplines of art, architecture and literature to explore possibilities of life support systems that may be developed and controlled on a small scale and that will integrate most fully with the existing support systems of nature." From a fundraising document. (see also Gorman 1975 pp141 and 145/7) There was a personality clash between Raven and Crump, which resulted in the vicarage being sold. I had spent the winter months finishing the third book in my Survival Scrapbook series - 'Energy' and going on a 37 radio and TV talk show promotional tour of the USA where the Scrapbooks had been republished by Schocken Books. After another year in Wales attempting to live on the income from these books, income that was never paid, I returned to London and lived in a short-life house in Flodden road, South London which included a disused church, vicarage and church hall. Larry of the Pink Fairies lived in the hall and Lemmy (who would later form Motorhead) were regulars. We had parties in the church in which the 101'ners led by Joe Strummer, who later formed 'The Clash', played. This loose formation had no cultural purpose or identity so I am not including it as one of my 'collectives'. New Dance Magazine Collective At the time I was researching a practical realisation of human ability for a new book I was writing for Wildwood House called 'Sense, Think, Act'. I was attending dance and bodywork classes run by the X6 Dance Collective. At the time dance was being challenged by new ideas such as 'release', Contact Improvisation, gymnastics, Aikido and Tai Chi. This was not an open collective. I had a relationship with one of the members, Emilyn Claid, but I was not a member of the X6 group, which was based in a large old tea warehouse in Butlers Wharf near Tower Bridge. In 1976 X6 initiated a magazine 'New Dance'. I became part of the separate open collective that produced this between the end of 1976 and 1978. At the same time I took part in performances which grew out of this network such as those directed by Sally Potter and Rose English. As I looked through the early issues of New Dance I noticed that two of the reviews were of performances that used home movies and presage some of the later preoccupations of this thesis. The first, written by me, is about a performance by Mary Prestidge and the second is written by Prestidge: "An acute shaft of orange sunlight, Most of the windows are blinded. A small sprawled audience watch two films, both home made. One, showing top Olympic gymnasts going through their routines, is on 16mm. The other is of Mary gym work and is on 8mm. Both films are running together, Mary is talking about scenes from her past. She pauses frequently. She mentions her relationship with her mother." New Dance No1 New Year 1977 p12. "The 'stars' of the film are the Green family, but we the audience see Sarah warmly alive in contrast to the bright projection on the back wall. Her shadowy figure moves with ease in and out of skills, but the magic and quality of the performance for me lay in the dialogue and relationship that was created between Sarah and the changing images on the screen." New Dance No3 Summer 1977 p15. Brixton Artists Collective As an outlet for this activity I joined the Brixton Artists Collective which had just taken over a carpet shop in the centre of Brixton in June 1983. The three arches were spacious if a little damp. They allowed huge shows to take place which were decided by an open collective of 20 to 50 people. The only membership requirement was that you should simply turn up! Later a voluntary administrator, Andrew Hurman with the help of a committed core of directors, brought some stability to the place for a few more years. Membership cost a concessionary rate of £2 per year. The range of shows that was possible due to the energy of a large collective was extraordinary. There were open themed shows like the '1984 Show' as well as shows made by groups with a shared identity. In June 1985 I initiated 'Roadworks' which was 'ten artists working in public for ten days, documenting the work back in the gallery on a daily basis' (Szczelkun, 1987 p9). One of the artists in Roadworks was Mona Hatoum, another was Rasheed Araeen. Both of these, now eminent figures in the art world, had other shows at BAG. Whole émigré communities had shows. The most memorable of which was the South African show in January 1986: "Hazel Carey, one of the forces behind the cultural event, expresses amazement at the 'magnetic' effect that the Exhibition /performances seemed to have on visitors. 'The sound of music - of things happening - drew children and shoppers off the street'." BAC Newsletter Spring 1986 The South African community had few of the boundaries between art forms that exist in the British contemporary culture. The Art show included music, dancing and food - their culture was still integrated with life and this made an strong impression on all those who became involved. Teri Bullen arranged the Soweto Sisters 'Patchwork of Our Lives' show in May 1986. Incredibly she got funding for all the women to come over from Africa to attend the opening in person. A women's group had formed as soon as the gallery started in the summer of 1983 putting on its first show at the end of November that year. The group put on annual shows, which included more than 100 women. After the second year they self-published a book recording their work ('Women's Work: two years in the life of a women artists group' 1986). A separate Black women artists group called 'Mirror Reflecting Darkly' had formed in 1984. Bigos, Artists of Polish Origin I also organised an open group of Anglo Polish artists which had their first major exhibition in Brixton Art Gallery in August 1986. The group was open to any artist with a Polish heritage. "Advertisements in Artists Newsletter and Jewish Chronicle to attract artists outside our immediate London circle got a good response and the group grew from 12 to over 30 with more women than men. From then on the group itself became more important than the initial concept of a prestigious exhibition." (Szczelkun, 1987 p.88) Each artist self-selected work for the Brixton exhibition, which was then hung by Andrjez Borkowski helped by Kasia Januszko and Krystyna Borkowska. This inclusive and self curating mode continued through our future exhibitions. We went on to tour Poland and have a further eight shows around England. Arts Council funding was awarded for a made-to-measure touring show. Work was to be selected or made to be site specific to each venue. The made-to-measure shows were hosted by the Watermans Art Centre at Brentford, Cartwright Hall in Bradford, The Huddersfield City Art Gallery and the Polish Cultural Institute in Portland Place with accompanying performances and workshops. The self selection mode was difficult to maintain. It seems to contradict the prevailing ethos of curatorship. Groups do not self select they submit to the objective eye of the professional curator. However the self selection process has its own power in being able to represent an identity group on their own terms. Mail Art At about the same time as I joined the Brixton Artist's Collective I also began taking an active part in Mail Art. "Mail art shows (grew) from five in 1971 to seventy five in 1979. By 1983, this number had exploded to one hundred and eighty-seven." (John Held Jr.1986) The 'International Postal Art Network' became a world-wide mass movement by the early to mid-eighties. Thousands of people from all over the world were sending each other artworks of all kinds through the post. You could ignore what you found dull and reply in kind to what you found exciting. Those who attempted to reply to everything faced an escalating torrent of art through their letter box. This world-wide net had inherited an elegant code about mail art projects which made so much sense that the majority of 'mail artists' adhered to it, if only on the basis of its self-evident utility. This code, which seems to have been developed by artists in the early 1970's, had two parts: First; in stark
contrast to the conventional art world, all work is accepted without fees
and no work is returned. Looking back the ultra democracy of the movement preceded and was probably a part of the great democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe. Not that many projects were overtly political but for people in the eastern bloc countries such as Poland easy access to an international forum was a powerful antidote to a debilitating marginalisation and internal state censorship. I know of at least one mail artist who became part of the new democratic Polish government after 1989. Effective democracy depends on an inclusive network of active communications. Ideas moved swiftly through the postal art network engaging hundreds in a matter of weeks. This international grass-root discourse may be considered one of its main strengths, whether as model practice or symbol. I started doing mail art in 1984. One of my first correspondents had started a project which has continued unabated until the present. This is Ryosuke Cohen's 'Brain Cell'. To my mind it represents the highest ideals of the global network. He had a technique, which was unknown in Europe, for printing A3 posters in multi-colours. The way it works is that you send him a rubber stamp (mail artists were great rubber stamp enthusiasts), or a logo, or a fragment of imagery. He takes this and reproduces it along with forty or fifty other images in a range of bright colours, along with stickers, stamps and whatever gets sent to him. He has kept this up from 1984 to the present day producing many hundreds of posters which together comprise a remarkable image of the 'eternal network'. Each 'cell' of our 'global brain' is represented with each autonomous artist's chosen image. The IPAN was open to anyone who wanted to communicate in any form. Rather than ending up lost in the crowd it was amazing how quickly the process sifted out useful soul-mates. And this was perhaps the greatest achievement of the net - putting you in touch with people that you could have the most satisfying artistic discourse with. It seemed to do this very efficiently, probably better that a computer matchmaker... Many of the people I met through this media are now lifelong friends. Some have even moved into the area I live in. Most of them are not now doing mail art although they are still doing collective or network projects. The process seems to have a half-life... after a few years of frenetic activity the sound of the letter box clattering can become more of a burden than a pleasure. It is easy to throw away junk mail but much harder to bin someone's precious artwork. Although we often worked alone in our bed-sits or squats the projects and shows were in essence collective. Because most of the work was inevitably small in scale the effect of a show was very much a sum of its parts, a collectivist and often motley aesthetic. But aesthetics were just one aspect of this activity and as I have said the relations formed through the interactions were probably more compelling. In the late Eighties people started meeting in person. The De-centralised World Mail Art Congresses first met in 1986 chalking up 80 meetings in 25 countries with the participation of over 500 artists. There was excitement about the potential of this full-on contact but its lasting result seemed to be an extension of friendship rather than the new art movement which some expected. In fact by the mid-nineties this interpersonal contact, which had its artistic dimension in an obsession with 'body prints', was overtaken by its antithesis: the highly disembodied and dematerialised internet. Arguably no art movement as focused and sensuous as mail art has yet occurred on the internet. Although the 'web' is similarly 'open access' the threshold cost of participation is much higher than the cost of a few stamps and still excludes many of the kinds of artists who flourished due in part to the low cost of mail art. Mail art probably shaped destinies more than most art colleges. The truly remarkable thing about mail art was not that artists were using the postal system, a practice which was popular from the 1960's if not before, but that a massive network of people were having a ludic discourse on an international scale without the mediation of the institutions and gate keepers which usually manage culture for capitalism. Mail art was highly anti-commodity as a process. No ownership was retained, you gave your art away, hoping to get worthwhile work in return. So, on an economic or aesthetic level it was not Art in the usual capitalist sense. It did however, realise important human needs to give and perhaps receive, to call and await a response. Working Press, books by and about working class artists The experience in Brixton Artists Collective led me to think about my other identity - that of being working class. I had many arguments and discussions on this basis in the Gallery. Then I met Graham Harwood at the Bonnington Square Festival for Peace in November 1985. As well as producing vibrant paintings he had worked as a graphic artist. We decided to form a group of working class artists who wanted to self-publish offset-litho books under a collective Imprint. This project became Working Press and we published our first titles in 1987 being fortunate enough to get Central books to be our distributor. I invited every working class artist I met to self-publish their work, whether written or graphic, in offset book form. If their work would clearly benefit from this form of presentation I was more enthusiastic. Few artists have the energy, self confidence and multiple skills to self publish but the open invitation seemed a good way of validating an artists work and generating some mutual recognition. In the ten years that followed our first publications we published eighteen original titles. These included high profile names like Conrad Atkinson and others who have become well-known like Alison Marchant and Mathew Fuller. At one point Tracy Emin brought an ephemeral work on tissue paper, but it didn't seem suitable for offset-litho printing. With the help of the Arts Council I researched the British Artists Book scene, which at that time had no focus or joint promotion. I used the research and a conference to make the book artists aware of each other and to raise the profile of books by artists. This work was continued by Tanya Peixoto with her three Artists Book Yearbooks and by Marcus Campbell with his annual Artist Book Fair.(refs) My attempt to promote the ideology of inclusivity into the artists book scene did not last beyond my own initiatives and those of Tanya. Those who defined 'artists books' as 'the book as an artwork' did not seem to welcome my more open definition which included such formats as 'zines and polemical pamphlets. Self-Build Co-op Of course life as an artist organising groups without pay was not very practical in economic terms. My income was minimal. There came a point when I realised that I needed to get my housing situation together. During the Eighties I had been living in a run-down short-life house, which was part of the St Agnes Place Housing Co-op, basically a famous street of squatted houses. I had been idealistic in expecting to either make my fortune in some way or at the least to have the luck to be re-housed by the Housing Association that managed our property and continually promised some kind of redevelopment. When the opportunity to join a local Self-Build group came up I jumped at the chance to provide a decent home for myself. This was the Sharsted Street Self-Build Co-op, my ninth cultural collective. Ten local families were to build ten houses on a shared ownership basis. The labour you put into construction was accounted as part of your final share of the house. Twenty hours were required each weekend for two and a half years - if a member fell behind they were fined. Although this was only ten families the group was like a cultural cross section of Londoners - Italian, African, Caribbean, Irish, Polish and English people were part of the group. I then decided to move from the offset-litho printing into the new area of digital publishing. This promised to allow colour and new forms of distribution with low capital and unit costs. To retrain in this area, and because I needed an academic qualification for my new job as a seminar tutor at London Guildhall University, I decided to do a Master of Arts in Time-Based Media in Maidstone. The digital publishing became realised in the form of video and I began to make video work. An interest in the Exploding Cinema collective was a natural next step but I was also aware that the collective history I had been part of was not being adequately historicised. This was when I started to look for institutional support to do a PhD programme of research on the history of Exploding Cinema. I found support from AL Rees who was then a fellow at the Royal College of Art and the head of the School of Communications Professor Dan Fern. My foundational assumption is that democracy, in the sense of people inclusively participating in evaluation and decision-making, is intimately connected to the processes of culture and epistemology. Culture being understood as the processes by which we evaluate, think and adapt to changing circumstances in all of our sense media. Epistemology being the discourses and rituals by which new understandings become ordered as part of the accepted consensus of what our reality consists of and how it is to be interpreted. The achievements of these groups I had been part of seemed, in retrospect, to be significant and influential and yet they were almost entirely unrepresented in the published history of the arts. I wanted to interrogate this invisibility and explore the ways in which collective activity could be recorded, represented and evaluated. My central hypothesis is that certain art groups, which arise on the margins of society, play an important role in the cultural processes of adaptation and re-evaluation but are, for various reasons, under represented within our accepted body of knowledge. The point about all these sites of production is that they were all open access in different ways. Open to anyone without qualification. And they were mostly democratically run with open meetings. Administration was unpaid nor were they reliant for their existence on grant aid. They reflected prevailing cultural enthusiasms of the time without the mediation of the establishment and brought subcultural consensii into focus. They brought collective desire to the surface and found expressive forms which were often refreshingly human centred and direct.
The Exploding Cinema has described itself as a "hybrid fusion of projection, performance and carnival". Architectural spaces, transformed with the use of slides and loop film projections are used as an environmental context for a programme of short films and video. A 'master of ceremonies' or MC sets up a dialogue with the audience and introduces the films. He or she encourages film-makers who are present to speak or be questioned. The audience are encouraged to make films themselves and invited to show them at future Exploding events. By thoughtful programming this inclusive process of soliciting material, along with targeted invitations and the work of the members of the group, results in a varied and lively programme which can regularly attract audiences of 100 - 300. The Exploding Cinema is run by a core group, helped by a wider network of friends and enthusiasts. In the last 6 years it has put on more that 100 events, showing the work of about 1000 film-makers. It is unfunded, and supports itself entirely from admission prices of £3. 'Underground film' practice has a long tradition in the UK of enhancing and often leading innovation in several film and TV genres. The same may be said of other art forms and yet the groups from which such cultural forms arise have rarely been studied with any scholarly rigour. My study of the Exploding Cinema is used as material to locate and ground a theoretical investigation into the relationship between autonomous art activity and models of culture that nurture or expand our notions of democracy. The main theorist used is Jurgen Habermas whose Theory of Communicative Action is critiqued from a Foucauldian viewpoint. The theoretical exegesis aims to assess the value of the Exploding Cinema and other such groups as producers of knowledge and contributors to communications that enhance democracy. The study is also an examination of the problems of interpretation that the study of art collectives bring with them and attempts to lay groundwork for the further study of such phenomena. Stefan Szczelkun February 2001
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