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Visual Culture in Britain

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British Expanded Cinema and the Live Culture

196979
Duncan White
Published online: 10 Feb 2010.

To cite this article: Duncan White (2010): British Expanded Cinema and the Live Culture 196979, Visual Culture in
Britain, 11:1, 93-108
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Duncan White
British Expanded Cinema and the Live Culture
196979

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One may take advantage of the appearance of images without visible transition in distant
places, which is a way of saying television, if one is willing to stay at home instead of going to
a theatre. Or one may fly if one is willing to give up walking. (John Cage, Experimental
Music, 1957)1

The Apollo moon landing of July 1969 generated the biggest audience for a
live televised event of its time. Outer space was in the home, and there
seemed to be no limit to what was in range of everyday perception. Not
only had the great distances of the cosmos been collapsed, television had
achieved a new temporality in media reception. The boundaries between
technology, media and culture were beginning to blur as television solidified its position as the main mediator of public consciousness by emphasizing its unique value as a live medium. Today, in the early twenty-first
century, liveness and immediacy are taken-for-granted aspects of modern media culture. A live and instantaneous media network is part and
parcel of everyday life. Yet the process of mediation in real time and
space, a process initially and most fully interrogated by film and video
artists associated with Expanded Cinema in the 1970s, remains a complex
and relevant concern. In this article I hope to map something of this
important moment in British film and video art but also to point towards
the relevance of Expanded Cinema for the continuing assessment of the
relationship today between art, technology and media in the UK.
In 2007 at the launch of Rewind, a major research project that has
recovered a large and important body of early UK video art, Kevin
Athertons performance In Two Minds stole the show. A timely and
much-needed archiving project, Rewind has made a great deal of material
from this crucial period in British visual culture available through its
website and various events in London, Edinburgh and Dundee where
the project is housed at the Visual Research Centre, Dundee
Contemporary Arts. Based on a twin-monitor installation shown at the
Serpentine Gallery in 1978, Atherton conducted a live interview with his
pre-recorded self. An uncanny near-distance opens up not just in time and
space but also in selfhood and identity. The incomplete nature of the work
allows me to re-enter it and create a new version, where as a fifty year old
man I can answer the questions put to me by my twenty seven year old
former self.2 Over the course of his career Atherton, using expanded
techniques such as performance and multiple screens, has explored the
role television has played in collapsing the boundaries between media
space and everyday reality. Those spaces, Paddy Scannell suggests, in
which public events occur, simultaneously in two different places: the
Visual Culture in Britain ISSN 1471-4787 print/ISSN 1941-8361 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/14714780903509854

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place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard.
Broadcasting mediates between these two sites. Events in public thus
assume a degree of phenomenal complexity they did not hitherto possess,
and this has consequences for the character of the events themselves.3
It is perhaps no coincidence that the moon landings watershed broadcast on live television occurred at the beginning of the most visible period
of Expanded Cinema in the UK. All Here and Now and the Future,
Expanded Cinema can be characterized as a form of filmmaking associated
above all with a sense of liveness, immediacy and a temporality of presence.4 The live event was not simply the property of an increasingly
televised culture, by the late 1960s it had become the paradigmatic form
of the counter-culture.5 The mid-1960s through to the mid-1970s witnessed an active combination of film and performance as the influence of
television and other media technologies on the temporal conditions of
space and consciousness (or, better, space and the conditions of perception) was challenged by a branch of experimental filmmaking rooted
firmly in what Stuart Laing identifies as an underground paradigm of
liveness that emphasized the cultural process (performance, happening) rather than the fixed product.6
Yet the meeting of experimental film and the live culture (or the
pseudo-immediacy) of television was not clearly defined. Film is implicitly a medium of the past, television a medium of the updating present.
Hence the different, and very telling, positions originally given to television and newsreel cameras at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
Geoffrey Fisher, then Archbishop of Canterbury, was adamant that television cameras should not have equal access to the action in Westminster
Abbey. This was partly because film meant a more respectful attitude to
the event could be induced in the darkness of the cinema but more
importantly film could be edited later if those in charge so wished.7 The
real time and widespread live broadcast suggest an alternative relationship to media that is not just a question of televisions representation of
real life as much as it is of television as real life. From the safety of our
homes we are a part of the event the moon landing, the football match,
the urban disaster unedited and direct as it happens. Yet, as Jane
Feuer notes, To equate live television with real life is to ignore all
those determinations standing between the event and our perception of
it technologies and institutions to mention two.8
It is precisely between the event and our perception of it that it is
possible to identify the complex space of Expanded Cinema in this period
of live culture. Various sites of reception, not just television but also
cinema, the gallery, the shop window, places of work and the street, all
act as the subject and content of work associated with Expanded Cinema.
The type of intermedia performance work discussed in this article represents a means of situating Expanded Cinema in the complex and altered
time scheme the real time space of film, video and the technologies of
visual reproduction that transformed the cultural conditions of media in
the UK after 1969.

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Real time space

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Malcolm Le Grice describes this Real Time/Space in opposition to the

illusory time and space of cinema. In 1972, he writes: The whole history of
the commercial cinema has been dominated by the aim of creating convincing illusory time/space, and eliminating all traces of the actual physical state of affairs at any stage of the film, from scripting through shooting,
editing, printing, promotion to projection.9 According to Le Grice, narrative cinema does everything it can to deny the ontological presence of the
audience. He advocates in opposition a form of filmmaking that prioritizes
the projection event, focusing on the primary experience of watching (the
only point of access) in response to so-called cinematic immediacy. Live
film actions such as his own Horror Film 1 (1971), Sally Potters The Building
(1970) and Annabel Nicolsons Reel Time (1973) all dramatize the physical
presence of film and explore hidden representational tensions between the
film, the performer and the audience as they interact in the dark (Figure 1).
Annabel Nicolsons Reel Time expresses a poetic concern for the fleeting,
the ephemeral and the unfixed quality of the live or living event that
perhaps speaks most clearly to the mood of the time. As it is being
projected, the film, showing a sewing machine in operation and a portrait
of the artist, is passed precariously through an actual sewing machine
operated by Nicolson. Another projector is positioned in order to throw
her shadow onto a second screen. Members of the audience are then called
upon to read from the sewing machines instruction manual in the intermittent light. This was the antithesis of a commercial film product. All
traces of what is a multi-faceted film action exist only in a handful of
photographs, written accounts and the memory of its audience. The film

Figure 1. Annabel Nicolson,

Reel Time (1973). # The artist.
Courtesy of the artist.

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itself is repeatedly punctured and erased by the sewing machine. Early

works associated with Expanded Cinema challenged the value status of
film products that circulate in the commodified arena of cinema by existing only in the present tense of performance. For Nicolson, live media
had an elemental and almost primary quality to them.
This antagonism towards cinema as an economy is also part of a crisis of
context for the art gallery. Indeed, for Le Grice, it is the reality of Expanded
Cinemas between-ness, a subject that has perhaps been most carefully
charted in recent times by Maeve Connolly, that preoccupies him at the
close of his essay on real time and space.10

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The biggest problem to be dealt with is creating a physical venue for this kind of work. The
most suitable existing possibility must lie in performance or installation in the art gallery
situation, and this requires the back up of a pool of suitable equipment which can be
transported . . . Meanwhile the work will continue to develop and be seen under inadequate
conditions.11

On one level this simply addresses the pragmatics of making work that is
inherently interstitial, and yet it speaks to a problem with the received
notion of Expanded Cinema on which I want to focus in this article.12
Tanya Leighton typically identifies Expanded Cinema as part of the post1960 contemporary exodus of film from the theatre towards the site of the
gallery.13 Leighton locates the beginnings of an intermedia condition;
the permeation of boundaries between art and film; and the creation of
hybrid filmic objects, installations, performances and events.14 Yet
cinema, in my use of the term, is taken to mean a more pervasive form
of media reception that has escaped the auditorium and penetrated other
spaces of everyday life. Works such as Anthony McCalls Line Describing a
Cone (1973) or David Dyes Mirror Film (1975) are as concerned with the
space in front of the screen as with the space of the screen, and attempt to
activate cinema as a form of social space defined by the placement of the
spectator and the relationship between the audience and the film. The
difficulty of locating real time/space in a live culture of proliferating
media becomes the very material in work associated with Expanded
Cinema. This remains the case today as a new generation of artists producing work that might be described as Expanded Cinema, such as Emma
Hart, Benedict Drew, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, have developed their
own visual languages that respond to the complex ontology of modern
media cultures in a way that is reminiscent of the powerfully ephemeral
techniques of artists such as Nicolson. At the same time, practitioners such
as William Raban and Guy Sherwin have begun to revisit their experiments of the 1970s, much to the delight of new audiences who might
otherwise have been unaware of this vital period of UK Expanded Cinema.
Architectures of reception
Whether they take on the particular spaces of the cinema, television or the
gallery, it is possible to identify a number of works in this early era of live
media culture that, although very different, when taken together express
Expanded Cinemas principal concern with context, liveness and the

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Figure 2. William Raban,

245 (1972). # The artist.
Courtesy of the artist.

social spaces of reception. William Rabans Two Minutes Forty Five Seconds
(or 245) (Figure 2) is crucial here in terms of the cinematic auditorium,
but there are also the questions posed by works such as David Halls
television interruptions (Figure 3) and Ian Breakwells gallery-based livevideo performances, works that seek to disrupt what Catherine Russell
identifies as a set of culturally received architectures of reception.15
These, according to Russell, are the cultural conditions of watching
made concrete by the physical venue, and represent the concepts of place
in which this type of work should be located rather than within specifically
filmic or art-historical traditions. It is not so much a question of the
difference between the living-room, the auditorium and the gallery as it
is about the hidden crossovers and the missing spaces in between. Each
architecture suggests a relationship to the image, a sense of control and an
aesthetic intensity that exist simultaneously in the historical scope of film
and the ephemeral just past quality of television. The traditionally captivated gaze of cinema has been rethought in an age of the so-called double
gaze of TV that is both distracted and absorbed. Hence, the primary
directness of Expanded Cinema represents a response not only to a notion
of cinematic immediacy but also to the live reality of broadcast media in
general. It is Expanded Cinemas uncertain position in the spaces between
these social institutions, developing instead out of a broader concern with
visual culture and media reception in general, that needs to be emphasized
in order to understand not only what it is but also what makes it

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Figure 3. TV Interruptions
(7 TV Pieces), TV Shoot-out
1971. # The artist. Courtesy
of the artist.

continually relevant to the study of film and visual culture. The inadequacies inherent in the social conditions of reception identified by Le Grice
and the call for new contexts are in themselves often the very material of
the works associated with Expanded Cinema and give way in the 1970s to
new forms of video art in the UK and elsewhere, as well as hybrid events
such as the Festival of Expanded Cinema at the ICA in London in 1976. In
many ways, Expanded Cinema of this period was part of a broader crisis of
context in the UK art scene as artists and activists from a variety of backgrounds began to question the institutional orthodoxies of an increasingly
commercial art world. Work associated with Expanded Cinema was
shown in a variety of spaces and tended to be created according to cooperative models of production and independent networks of distribution.
The various projection spaces of the London Filmmakers Coop were
crucial sites of experimentation, as were non-commercial gallery spaces
such as Walker Arts in Liverpool, Gallery House in London and the
Arnolfini in Bristol. European film festivals were also hotbeds of
Expanded Cinema during this period. Particularly important was
Experimntl, the experimental film festival held at Knokke Le Zout in
Belgium until 1975.16

2 Minutes 45 Seconds: a film which is its showing

Rabans film, 245 is one that repositions the cinematic in these terms. Like
his earlier work, Take Measure, 245 investigates the popular space of the
auditorium; the third or hidden space and time of cinema that since childhood Raban regarded as something unfathomable and illusory. Conceived

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in 1972, 245 is a film made for the cinema. It has its origins as much in the
conceptual music of John Cage as in the ideas of process art applied here
to the specifics of the cinema. Traditionally, cinema presupposes a readymade sensorial product and an absent creator. Production and distribution
models mean that the global medium commonly understood to be
cinema tends to be produced at a not insignificant distance from its
audiences. Instead, 245, as Raban notes at the time, is a film that begins
and ends with the period of its making . . . a film which IS its showing.17
A blank cinema screen is filmed from the back of the auditorium for the
length of a single reel of film. Like the barkers of early British silents or the
Benshi of pre-war Japanese film, Raban is present and announces the films
title as well as the date, place and time into a microphone positioned in
front of the screen. Part of the audience is in frame as the reel of blank film
is projected and a camera positioned next to the projector records the
event. The film is then processed and made ready for projection at the
next days screening in the same auditorium. The footage of the preceding
screening is projected and simultaneously re-filmed. Over the course of
several evenings the re-filmed footage builds up a layered and complex
film-within-a-film effect. The film acts as a history of its own recording and
is discarded once the process of re-filming has come to an end.
Ironically 245 has rarely been performed in a conventional cinema
space. Performed on various occasions throughout the 1970s it was often
screened at experimental film festivals rather than intervening more
directly in the mainstream culture of cinema. Yet, 245 assumes a relationship to the cinematic that is extrinsic to the structural formality of the piece.
It explicitly refers to the cinema as a condition of viewing and in doing so
makes a distinction between film as a medium and cinema as a social
institution. The distinction is important. Like Valie Exports Tapp und Tast
Kino, in which both film and cinema as such are absent, the conceptual
form of the work deals quite literally and directly with the material of
cinema and the social relations (those that are specifically gendered, in the
case of Exports work) that cinema constructs. By creating a meeting place
between film as cinema and cinema as film, the performative aspect of
245 sets up a tension between what is seen and the way it is seen. It
suggests that the subject of the work is the audience.
Indeed, the film, a chemical medium transforming the world into its
recorded shadow, is produced at the live moment of its reception and
turns cinema into a transgressive act of doubling.18 The common conception of cinema as a one-way process (projector-screen-audience) is reconceived in 245 as a two-way process of reciprocal feedback. By feedback I
mean a kind of mirroring in which the work tells of itself and the conditions of its production. It is a question of rethinking the term cinematic as
locational; as a play on the live quality of the mediums apparent immediacy. Raban holds a mirror up to these conditions in the space and time of
its making, and cinema a representational field of reception is
rescreened as a film product. As it shifts from positive to negative the
film (or, more importantly, the film act) documents its own reversals and
carries the traces of its watching. The film act (the film as a condition of its
making) goes some way towards heightening audience awareness and

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collapsing the boundary between production and reception. It does this

formally and aesthetically but also culturally.
Rabans work is based on 433 (1952), a work in which John Cage
imposes the conditions of indeterminacy or chance onto the rules or
structures of music. Principally formal in design, Cages piece sets up an
uncanny displacement of what might be described as musics cultural
locatedness within those normalizing models of production and reception
that define the nature of art more broadly. Cage breaks the cultural down
into its relationships; primarily the power relation between composer, text
(or score) and performer. The traditional, determinate passages from
composer to score, score to performer, and performer to listener are understood in terms of power relations.19 433 is a musical score for chance
happenings; sounds enter the silent score and disrupt the relations of
listening built into a culturally inherited conception of music. As with
Cages notion of music, Rabans work investigates cinema as a time and
space produced in its relations. Rather than disparate realities separated as
existing either inside or outside the film, Rabans 245 attempts to open up
a Cageian field of uncertainty disabling the inherited values and expectations of cinema that regulate (and are regulated by) the cinematic.
Cinematic is thus taken to mean the culture of cinema; a value system
that crystallizes around a set of expectations; a set of codes or a language
that defines the reality of a cultural relation that is of cinema. The cinematic is more usually thought of as a movement away from the actual
space of reception and into the space of the film, an inherent aspect of
cinemas escapism. But here the cinematic refers to the social space of
watching and, more to the point, refers by extension to the material of
Expanded Cinema. The cinematic involves a set of differences that are
constructed in their naturalized relations as part of a theatrical and economic production. 245 disables this economy of the cinematic by
expanding it into the cultural field of media reception more broadly.
Expanded Cinema and the intermedia network
245 makes specific reference to cinemas broader penetration into other
fields of visual experience. Originally Raban employed a 16mm newsreel
camera that recorded sound directly onto the filmstrip.20 It goes without
saying that newsreel technology played an important part of the historical
development of media production and reception. Less appreciated is the
way in which 16mm film was used during the 1960s as a way of producing
content made on location for television. As a mobile technology, it
allowed for information gathering and meant that television was not
confined to the live studio broadcast. It would be fair to say, in fact, that
the cinematic quality of the film medium changed the geography of
television: As television emerged out of the studio, the complicated question of television specificity turned to topography: the recognisable sites
and concerns of everyday life could reach the domestic space of reception
and the everyday lives and concerns of viewers.21
Rabans re-appropriation of this device of broadcast media for his own
locational critique of cinematic immediacy is telling and points to

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expanded cinemas wider concern with the inherited media conventions of

an increasingly diffuse information economy. It also suggests something of
the mediated reality of liveness inherent in the broadcast medium itself.
The shifts in global cultures networks of communication have always
been an important aspect of expanded cinemas critical energies, particularly in the US and Europe. Gene Youngbloods book Expanded Cinema
(first published in 1970 and influenced by US media and information
theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller) is in many
ways a manifesto for techno-democracy and represents a continuation of
the enquiry into the ways in which modernity has altered the nature
of human perception. Youngblood situates Expanded Cinema in relation
to mans ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of
his mind, in front of his eyes.22 Such a process is integral, he argues, to the
case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now
functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.23
The response in the UK was perhaps less idealistic and more circumspect but no less critical. While, as with McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller,
there was a shift from the deterministic sociological focus on forms of
mass communication, in the UK contemporary models of media and
communication theory were developing as part of a broader ideological
(Marxist) cultural critique of media and communication. As Stuart Hall
notes in his essay (originally written in 1973) Encoding/Decoding, In
societies like ours, communication between the production elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of systematically distorted communication.24 Indeed, the appropriation of video technology
by artists as a means of challenging the power apparatuses of media
communication and redistributing the means of media representation is
an important part of Expanded Cinemas history. The year of the moon
landing, 1969, is also the year that the Sony Portapak arrives in Europe
fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam. The technical flexibility of video
made possible the stage-management of time and space, pioneering the
way for subsequent developments in interactive media and participatory
cinema, it lent itself to delving inside its mechanisms, to looping and
networking multiple channels, or to combining recording and playback
technologies as gallery artefacts.25 By the mid-1970s the new portable
technology was taken up in the UK by artists and community organisers
wanting to produce television outside the ideological and format restrictions that applied to broadcast programmes.26
Interrupting television
David Halls TV Interruptions might be considered part of this expanded
popular context that takes as its point of departure the new nervous
system of mankind and the ideological restrictions of format and programming that confined broadcast media. Suspicious of the gallery system
as isolated, irrelevant and elitist, Hall (a film and video artist who had
trained as a sculptor) situated his practice in the earlymid-1970s as a
contextual production in terms of the supposedly transparent neutrality
of televisual language. It was the locational aspect, or, more to the point,

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the popular field of reception, that was important to Hall: Film (as cinema)
and video (as television) became of interest, because they were the media
of now; they were what most people were looking at, they werent looking
at art, art was in galleries.27 Unannounced and un-credited, Halls twominute, forty-five-second Television Interruptions were broadcast in
Scotland in 1971 to coincide with that years Edinburgh Festival. There
were seven interruptions in total that ranged from the optical joke of a TV
set apparently filling with water through to more contemplative timelapse works. Each in their own way de-familiarizes the naturalized conditions of televisual space and time, continuing the surrealist inclination to
make the everyday strange.
The TV piece on which I would like to focus is Television Shoot-out. Its
wild west theme is particularly cinematic and plays directly on the
specific role of 16mm film in broadcast television. Television Shoot-out is a
location shoot in which the shooting is the subject of the work. Four
cameras are positioned one at a time as part of an apparently live shoot.
Each camera is pointed at the other and at twenty-second intervals the
point of view shifts from one camera to another. The film is shot on a street
corner that it is more than likely would have been recognizable to the local
television audience. As with 245 there is a reciprocal feedback as camera
position, subject and point of view become the focus of the films movement. Again there is a phenomenology of making as the construction of
seeing becomes the subject of the film. Shoot-out would suggest a kind of
targeting and exchange of fire, but the alternative positions each collapse
into a singular point of view what we might call the televisual. The act is
reminiscent of the question Richard Dienst asks in his book Still Life in Real
Time: When does television cease functioning simply as a movement
between distant points and begin shaping its own world, gathering
distances into itself in order to redistribute them according to its own
program? And the answer is: from the start.28
It is interesting to consider Halls disavowal of the gallery system in
relation to Le Grices ambivalence regarding physical venues and the
locational aspect of his shoot-out. Hall notes that he is attempting to
create an alternative relationship to the medium, even to the box itself as a
potentially powerful piece of furniture.29 Developing ideas from his time
in the Artist Placement Group in the mid to late 1960s, it is the context of
reception with which Hall not only concerns himself but which he uses as
the very material of his work.30 As Jackie Hatfield has pointed out, with
his seminal televisual artworks . . . Hall coalesced his ideas about context
and concept; both, he argues, are inextricably linked.31 Hall himself is
relatively clear on this:
By context I mean the inevitable, unavoidable consciousness of physical environment through
to perceived cultural framework a phenomenological issue. A concept, once manifest
externally in whatever form cant be read in isolation as though in a void, but is necessarily
read within its specific context and this context invariably influences, even shapes, that
reading. With this recognition the choice of context must necessarily be given equal
consideration from the outset, the two integrated are the condition of a perceived
experience.32

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The cinematic is expanded into the most immediate conditions of perceived experience in Halls work. The local perspective offered by a street
corner in Edinburgh in 1971 is subsumed into the partwhole relation of
television that tends to create a totalizing and singular point of view that
of television. J.D. Peters calls this predicament seeing bifocally, a confusion of near and far, and notes the way it characterizes the contemporary
experience of society within an economy of representation.33 Hall, like
Raban and Cage, seems to be suggesting something similar in his notion
of the relationship between perception and the cultural frameworks that
circumscribe perception. The prevalence of mass media in everyday life,
Peters argues, means that direct experience contradicts the sense-making
activities of the coherent and graspable vision offered up by the totalizing
images of multi-media:
Modern men and women see proximate fragments with their own eyes and global totalities
through the diverse media of social description . . . Institutions of the global constitute
totalities that we could experience otherwise only in pieces, such as populations, the weather,
employment, inflation, the gross material product or public opinion. The irony is that the
general becomes clear through representation, whereas the immediate is subject to the
fragmenting effects of our limited experience.34

In Halls Shoot-out, the time and space of broadcast medias apparent

immediacy is parodied in terms of the cultural coordinates of the cinematic. It is not clear whether Shoot-out is a live present, a past moment or a
series of past positions posing as the present. It creates the illusion of a here
and now that Hall is attempting to break by combining the alternative time
codes of the two mediums of 16mm film and television. This is a hybrid
approach common to forms of Expanded Cinema, in which the temporal
structures of film are made subject to the spatial analyses of cinema. As
Laura Mulvey notes:
temporalities have been fused by the conventions of broadcasting, so that even the necessary
past-ness of film acquires, on television, a pseudo-immediacy, achieved, particularly, by
direct address. In this sense 16mm film on television could exploit two conventions. The
hand-held camera could signify the crucial move into the space of reality, of being actually on
the spot and the thick of things; direct address could signify the temporality of television, its
immediacy and its ability to cross between here and there.35

The interruption ends with the camera pointing directly at the viewer,
reversing both televisions technique of address and its ability to cross
between here and there. Halls camerawork mirrors (feeds back) the unidirectional singularity of televisions perceived liveness the totalizing
point of view with which television attempts to cancel out the fragmenting
effects of our immediate experience. Instead, the liveness of television
offers a false immediacy. I may see blue skies, but the satellite picture on
the TV news tells me a huge storm is on its way.36 Hall intervenes in this
supposedly neutral or objective reality of televisual language by re-staging
televisions context of watching. (It is important to emphasize that each
piece was broadcast unannounced.) The false live act of transmission
where images appear without transition in distant (and not so distant
places) becomes a cinematic confrontation with the reality of watching. If

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the cinematic is considered a space of reception in which the cultural space

of its own making is made visible, this is Expanded Cinema at its most
interventionist because as well as space it foregrounds the problem of time
as the continuous present of media reception.

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Programming One
Arguably, it is the subversion of media time patterns that defines
Expanded Cinemas materialization of social space. There are obvious
and important distinctions between the cinematic and the televisual. The
aesthetic concentration of the television screen and the light emitted by
that screen, draws our attention.37 The televisual, rather than the cinematic, gaze is distracted. As an audience we are addressed in a way that is
generally distinct from the cinema, as perpetually present and as personally involved somehow in the manner and affect of communication. It is
possible to suggest that, unlike cinema, television operates within its own
continuous and unbroken landscape (or televisual flow).38 But this view
tends to privilege the autonomy of the medium. The problem of television
exists more in its likeness to cinema, in that built into its very architecture
are notions of social status, the organization and management of everyday
time structures, life patterns and cultural conventions which in the early
1970s were very much defined by structures of class, work and leisure.
Like television, cinema remains reliant on a principle of continuous or
rolling programming, it is received within regulated periods of release and
tends to be experienced in the divisions between work and leisure.
Similarly, television has always been organized around the working day,
the working week, as well as seasonal conditions and ritual festivals. TV
has always acted as a kind of clock:
TVs organisation of time is such that it turns the perpetual present into the time of timekeeping: split apart into measured segments, carrying, as Adorno would say, the rhythms of
the factory and the office not only into leisure time but into the family home, centre of the
reproductive process of capital. TV brings the time-organisation of capital into the domestic
arena.39

It is not without irony, then, that a work posing as the birthday celebration
of an art gallery in Londons East End in the early 1970s should play an
important part in the history of Expanded Cinema, primarily because it
situates itself in terms of the social and cultural programming space and
time (or relationships) of media reception.
Ian Breakwells work often foregrounds the context of programming,
work and time. While Hall has turned towards the televisual and the
cinematic for his material, Breakwells equally material use of the gallery
as a cultural space is similarly interventionist, unsettling and displaced.40
On February 10, 1971, Breakwell staged his own form of celebration for
the first anniversary of the Angela Flowers Gallery in London. The continually changing tableaux ran between the hours of 11 am and 7 pm as a
performance-cum-video installation that involved four workmen moving
sods of earth in a circle. The work was videoed on closed-circuit television and displayed on a monitor in the gallerys window at street level. The

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Figure 4. Ian Breakwell, One

(1971). # The artist. Courtesy
of Felicity Sparrow.

pointless, almost Sisyphean, endeavour of the workmens day shift in the

domain of art is equated with an art-world calendar year. The displacement is spoofed further as the invisible or hidden labour is instantaneously
reproduced in the gallerys shop window in the same way that the contemporaneous moon landings were televised and displayed in highstreet windows. Indeed, footage of the moon landings has been incorporated into the subsequent film made by Mike Leggett (who collaborated
with Breakwell at the time) that combines footage from the performance
with Breakwells voiceover and re-filmed television images (Figure 4).41
The event (and its documentation) is in some ways part of an answer to
Le Grices concern over the inadequate conditions for and of Expanded
Cinema. Breakwells work is situated on the uncertain boundaries of
popular reception. Television, the gallery, the street, video, film and performance all meet within the context of a live cinematic production as a
socially codified set of experiences. The moving image is positioned within
the landscape of everyday experience not only as record or live transmission but as an active agent in the reproduction of lived conditions. The men
working in the basement can be seen only via the live video image.
Juxtaposed with the aura of heavenly (satellite) broadcasting and space
travel each distance is equal to another. Their mundane and earthly task
becomes a televisual echo of the moon landings. It is not the task so much
as the way in which the task is received that is important. In Breakwells
parody, media reception gathers distances into itself in order to redistribute them according to its own programme.

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british expanded cinema

The small distances of Breakwells piece are no different from the great
distances of space travel as far as reception is concerned. As a means of
verifying actual events the video image exists less in what it shows than
in the way it addresses its audience. This is perhaps what makes video
art such a valuable critique of television. Artists approached the medium
as a means of rethinking the relationship between space, time and consciousness in modern media landscapes. But, more than this, it is the
reflexivity of live video performance that makes it such an important
aspect of Expanded Cinemas critique of the architectures of reception
that are now an integral part of everyday life. The images of the otherwise invisible men working only feet away from the viewer are not
simply a live reflection of the present, but a mirroring of the present in
construction. The liveness of the event is more a question of uncertainty
than the confirmation of an existing but absent reality. The same is true
of the moon landing, that live cultural event which altered the temporal
and spatial media expectations of a generation. Seen from the UK, the
live pictures of the moon landing were more likely to be recordings
broadcast as if they were live. Arguably other live televised events such
as the coronation of Elizabeth II or the funeral of Winston Churchill may
have had more cultural significance in the UK, especially in terms of the
authorization and development of television broadcasting institutions.
Nonetheless, each event serves to reinforce the normality of an uncanny
condition. Whether it is Neil Armstrong or unnamed labourers, the only
present presence that can be confirmed is the viewers: the one presence
(as Le Grice noted at the outset) that, ever since the expansion of
the cinematic beyond the auditorium and into the home, the workplace
and the street, has been continuously cancelled out. Reflected back in the
shop window are the hidden mechanisms of medias rearrangement of
space and time: a consciousness of ourselves that is otherwise denied.
It makes physical everything that comes between the image and
its perception.
Moondust
Breakwells earth-moving, Halls TV interruptions and Rabans 245
relate to the spatial and temporal programming that informs what Hall
calls the complex analogical mirror developed in video art but which has
always been an integral part of Expanded Cinema.42 The live context of
Expanded Cinema feedback displaces (and is displaced by) the given
architectures of reception. The inadequate conditions of Le Grices geography become the material of Expanded Cinema, a hybrid form manifesting at the intersections and boundaries of the cinematic, a socially codified
space, a form that is between as well as of the cinema, television and the
gallery.
Refusing to exist as an art commodity while resisting the economics of
film distribution, it is not so much that Expanded Cinema falls between
institutions, but that it has developed precisely in the way it defies the
categories, taxonomies and cultural boundaries that manage definitions of
film art practices. Indeed, as Eric de Bruyn has noted, for practices

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107

associated with Expanded Cinema, the social function of institutions

needed to become as much the focus of critique as the properties of the
medium.43 This principle gives way to the much broader implications I
have attempted to touch on in this article. I have tried to suggest that terms
such as context, the cinematic, liveness and reception need to be
properly explored in order to understand the peculiar spatial and temporal dynamics of what might be identified as Expanded Cinema.
Notes

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1 John Cage, Experimental Music, in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press, 1973), 9.
2 There is also a rather tongue in cheek future version of In Two Minds which consist of me as a fifty five
year old man asking questions of my eighty one year old self. This is done through the use of makeup
and by myself acting as an old man. The basic principle of real time, so enshrined in the work from the
seventies, is now broken. This and other transgressions that span a period of fifty-four years, twenty six
of which are yet to occur, is the subject of the work. The virtual nature of predicting the future allows me
to create fictional artworks, make public my career aspirations, and to imagine how my personal life
might pan out. See Athertons note to accompany the performance at http://www.rewind.ac.uk/
rewind/images/kevin.gif. Rewind is run by principal investigator Stephen Partridge and archivist and
producer Adam Lockhart and is an essential resource for research in this area. The website also hosts
part of the research project Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema funded by the AHRC that I
have been developing with David Curtis at Central St Martins School of Art and Design. See: http://
www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded
3 Paddy Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (London: Blackwell,
1997), 76.
4 Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 19691971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972),
242.
5 Stuart Laing, The Politics of Culture: Institutional Change, in Cultural Revolution: The Challenge of the
Arts in the 1960s, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed (London: Routledge, 1992), 90.
6 Ibid., 90.
7 See Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life, 81. Of course, the BBC was granted full coverage of the
coronation and television broadcasting was in a sense consecrated as the authorized eye of the
people. From then on TV would develop a privileged access of its own that has become increasingly
exclusive compared with the kind of access enjoyed by the man on the street.
8 Jane Feuer, The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology, in Regarding Television: Critical
Approaches An Anthology, ed. Ann E. Kaplan (Los Angeles, CA: University Publications of America,
1983), 13.
9 Malcolm Le Grice, Real Time/Space, in Malcolm Le Grice, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age
(London: BFI, 2001), 156.
10 See Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists Cinema: Site and Screen (London: Intellect Books, 2009).
11 Malcolm Le Grice, Real Time/Space, 163.
12 In 1970 the Arts Council in Britain flirted briefly with supporting what it defined as the new activities
that did not fit with the traditional practices it was more accustomed to supporting. Particularly
problematic were mixed-media events, performance art and anything else that did not have a clearly
defined artistic product . . . A New Activities Committee was set up for 196970, with a budget of
15,000; among activities supported in that year were the music of Cornelius Cardew, the performance
art of Bruce Lacey and the theatre of Inter-Action, the People Show, Portable Theatre and the Pip
Simmons Theatre Group. Laing, The Politics of Culture: Institutional Change, 83. Enthusiasm waned
as funders questioned the professionalism as well as the cultural and political value of the new
ephemeral performance culture.
13 Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing/Afterall,
2008), 14.
14 Ibid., 14.
15 See Catherine Russell, Parallax Historiography, in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M.
Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5556.
16 For more on this, see David Curtis, A History of Artists Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI Publishing,
2007), especially regarding the importance of public funding in the UK for this kind of work; and
Margaret Dickinson, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 194590 (London: BFI Publishing, 1997).
17 From Rabans personal notes (1972). Im grateful to William Raban for his assistance in researching this
essay.
18 Thus creating the kind of cinematic consciousness Robert Morris has called a phenomenology of
making. An artwork cannot exist (be properly seen or experienced) Morris suggests, except in terms of

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how it is produced. See Robert Morris, Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for
the Motivated, in Continuous Projects Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995).
19 Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books,
2008), 81.
20 This is known as optical sound whereby sound is recorded directly onto a magnetic strip that is part of
the roll of film so that sync sound can be recorded and replayed as part of the original optical
information. For a fascinating discussion of the use of this now near-defunct technology in artists film,
see Guy Sherwin, Optical Sound Films 19712007 (London: LUX, 2007).
21 See Laura Mulveys introduction to Experimental British Television, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton
(London: BFI, 2007), 12.
22 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 41. Stan Vanderbeek probably coined
the term expanded cinema around 1966.
23 Ibid., 41.
24 Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies,
19729 (London: Routledge, 1980), 12838.
25 Sue Hall and John Hopkins, The Metasoftware of Video, Studio International, MayJune 1976, 263.
26 Mercedes Vicente, Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work (Ikon: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2008), 26.

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27 Jackie Hatfield, Another Place: David Hall, in Experimental Film and Video, ed. Jackie Hatfield
(Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 201.
28 Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 5.
29 Hall quoted in Hatfield, Another Place: David Hall, 200.
30 Artist Placement Group (APG founded in 1966). Their objectives were in fact complex and
sophisticated: to initiate a long-term pattern of disturbances within the power structures and
information flow of the organisations involved, taking effect perhaps over a quarter of a century, in
order to have a profound influence on the nature of society. Members included John Latham and
Barbara Stevini but also Stuart Brisley, Ian Breakwell, Garth Evans and David Hall. See Mick Hartney,
InT/Ventions: Some Instances of Confrontation with British Broadcasting, in Diverse Practices: A
Critical Reader on British Video Art, ed. Julia Knight (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996).
31 Quoted in Jackie Hatfield, Another Place: David Hall, 202.
32 Ibid., 201.
33 John Durham Peters, Seeing Bifocally, in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
34 Ibid., 789.
35 See Laura Mulveys Introduction to Experimental British Television, 12.
36 Ibid., 81.
37 Tamara Krikorian, The Monitor, Studio International, MayJune 1976, 256.
38 Raymond Williams term. Neither cinema or television is perhaps an inherently one-way (linear)
medium they are merely managed in that way.
39 See Cubitt, Videography (London: Macmillan, 1993), 89. This is true even today as television scheduling
is organized around breakfast, daytime, evening, evening prime-time and weekend prime-time.
These time zones determine content and advertising revenue and conform to the traditional or
normative patterns of work and leisure.
40 Indeed, Hall has never stopped making work for the gallery as such.
41 In many ways, One, the film Breakwell made with Mike Leggett, as a part of the days event (and which
foregrounds the broadcast footage of the moon landings) acts as an Expanded Cinema document.
42 See David Hall, Early Video Art: A Look at a Controversial History, in, Diverse Practices, ed. Julia
Knight, 78. Also in Hatfield, David Hall: Another Place: One interest for me was the potential of live
interactive work, where you were dealing with the here and now which you could never do with film;
film is a past medium in that the experiential event is one of viewing an idea manifest in the past and
in a sense copied onto film. Its the copy you are seeing. With much early video work the element of
excitement was that it wasnt a copy, it was an instant manifestation, and this continues as multiple
digital forms develop, 205.
43 See Eric de Bruyn, The Expanded Field of Cinema, or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, in
X-SCREEN, ed. Matthias Michalka (Vienna: MUMOK, 2005).