Taking the long view

The month of October is a cultural assault course to test the stamina of even the most seasoned arts professional. So many different events converge on the middle of the month that it can often feel more like a collision course – the rising crescendo of openings and events threatening to turn into an almighty pile-up. For someone like me, with parallel and overlapping interests in both visual art and film, that one week in autumn when the Frieze Art Fair and the London Film Festival go head to head inspires a peculiar kind of dread. Simply fulfilling my professional obligations, let alone getting to some of the many things that have piqued my interest, regularly require me to be in several places at once. Most of us in the arts are used to performing minor miracles. But every day for a week?

Isn’t it always the way? It takes ages for something to turn up, and then everything happens all at once. Something similar could be said for the public’s growing enthusiasm for artists’ film and video, an area of activity that I have followed and supported for the best part of thirty years. When I started out, in the mid 1980s, experimental/avant-garde film and its infant cousin, video art, were regarded with haughty curiosity or barely concealed suspicion by the cinema fraternity, and with almost total indifference by the art world. How much that has changed. While the mainstream film world still maintains an air of grown-up detachment about what it generally sees as the fripperies or indulgences of its junior sibling, the arrival of serious players like Steve McQueen or Clio Barnard (via early success in the gallery arena) has forced the recognition in industry circles that artists’ work is not only a source of energy and creative ideas but also a potential supply chain of talent.

As well as more places to exhibit, there are also, despite the economic downturn, more opportunities to make work

If the film world has warmed to the artist within, the art world has rushed to embrace many of the pioneering film and video makers it too had strangely neglected for so long. Although it took a fair while to get started, this blossoming love affair has been going on for long enough now that I think we can begin to pronounce it a permanent relationship. The fruits of that relationship are everywhere to see: more shows by more artists (some of them veterans of long standing, but many more of them young artists who have taken up the moving image as if they were born to it, which, indeed, they are.) As well as more places to exhibit, there are also, despite the economic downturn, more opportunities to make work, some of them arising through a burgeoning commercial gallery network, but most of them still nurtured through publicly funded commissioning initiatives. And, in support of all this, there is also a more extensive, and stronger, critical infrastructure, with artform curators and media historians teaching on specialist courses and speaking at public events.

Film and Video Umbrella is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary as an organisation this year (I have been Director for twenty of them). It’s impossible not to reflect (and with a modicum of pleasure and satisfaction) on how dramatically things have changed between now and then. We are in the process of marking that anniversary with an ongoing programme of screenings and other events called '25 Frames', which offers a chance to revisit twenty-five key works that we have commissioned over that time, and to re-appraise them for the present. Film and Video Umbrella has often offered important step-change commissions to emerging artists, and one of the features of the programme is to look back at significant early-career pieces by established figures like Clio Barnard or Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey.

We’ll be delving deep into our back catalogue, all the way back to some of the very first touring programmes that we were originally known for in the 1980s and early 1990s. These touring programmes would have been many people’s first introduction to groundbreaking experimental figures such as Kenneth Anger, Jan Svankmajer and Derek Jarman, whose work was all too rarely seen then outside festivals or underground film clubs.These days there are DVD box sets of their collected output on Amazon, and you can see many of their films for free on YouTube. Where anyone wanting to know more about the area had to rely on word of mouth (or an irregular trade in home-copied VHS tapes), we now expect Twitter to twitch every time a new source of material is found.

Public access to, and public interest in, artists’ film and video has reached a high point unimaginable 25 years ago. As, it should be said, has public investment. We get ten times the Arts Council England funding we did in 1988 (and, just for the record, raise roughly the same amount of income on top). Which only makes it all the more unimaginable that we, like most of our peers, are facing possible cuts − at a moment when we are at our most productive and with public awareness and appreciation of our artform so significantly on the up. It goes without saying that the sustained commitment of organisations like ours (through times when artists' film and video was not as familiar or as fashionable as it is now) has contributed massively to this upsurge of interest. What’s more, one could go on to argue that it is precisely this knowledge and understanding of the past (of lean times as well as good) that makes us so well placed to make sense of the present and, beyond that, make predictions for the future. At this 25-year point in our existence, and with who knows what around the corner, it is worth saying it loud and clear: arts organisations are in it for the long game, and, when successful, create long-lasting change. One thing I know for a fact from my time here is that you need to take the long view. So-called 'overnight' success (no matter how enjoyable and hectic when it arrives) often comes after years spent out of the spotlight, preparing the ground.

If part of our mandate when we were founded was to help encourage greater awareness of the artform, one could say that much of that mission has been achieved. But, as I said earlier, new-found abundance can have its own side-effects. It used to be the case that there were fascinating things to discover but hardly any places to look. Now the dilemma can be knowing just where to start. Compared to the old days it’s a very nice problem to have…

Steven Bode is Director of Film and Video Umbrella.
www.fvu.co.uk