“Things that stick in your mind aren’t always necessarily the most fully achieved or accomplished. They stay with you because they’re different – I’m looking to be surprised, I’m looking to see something I haven’t seen before.”
Steven Bode, director of Film and Video Umbrella (FVU), is considering moving image work in the context of degree shows. And with film forming part of more and more artists’ practice – either wholly or as one facet of a much broader approach – there’s certainly a lot to think about.
How, for example, would Duncan Campbell’s 54-minute Turner Prize-winning work, It For Others, fare in the sometimes deliriously chaotic surroundings of a graduate show? Would it be overawed by its noisy neighbours?
“Moving image work puts pressure on the degree show’s sustained and continuing value,” says Bode. “It puts pressure on audience time and on the space available to show the work.” Not, he stresses, that this means the degree show is somehow outmoded.
“I don’t think that this pressure invalidates a traditional and potentially very useful exercise and meeting point for artists,” he adds. “Degree shows provide that first sense of what it is to achieve something and put something out into the public domain. They’re an important test of ideas and an important indication of what’s to come.”
Early career artists
Film and Video Umbrella is perhaps best known for producing work by established artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson, Ben Rivers and Phil Collins, as well as others on the cusp of bigger things. (Back in 2009 that included a pre-Turner Prize Campbell for Make it new John, his entertaining deconstruction of the rise and fall of the DeLorean Motor Company).
The launch of the Jerwood/FVU Awards in 2012 has, however, meant a greater focus on early career artists. And while the award’s criteria for entry is artists working in moving image who are within five years of starting their professional practice – rather than five years from graduating – many applicants are inevitably not long out of college.
“I’d seen Marianna Simnett’s work [joint winner of the 2015 awards], for example, at the Slade before she applied,” explains Bode. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘You’re good, you’ll go far’. So there are definitely people you remember seeing and want to see more of.”
And as Bode notes, in the age of Vimeo and HD video online, for artists working in moving image the degree show itself doesn’t need to be the only way to show work in a meaningful way.
“Putting work online can’t factor in the sculptural, three dimensional, multi-part projection components of a work that has a degree of presence and spatiality to it. But if an artist is presenting a single projection or single monitor work, thinking about it having a parallel life online is a very good way of getting work out there.”
That said, Bode remains convinced that even if the degree show conditions aren’t ideal, notable work will get noticed. “I have seen some astonishingly good work at degree shows and we have ended up working with those artists.
“With ever-more artists competing for people’s attention and time, it is getting harder and harder to get that focus on the work, but they are still an important platform. If it’s good work, it stays with you.”
This year’s Jerwood/FVU Awards exhibition, featuring new commissions by Marianna Simnett and Lucy Clout, is at CCA Glasgow until 12 July 2015.
This article was originally published in the a-n Degree Shows Guide 2015. Read the full guide, featuring interviews, previews and listings, as an ebook or download the pdf
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