Fortis in Arduis
08-14-2009, 12:04 AM
I saw it at http://www.projectspace176.com/
Three hundred years ago a Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk was rescued from a four-year, self-imposed exile on a Pacific island, a story that Daniel Defoe turned into a best-selling survival primer. Artist Matt Stokes is doing something similar for John Burdikin, a 19th-century jack-of-all-trades who laid out his life story in a letter to his friend Pybus. Stokes has translated Burdikin's adventures into a nine-minute Super-16mm pop video. The work is showing more or less simultaneously in London (at the 176 gallery) and Gateshead (at the Baltic) until early summer.
Matt Stokes
The Gainsborough Packet
Baltic, Gateshead
Starts 4 March
Until 10 May
The Gainsborough Packet is also at 176, London until 28 June
Book tickets here
On one level, the video could be viewed as a primer on the hazards of a slipshod civilisation: our side-burned hero (folk singer Sam Lee) is robbed, buried alive in a coal mine and escapes death by a whisker from the blazing "Gainsborough Packet" that gives the piece its name. It is also an uplifting, irony-free piece of film-making that may, consequently, puzzle the fans of an artist associated with respectful but anthropological studies of musical subcultures. Stokes, the 35-year-old son of an ex-RAF helicopter pilot, picked up the 2006 Becks Futures award with a seven-minute study of aged Northern Soul dancers gyrating in the gloom of an arts-and-crafts Dundee church.
That film featured hypnotic music and a stubbornly static camera which flitted between religious symbols and bodies decked in 1970s fashion. In contrast, The Gainsborough Packet is almost, well, Barry Lyndon. A £50,000 budget, financed partly from his own bank account, enabled Stokes to film at seven north-eastern locations with a cast of 76. This time, the period costumes are hitched to painterly camerawork and a distinct narrative, as well as a catchy soundtrack. New media exhibition-goers, used to anti-heroic monologues, will be dumbfounded by Sam Lee, a rascally Ryan O'Neal with duck-egg eyes, hollow cheeks and a deep trunk of a chin which, when prised open by an accordion chord, spills large white teeth, a horseshoe smile and an honest, confiding baritone. The lyrics, written by Jon Boden of the group Bellowhead, unfold Burdikin's saga with wry clarity.
"So what?" some will ask. That, you suspect, is precisely the point. English folk music is an overlooked musical subculture, no less valid for being associated with unruly knitwear and earnestness. Sceptics may also be undervaluing Stokes's technique of open-minded collaboration. He stumbled upon his theme as he roamed around Camden, 176's hinterland, in search of material for his site-specific commission. The gallery is a former Methodist chapel and the English Folk Dance and Song Society is close by. Stokes proceeded serendipitously: he heard Northumbrian pipes. He thought about the parallels between 19th-century Tyneside and London. He found the Burdikin letter in a northern archive and attended debates on the future of folk song. The idea of pulling the strands together and creating a contemporary folk epic that linked Camden and Tyneside, where he lives, finally took shape.
The charge might be laid that The Gainsborough Packet is too smooth. Many visitors to the display, especially in the modernist Baltic setting, may think they have walked in to a promotion for the band Bellowhead. The layers of creativity are invisible. Stokes has abandoned the use of evocative ephemera which marked his earlier projects. Even Burdikin's letter has been exiled, on the grounds that it could "heritage" the show. Is this wise? Robinson Crusoe did crave for company, after a while.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/04/matt-stokes-gainsborough-packet
Here is a clip - I think that we may have to wait a long time before it comes on youtube:
http://www.depictionfilms.co.uk/TGP%20clip%20small%202.mov
Three hundred years ago a Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk was rescued from a four-year, self-imposed exile on a Pacific island, a story that Daniel Defoe turned into a best-selling survival primer. Artist Matt Stokes is doing something similar for John Burdikin, a 19th-century jack-of-all-trades who laid out his life story in a letter to his friend Pybus. Stokes has translated Burdikin's adventures into a nine-minute Super-16mm pop video. The work is showing more or less simultaneously in London (at the 176 gallery) and Gateshead (at the Baltic) until early summer.
Matt Stokes
The Gainsborough Packet
Baltic, Gateshead
Starts 4 March
Until 10 May
The Gainsborough Packet is also at 176, London until 28 June
Book tickets here
On one level, the video could be viewed as a primer on the hazards of a slipshod civilisation: our side-burned hero (folk singer Sam Lee) is robbed, buried alive in a coal mine and escapes death by a whisker from the blazing "Gainsborough Packet" that gives the piece its name. It is also an uplifting, irony-free piece of film-making that may, consequently, puzzle the fans of an artist associated with respectful but anthropological studies of musical subcultures. Stokes, the 35-year-old son of an ex-RAF helicopter pilot, picked up the 2006 Becks Futures award with a seven-minute study of aged Northern Soul dancers gyrating in the gloom of an arts-and-crafts Dundee church.
That film featured hypnotic music and a stubbornly static camera which flitted between religious symbols and bodies decked in 1970s fashion. In contrast, The Gainsborough Packet is almost, well, Barry Lyndon. A £50,000 budget, financed partly from his own bank account, enabled Stokes to film at seven north-eastern locations with a cast of 76. This time, the period costumes are hitched to painterly camerawork and a distinct narrative, as well as a catchy soundtrack. New media exhibition-goers, used to anti-heroic monologues, will be dumbfounded by Sam Lee, a rascally Ryan O'Neal with duck-egg eyes, hollow cheeks and a deep trunk of a chin which, when prised open by an accordion chord, spills large white teeth, a horseshoe smile and an honest, confiding baritone. The lyrics, written by Jon Boden of the group Bellowhead, unfold Burdikin's saga with wry clarity.
"So what?" some will ask. That, you suspect, is precisely the point. English folk music is an overlooked musical subculture, no less valid for being associated with unruly knitwear and earnestness. Sceptics may also be undervaluing Stokes's technique of open-minded collaboration. He stumbled upon his theme as he roamed around Camden, 176's hinterland, in search of material for his site-specific commission. The gallery is a former Methodist chapel and the English Folk Dance and Song Society is close by. Stokes proceeded serendipitously: he heard Northumbrian pipes. He thought about the parallels between 19th-century Tyneside and London. He found the Burdikin letter in a northern archive and attended debates on the future of folk song. The idea of pulling the strands together and creating a contemporary folk epic that linked Camden and Tyneside, where he lives, finally took shape.
The charge might be laid that The Gainsborough Packet is too smooth. Many visitors to the display, especially in the modernist Baltic setting, may think they have walked in to a promotion for the band Bellowhead. The layers of creativity are invisible. Stokes has abandoned the use of evocative ephemera which marked his earlier projects. Even Burdikin's letter has been exiled, on the grounds that it could "heritage" the show. Is this wise? Robinson Crusoe did crave for company, after a while.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/04/matt-stokes-gainsborough-packet
Here is a clip - I think that we may have to wait a long time before it comes on youtube:
http://www.depictionfilms.co.uk/TGP%20clip%20small%202.mov