Areas of Research Expertise

Artists film & video, experimental moving image and digital work

Research Profile

George Barber's work on "The Greatest Hits Of Scratch Video" is internationally known and has been featured in many galleries and festivals across the world. The Independent and Sunday Times ran features on it, and the tapes, unusually for video art, once sold in record shops.  His two famous works of the period, 'Absence of Satan' and ' Yes Frank No Smoke' are screened regularly and many of the other works in his canon are considered seminal in the history of British Video Art.  

In recent times, as his work and career have developed, he has had an installation at Tate Britain entitled 'Automotive Action Painting' and shows of his video sculptures, 'The Long Commute' at Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery Brooklyn, New York. He has also been part of numerous programmes at Tate Modern and had retrospectives at the ICA, New York Film & Video Festival and recently at La Rochelle Festival, France. He has been written about by Paul Morley and Gareth Evans, the Time Out & Vertigo magazine critic. LUX is releasing a DVD compilation of his work, soon to be available world wide in all gallery book shops. Film & Video Umbrella have released a monograph. Seventeen Gallery and Anthony Wilkinson have also shown his work and he is often cited by younger video artists as being influential on their own practice.

Barber is eclectic, his ideas varied.  After Scratch, Barber created many low-tech video pieces and was influential in defining an emergent 'slacker' aesthetic.  Narrative and found footage seem to be at the centre of much of his work, either deconstructing it or trying as an artist to evolve an approach that is contradictory to the maker's original intention. His "Passing Ship" has been widely screened at festivals, as too his "Hovis Advert" and "Walking Off Court".  Barber's skills as a writer have led him to produce many lyrical works too, including 'Ansaphone' and 'Withdrawal'.  'Withdrawal' is currently in the international touring show, 'Figuring Landscapes' starting at Tate Modern and is highly regarded itself in the history of the Animate scheme.

His monologues like "Refusing Potatoes" or "I Was Once Involved In A Shit Show" are simple performances that carry the viewer into a genuinely odd confessional world.  The monologue form particularly suits Barber as his instinct for the incongruous is appealing.  Here, as in Scratch, he is trying to 'layer' another of his own stories and thoughts onto someone else's creation, and piggyback on the original's cultural familiarity. This project also continues in his latest found footage work, 'Following Your Heart" and "Losing Faith" 2008. Both use off-air adverts and TV films, mostly American. The central conceit is to take found footage and manipulate it into a new artistic experience. The adverts and dramas all essentially present clichéd dialogue but by the use of repetition, music, the work rises away from being humdrum television into something more disturbing and effecting. The ingredients of television are inverted and put to new purposes.

He has also produced a number of 'language' free, conceptual works, like "Automotive Action Painting" and "Shouting Match" or "Beyond Language" which reference early video art yet are contemporary too. "Automotive Action Painting" won First Prize at the 24th Hamburg International Short Film Festival in June 2008. Currently, he has been commissioned to write and direct a short for the UK Film Council.

Research Degree Supervision

Video art, fine art, conceptual art