Lecture Theatre E002, Studio Theatre and Lethaby Gallery Central Saint Martins, Granary Building, London N1C 4AA
19th March 2015
The British Artists’ Film Video and Study Collection at Central St Martin’s, University of the Arts London, in conjunction with REWIND hosted a symposium titled NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL PLURALISM!
This one-day symposium and screening event, followed by the launch of the newly installed REWIND Videotheque at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, was presented as part of Central Saint Martins’s Strangelove Moving Image Festival.
The 1970s and 1980s is a period sometimes characterised as marking a transition from modernist medium specificity to more diverse pluralistic forms of engagement in artists’ film and video in the UK. This symposium and screening event traced the practice and exhibition of these decades. It ranged through the diverse practices of the 1970s, and the politicized early 1980s, with a focus onThe New Pluralism (Tate 1986), which sought to survey work from first five years of that decade. It also hoped to consider how notions of pluralism may be applied to artists’ moving image practice and exhibition in the 21st Century, in its many contemporary forms and contexts.
The day included presentations by Stephen Partridge (University of Dundee), Patti Gaal-Holmes, and Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths College), who along with CSM students from MRes Art: Moving Image, also curated special screening programmes of rarely seen works of British Video Art and Experimental Film from the 1970s and ’80s, including a screening of the newly remastered Five Films by David Hall and Tony Sinden (1972/3)