“Non-institution”: Finding Expanded Cinema in the Terrains Vagues of 1960s London

“The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.”

—Ignasi de Solà- Morales, “Terrain Vagues”¹

“A lab is a non-institution. We all know what a hospital, theater, police station, and other institutions have in the way of boundaries, but a lab’s boundaries should be limitless.”

—Jim Haynes²

Terrain Vague

The desire of scholars and curators to assimilate the past in order to orientate and understand current practices and modes of reception in artists’ moving image echoes Stuart Comer’s argument that, “It becomes increasingly urgent to identify, exhibit, and understand this hybrid history so we can establish our critical bearings within our rapidly evolving media culture.” ³ Exhibitions such as the Whitney Museum’s ambitious 2001 exploration of “projected light” works from the 1960s and 1970s, Into the Light, and the thorough exposition of postwar expanded cinema seen at the X Screen exhibition at MUMOK, Vienna, are both exemplary of rehabilitative projects which have brought the contributions of an earlier generation of artist filmmakers such as Anthony McCall back into the spotlight, and have emphasized the diverse and proliferate use of film and video projection in the spaces of the gallery in the postwar period.

However, despite the best intentions of curators and scholars, a close look at the addresses of where many of these key works were first performed and exhibited underlines the extent to which they are being read, and experienced, out of context. Anthony McCall’s celebrated and much restaged Line Describing a Cone, for example, was first projected at Artists Space in downtown New York in 1974, an artist-led initiative established to give assistance and visibility to emerging artists existing outside the art market, and which has been the locus for many experimental practices since. Artists Space is indicative of an emergent culture of art spaces during the 1960s and 1970s, often short lived and makeshift, whose modes of operation and ethos defined themselves against those of more major institutions.

This was not simply because the ambiguous hybrids of film, performance, and installation they supported were difficult to situate within, and were marginal to, existing cultural criteria, but because the alternative networks of artists and modes of practices for which these spaces and events were points of convergence, rooted in the anti-establishment politics of the period, chose to identify themselves as marginal to the main institutional and industrial structures of film and art. Furthermore, these spatial conditions of marginality could also be seen to impact on the art itself. As Dougal Sheridan contends, in his study of the repurposing of marginal or disused sites in the urban environment, “the understanding of indeterminate territories as spaces outside hegemony,” suggests that these spaces may have a “formative effect” on the nature of subcultural expression, both affirming and reinforcing their marginality.⁴ Sheridan’s exploration of indeterminate spaces is indebted to the architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ formulation of the term terrain vague, which has become a fruitful paradigm for theorists, from across a range of disciplines, to understand the resonance of city spaces that exist outside the civic and commercial functions of urban life. It has also proved a resonant notion, as this essay will contend, for exploring the development of an alternative practice of the moving image in postwar London. Can a dialogue be identified between the speculative and experimental forms of 1960s and 1970s expanded cinema, and the makeshift and interstitial terrain in which they were devised and presented?

According to Patrick Barron: “Terrain vague, indeed, contains within it a multitude of possible connotations, and is thus well suited to serve as a collective term of various subtypes of leftover land within the edges of the pale—boundaries that, as they proliferate, are also increasingly difficult if not impossible to delineate.”⁵ In this way, terrain vague has provided a helpful schema from which to identify the ambiguous spaces which have been generated in the wake of industrialized urbanity: those areas of “antiquated infrastructure and former industrial sites,”⁶ which have also been named “loose space”⁷ or “indeterminate spaces,”⁸ and which have more recently been the sites of transgressive architectural and ecological interventions.⁹

However, as Sheridan’s comments intimate, Solà-Morales’ term goes further to address the attraction of these spaces to groups for whom the city’s terrain vague reflects their own experience of disenfranchisement and marginality to the functions of the city. Referring to Julia Kristeva’s concept of “strangers to ourselves,” Solà-Morales identifies in the unresolved nature of terrain vague a strangeness, or otherness, that reflects the alienating effect of urbanity on the individual, drawing to it those who identify themselves as disaff ected by the city’s unrelenting intensities: “Film-makers, sculptors of instantaneous performances, and photographers seek refuge in the margins of the city precisely when the city offers them an abusive identity, a crushing homogeneity, a freedom under control. The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces—expectant, imprecise, fluctuating—transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves.”¹⁰

Pinpointing the compelling strangeness of these interstitial sites, Solà-Morales thus portrays terrain vague as a space of identification and reflection for the disenfranchised city dweller who looks for “forces instead of forms, for the incorporated instead of the distant, for the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative.”¹¹ But while Solà -Morales delineates the draw of terrain vague as a reflection of the conflicted condition of the “divided individual,”¹² he does not expand on terrain vague’s potency as a space of creative appropriation on the part of the artist, when what was once industrial becomes artisanal, as factories are transformed fleetingly into studios, galleries, and theaters.

For Solà-Morales’ term not only opens up questions about current conditions and possibilities for urban dwelling, but could also act as a useful tool for reflecting on histories of creative occupation, and how these interstitial, indeterminate places shaped in turn the art practices developed within them, as the indeterminacy of the terrain vague is reflected in the hybrid, event-based nature of the work itself. Such, I would argue, is the case with the development of practices of expanded cinema in postwar Britain, Europe, and North America.

Therefore, in order to gain a more profound reading of its histories, we need to situate artists’ moving image within these originating spaces of terrain vague. For this will enable us to comprehend, not only the first reception and configuration of key works, but to understand the contexts that influenced their conception. As the Artists Space exemplifies, the terrains vagues of London and New York afforded new opportunities for making and showing art to audiences beyond the reaches of more official cultural institutions, and it is vital that current restagings and reformulations of artists’ moving image in the museum are understood as retrospective mediations for an institutional context which bear little relation to the situations in which these works were first exhibited, performed, and encountered. McCall’s Line Describing a Cone illustrates only too well the problems of this institutional translation, now transformed by digital technology into a very different reading of cinematic duration, in the hushed spaces of major museums, and where its original performance at Artists Space, displayed, perhaps, in blurry grain in the catalogue or adjacent wall panel, has become merely a seductive proposition of its earlier radicality.

I would like to consider two examples of where the terrain vague has played a significant role in fostering new sites for spectatorship and shaping expanded film practices, yet are little acknowledged in the chronologies and curatorial recoveries of British artists’ filmmaking: the Arts Lab, situated in the countercultural milieu of late 1960s London, and Gallery House, one of the first London art spaces in the early 1970s to recognize and encourage the growing interest among artists in the film—and nascent video—mediums. I will also refer briefly to 26 Kingly Street, another counter-cultural space of early significance for the blurring of cultural boundaries, and will acknowledge the importance of the basement of the Better Books bookshop in Drury Lane as the first space to bring together, through the galvanizing energies of its manager, the concrete poet Bob Cobbing, art practices which exceeded the acceptable boundaries of art practice, such as film, performance, and sculptural installation.

Kingly Street: Urban Indeterminancies

The cultural and social conditions of postwar London played a central role in shaping the unique film forms that emerged in London during the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the state of the city itself was to produce the conditions for a cultural underground to flourish. The wide availability of empty buildings in mid -1960s London was a result of postwar delays in housing redevelopment by local boroughs, following the abandonment of much private housing by residents during the war, many of whom did not return to central London in its aftermath. As Anna Bowman notes, London’s postwar terrains vagues “emerged as a consequence of delays to large scale local authority municipalization and renewal plans, which were disrupted by budget cuts in the 1970s.” ¹³ Robert Hewison also observes the “strange principle,” following an initial building boom between 1958– 1964, where “it was often more profitable to keep a building empty than let it,”¹⁴ when the developers who had profited during the boom through the availability of cheap land from local authority compulsory purchase, speculated on rising prices for London land. Coupled with a drop in population, as Londoners chose not to move back after the ravages of the blitz, London itself might be seen as terrain vague, a space of indeterminacy, in hiatus between the promise of a bright and affluent future, soon to be curtailed by the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the halted building plans and bomb damage of war. On his arrival in London from New York as a Fulbright scholar in 1964, the artist filmmaker Steven Dwoskin recalled the city as “very dead, very strange … I was looking for what was going on, but so much was in secluded spaces and there wasn’t a kind of network at that time.”¹⁵

However, the buildings lying empty across the capital, which contributed to Dwoskin’s experience of blankness and lack at the beginning of the decade, could also be seen as spaces of opportunity, offering in their very makeshift and ad hoc nature Solà-Morales’ “space of the possible” for the burgeoning counter-culture to create an alternative network. The need by landlords both commercial and public to fill empty spaces on a temporary basis— whether before demolition, or for tax incentives—appealed to marginal organizations and individuals, concerned either with cultural or activist causes. As Bowman observes, “The organizations were opportunistic, and most developed without any long-term plans but plenty of idealism, and hoped to shape temporarily licensed resources into some- thing more lasting.”¹⁶

In the brief period in which they flourished, both the Arts Lab and Gallery House indeed mark a distinct shift from the mono-cultural configurations of earlier institutions to inscribe instead a counter-cultural indeterminacy into their spatial and curatorial configurations. The challenging of boundaries which they encouraged in their mixed programs of art, film, music, and theater, were symptomatic of the wider challenge to the hierarchies of culture that began in the 1960s, crystallized by Lawrence Alloway writing in 1959, as “the long front of culture.” In an echo of Walter Benjamin’s prescient essay,¹⁷ and anticipating the debates of postmodernism, Alloway perceived in the burgeoning “mass production techniques” to which art was now subject, the dismantling of traditional hierarchies of elite versus mass culture; declaring that: “[T]o approach this exploding field with Renaissance-based ideas of the uniqueness of art is crippling. Acceptance of the mass media entails a shiftin our notion of what culture is.”¹⁸ Alloway’s essay refers to the emergent Pop art movement in Britain, with its celebratory engagement with the print media, cinema and television of American consumer culture, yet his remarks look ahead to film and video, not solely as a point of reference within the canvases of Peter Blake or Richard Hamilton, but as a feasible medium for artists.¹⁹

The dissolution of hierarchies Alloway articulates also reflected the wider societal changes precipitated by economic boom and expanded education in 1960s Britain, which challenged prevailing cultural standards, described by Stuart Laing as “a hierarchical education system (with universities, public schools, and grammar schools at the pinnacle), key quasi-state institutions (including the BBC and the still new Arts Council), and a network of commercial institutions, including “quality” newspapers, journals, magazines, publishing houses, and theaters.”²⁰ A key figure instrumental in pioneering hybrid practices of sound, film, and sculptural form at 26 Kingly Street, the Arts Lab, and Gallery House, Malcolm Le Grice recalls how the 1960s in Britain represented a break with structures of power once dominated by tradition and class, which he termed “old-fashioned, real class conservatism.”²¹ The pluralistic cultural landscape that emerged fused political sympathy with the student uprisings of 1968, and anti-Vietnam protest with an expression of popular culture. As Le Grice asserts, “The 1960s, its lifestyle, pop, The Beatles, changing fashions, and so on went along with a real desire amongst radical intellectuals to break that class structure … For example, rock music at that time also seemed to share a radical philosophy, a radical political position.”²²

Le Grice’s observation that a form of music associated with entertainment such as rock music could take on the dimension of the political corresponds to the questioning of cultural hierarchies characteristic of the period. Thus the 1960s in Britain, buoyed by affluence and the expansion programs of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, engendered potent and unprecedented reciprocities between politics, culture (in both its elitist and commercial forms), and the individual. This meeting of ethics and aesthetics found foremost expression in the values of the counter-culture or Underground movement which burgeoned fleetingly in London during the mid 1960s; and who, as Hewison asserts, “… recognized that cultural categories are also social definitions. Thus its arguments would necessarily be at the same time political and aesthetic.”²³

Indeed, the Underground movement could be characterized as a society running in parallel—but, as its very name suggests, at a subterranean level—to its “straight” counterpart; with its own established economies, societal rules, and moral codes, which, informed by the politics of Marx and Herbert Marcuse, and infused with the philosophies of Eastern mysticism, called for a turn away from mainstream norms, to promote what Jeff Nuttall described as a politically inflected “deliberate sell it yourself amateurism,” whose subcultural markers included the liberalization of drugs, sexuality, and distinctive language and cultural activities.²⁴ As one-o events in peripheral, temporary spaces, the expanded film forms and collisions of sound, art, and performance that emerged in London from this countercultural context could thus be seen as meeting points of mutual recognition, as an arts culture rethought itself in the era of the cold war and the protests against the bomb.

As part of this pluralistic activity, the unprecedented spatial and conceptual juxtaposition of film with other arts mediums in these spaces of terrain vague was to impact on the film practices that emerged from the nascent London Filmmakers Co-operative housed there. For while the underground’s explosion of diverse activities may seem at variance with the rigorous antinarrative focus that would later characterize the films to emerge from the LFMC in the early 1970s, it is significant that the LFMC’s formative years were spent at the hub of countercultural activities, first at Better Books and then the Arts Lab. In a 1975 interview with Deke Dusinberre, Bob Cobbing remembered the diverse convergence of activities in the basement of Better Books as “very definitely the meeting point for artists of all kinds in London at that time. We might have poetry reading another night and people showing film … And we had exhibitions there and so people were constantly in for these activities and meeting each other and it was a very good period for sparking off ideas.”²⁵

The atmosphere of experimentation and cross-fertilization that Cobbing describes, is also confirmed in Stuart Laing’s study of 1960s cultural practice, and his observation that live event became the “paradigmatic form of the counterculture” where “the cultural process (‘performance,’ ‘happening’) rather than the fixed product was a central feature of much would-be revolutionary culture of the decade.”²⁶ The focus on the ephemeral which Laing notes may have had its roots in the early predominance of event- based culture such as the poetry readings and musical performances at Better Books,²⁷ but it also returns us to Solà-Morales’ marginalized citizen, and the self-determined turn from traditional art institutions, and conscious resistance to the production of cultural capital required by art’s commercial and state-funded sectors that Hewison describes.

A pertinent example of this fertile moment of convergence is apparent in the conception and reception of Le Grice’s first expanded work in 1966, Castle 1, which was presented “[A]round late 1966 or early 1967,”²⁸ in a small gallery at 26 Kingly Street in London’s Soho, in conjunction with some performances and a film projection piece by the artist Jeffrey Shaw, an artist who had previously shown proto-expanded film installations in the basement of the Better Books bookshop. The event was initiated not through Le Grice’s involvement with the nascent London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, but with London’s experimental music community in his role as a jazz guitarist who often played with Keith Rowe and his improvisational music group, AMM, exploring the improvisational techniques and instrumentation of experimental music forms, such as those being advocated by John Cage, Fluxus, and contemporaries such as Cornelius Cardew, who also played with AMM.

Castle 1’s structure could thus be seen as a convergence of influences from contemporary experimental music, the visual arts, and Le Grice’s anti-establishment affiliations, rooted here in his readings of Marxist theater, particularly Brechtian methods of alienation and distanciation. The film’s use of repeating black and white imagery, which Le Grice describes as “largely drawn from the TV documentary of an unspectacular kind, but which thematically are concerned with the ‘surface’ of the industrial institution and political world”²⁹ also shows his admiration for the screen print collage techniques of Rauschenberg. At the same time, his formal interventions of repetition, re-filming, and reversing the image, employ strategies derived from jazz improvisation and experimental sound art to scramble the messages of consumer comfort that the film was originally designed to convey. The interposition of an intermittently flashing lightbulb hanging in front of the film screen and operated in an improvisational fashion by Le Grice goes further to disrupt the transmission and decipherment of the images, while the sound track disconnected, looped, and repeated out of sync the original music and commentaries from their accompanying image.

Le Grice’s first film experiment could be seen to contain the seeds of his future approach to expanded cinema, its loose improvised structure of looping sound, performance, and projection providing a framework in which influences from music, politics, and art could converge. Run by the artists Keith and Hazel Albarn, the mixed media “happenings” and “environments” at their short-lived Artists Own Gallery at 26 Kingly Street between 1966 and 1967 could be read as symptomatic of the diverse nature of the art activities undertaken by galleries of the counterculture period, as they moved away from more traditional art mediums to explore a multidisciplinary approach.

Non-institutions: The Arts Lab

For if 26 Kingly Street provided an ad hoc space open to the expression of countercultural convergence, Jim Haynes’ Art Lab could be seen as the most consciously and ambitiously wrought spatial articulation of this oppositional subculture in London, reflecting terrain vague as a psychological as well as a spatial condition, where, as he described to Town magazine in 1966, a year before it opened, the Art Lab “ … will be completely flexible so that a room which is a cinema one moment will be used for poetry reading the next.”³⁰

An American ex-airforceman who had stayed on in Scotland after the war, Haynes was a charismatic countercultural figure, already well known for earlier projects such as the Traverse Theatre and the Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, before coming to London. Like the Arts Lab, the Traverse and the Paperback Bookshop had both challenged the elitist institutional conditions for culture that Laing outlines, emphasizing culture as a generative, discursive, and event-based phenomenon, which emphasized audience integration rather than the display of artifact or artwork.³¹ Extending the pluralist and participatory model he had developed in Edinburgh in a more ambitious direction, Haynes’ intent was to employ the example of the laboratory as his blueprint. The lab paradigm evoked the experimental, speculative approach of the scientific test-bed that Haynes intended for his arts space.³² At the same time, with its reference to chemistry and science, his alternative model might also be seen as an oppositional gesture to the prevailing structures and official validations of British culture, apparent in his stress on the Arts Lab as a “non- institution” where “boundaries should be limitless.”³³ Indeed, few examples of this discursive model of cultural integration existed in postwar London prior to the Arts Lab. The Institute of Contemporary Arts combined a bar and gallery that hosted readings and discussions; however as Hewison notes, the atmosphere at the ICA was “inward-looking, cosy and staid,” while the size of London caused its literary and artistic network to be “informal and dispersed.”³⁴

In this sense, the Arts Lab could be seen as an attempt in architectural form to break down the class-inflected distinctions between the visual arts, performance, and the written word still dominant in postwar Britain and to assert, what the historian Robert Hewison describes as, “a system (or rather anti-system) of aesthetics,” which “wished to destroy artistic categories altogether.”³⁵ Launched in 1967, it housed a gallery, cinema, theatre, and café, and became a point of convergence for a diversity of multidisciplinary activities. As the theater critic Ronald Bryden remembered: “It refused to define itself because any definition would have implied limitation … You could drift in at almost any hour of the day or night, eat a huge beef sandwich or a bowl of soup, watch the People Show or an Andy Warhol movie, buy a copy of the International Times or Oz, sign a petition about Biafra, find out where the next demo would start, sit on the floor under the branches of a lurid pop-sculpture, and meditate on the Vedanta.”³⁶

This short-lived and vibrant oppositional culture recalibrates Solà-Morales’ portrayal of the alienated city dweller’s “strangeness in front of the world” as group dynamic, for whom terrain vague might offer, not so much succor from strangeness, but spaces flexible enough to reflect these dissolutions of boundaries, and create new spaces for a hybrid art practices: recalibrating mediums such as film as an experiential rather than a figurative form within the broader expression of countercultural sensibility. Against the backdrop of “the extraordinary rich series of events” at Better Books instigated by Cobbing from 1965, David Curtis recalls the film screenings initiated there by the fledging Co-op, from the early avant-garde of Dada and Surrealism, to more contemporary American work by Kenneth Anger, as “a curiously secondhand experience, encumbered by the need to black out the shop, the projector’s noise and stray light, and the lack of the presence of an author.”³⁷ Curtis’ comments indicate how at odds the fixed conditions required for screening film were with the live, event-based culture that Laing perceives as so paradigmatic of the period. However, Curtis concedes that while incompatible with the spontaneous feel of the Underground approach, film “gains a sense of belonging to a wider cultural movement.”³⁸ As he stresses, “ … the question of context has some relevance here. At Robert Street the Arts Lab philosophy of ‘mix all the arts!’ meant that film was produced in an environment that might contain performances by Brisley, Schneemann, any of the current fringe theater groups, Jim Ballard’s Crashed Cars exhibition and so on, ‘hot’ imagery abounded.”³⁹

As Curtis’ points suggest, proximity is key here: not only in the disciplinary juxtapositions he lists, but also in the adjacent spatial configurations of cinema and gallery, which presented opportunities for inter-influences between different media and formal approaches. Le Grice’s first opportunity to fuse film with performance and sculpture in Castle 1 had been afforded by the convergence of the visual arts with experimental music encouraged in the Albarn’s short-lived space. At Haynes’ laboratory model, and at the Arts Lab, with its emphasis on performance, improvisation, and live event as the countercultural agency through which boundaries between the art forms might be dissolved, film was opened up to a new potential, not only to bring theater off the screen into the viewing space through performance, but also to assert a new awareness of the space around the screen as an integral part of the film experience; this might extend from the supine seating in the basement space of the Arts Lab cinema, where mattresses replaced chairs, to the adjacent spaces of gallery and theater. At the Robert Street Arts Lab, established in 1968 by some of the original artists involved at Drury Lane without Haynes’ involvement, such as underground figure John Hoppy Hopkins and Curtis himself, the derelict state of the building, which required substantial renovation, enabled them to rethink the spatial conventions associated to more traditional cultural institutions. Thus, the projection box was situated between the gallery space and the cinema auditorium, and although the uses of these spaces remained distinct, projections could be directed in both directions, into the gallery and into the cinema. Ian Breakwell, for example, took advantage of this in Unword, his early combination of projection and performance in the gallery in 1968. Whereas, for Annabel Nicolson, a painter then starting to experiment with film, the conceptual approach being used by young artists such as Tim Head and Roderick Coyne in the gallery, “felt quite radical.” The sequential installation which they created, where each artist responded to the configuration created the week before, allowed, according to Nicolson, “for movement out of a static situation of the gallery,”⁴⁰ relating to her own tentative explorations with film, and suggesting new reciprocities between film and sculpture.

Furthermore, the unconventional layout of these alternative spaces reconfigured the relationship between viewer and film image to introduce a reinvigorated form of spectatorial proximity, which extended countercultural ideas of the politically activated body of the individual to encompass the notion of an activated form of perception. By rejecting conventional seating in favor of tiers of foam mattresses, the basement cinema at the Drury Lane Arts Lab could be read as a challenge to the institutional spaces of cinema and theater, redefining the perceptual relationship between viewer and image within the liberalizing context of the Underground⁴¹ by blurring the distance between body and screen, as the cushioned, horizontal surfaces of the viewing space evoked, as Maxa Zoller has suggested, a “cinema bed.”⁴² While Zoller concedes that this perceptual shift may have been an incidental result of the cramped intimate conditions of the Arts Lab, “probably merely a practical solution to the lack of chairs,” she rightly asserts that this new proximity between viewer and screen “carried political meaning … which challenged the spatial and social codes of the traditional cinema screening.” ⁴³ At the Robert Street Arts Lab, spatial juxtaposition also elided film and visual art for visitors, who had to walk through the gallery to reach the cinema.

The new forms of spectatorship that flourished in this brief period may also account for the emphasis placed on the viewing experience by artist filmmakers such as Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson, Gill Eatherley, and William Raban. Thus, while Le Grice has sought to distance his film performances from the “light shows of the 1960s,” ⁴⁴ I would argue that his articulation in his 1972 article “Real TIME/SPACE,” of the potential for cinema as an event-based one rooted in the present moment, where “Real TIME/SPACE” is “now and here,”⁴⁵ reflects the contingent immediacy and proximity experienced at countercultural spaces such as the UFO club and the Arts Lab. At the UFO, for example, the emphasis was on ambient environment rather than attention to on-screen content, as Mark Boyle’s light shows projected swirling patterns of colored lights over the dancers and performers.⁴⁶ Similar to the convergence of moving image and popular music already seen across the Atlantic in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances with the Velvet Underground, the experience of film no longer remained within the frame of the cinema screen, but was now distributed across the viewing space, accentuated by the material presence of projection and performer, and the agency of the freely moving audience. It could be argued that film’s new element of contingency, subject to the temporal conditions of the space, audience interaction and the performing body, can be traced in Le Grice own 1970 shadow piece Horror Film 1. Moving back through the audience while two pulsating screens of colored light cast the artist’s shadow in different hues upon the wall, Le Grice’s performative dialogue with his own shadow, like a kind of dance, evokes the ambience and multi-sensory spectacle of the period’s club culture.

Convergences and Dematerializations: Gallery House

The question of a more participatory experience for the audience was also at stake in the gallery. The historian Mark Donnelly refers to “the increasingly prevalent trend toward an elision of the artistic work and the process of spectatorship, with the intention being that spectators would experience art as a total environment.”⁴⁷ As 26 Kingly Street has shown, the galleries most sympathetic to cross-media practices were those independent initiatives that existed outside the funding structures of the major public art institutes and which had emerged as a result of the multidisciplinary convergences of the mid 1960s. It could be argued that, by the early 1970s, when Sigi Krauss and his codirector Rosetta Brooks first formulated their plans for Gallery House, they were more concerned with the convergences occurring across practices within the visual arts rather than across art forms, as traditional categories of painting and sculpture were challenged by emerging conceptual and “dematerialized” art practices. This new tendency toward, as Brooks puts it, “a redefinition of the concept of art, of art’s function and its social purpose … ”⁴⁸ was reflected in the ambitious three-part Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain mounted in 1972, which attempted to bring together “the most important tendencies that make up the art activity of younger artists in Britain,” showing artists working across time-based media, installation, and performance, like Stuart Brisley and Stephen Willats.

The roll-call of artists in the Survey included many who had been associated to the Arts Lab, such as David Medalla, John Latham, and Brisley himself, suggesting that the “anti-commodity,” anti-institutional position of the 1960s noted by Hewison still held currency at the beginning of the next decade, and that the strategy for rethinking art practice and art purpose through a practice of subcultural indeterminacy, by the destruction of traditional art categories, retained its urgency.

Thus, the increasing prevalence of film and video as a method of challenging existing artistic divisions was strongly reflected at Gallery House, with the last part of their Survey devoted to artists working across the medium. Continuous screenings in the galleries and one off screening events attempted to address the diversity of film and video activity then occurring in Britain and internationally: from artists for whom film served a conceptual or documentary function, such as Brisley, to the materialist explorations of practitioners associated to the Co-op, such as Le Grice, who presented a film action. The Survey attempted to represent a breadth of different international contexts, from the underground context of the infamous Destruction in Art Symposium, such as Vienna Actionists Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch, to film works much more steeped in the discourse of art, such as those by Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall, and two films by American minimalist Robert Morris.

However, the critic Richard Cork’s disparaging review of the survey, which argued that “as an art form” the moving image “is still in its infancy; and any artist who wishes to encroach on its preserves should be confronted with the label ‘handle with care’”⁴⁹ reveals the extent to which the British art establishment of the time was still suspicious of film and video in the gallery. Furthermore, LFMC screening programs from the early 1970s show that opportunities to screen artists’ film and video in larger institutional spaces such as the Tate usually occurred as adjuncts to main exhibition spaces, often taking place in the context of the education department.⁵⁰ As the Arts Council’s short lived New Activities committee has already shown, film continued to be understood only in the context of a pedagogic role for the major art institutions, as a form of explanation or context rather than a work in itself.

Gallery House thus offered a unique space of visibility and experimentation for film and video artists existing outside the validation of British public arts institutions as well as the art market. Le Grice stresses that it offered “really the first of the public showings where we experimented with installation and performance.”⁵¹ Certainly spaces like Gallery House offered the artists associated to the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative a rare chance to screen their films to an audience outside their own tight knit group, and to use the open gallery spaces like a studio where new ideas could be tested out, taking advantage of practical support from each other as necessary, and presenting their films as works in progress with which the visitor could engage, echoing of Haynes’ laboratory dynamic of an integrated practice and spectatorship.

The opportunity arose over an intense weekend in March 1973, when Le Grice was given free reign to organize a weekend of “film action” events, and invited his LFMC colleagues Annabel Nicolson, Gill Eatherley, David Crosswaite, and William Raban to join him. For William Raban it was “an unconscious precursor” to Filmaktion, a week of expanded film events at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool later that year, and was crucial to the development of his expanded practice. In a later press release for Filmaktion he refers to “the recent ‘film action and installation show’ at Gallery House” as “the first positive step toward discovering a new direction for presenting expanded films.” ⁵² Certainly the Gallery House events provided momentum for an intense period of expanded cinema activity across the year, which also included events at the ICA as part of the International Festival of Independent Avant-Garde Film as well as Filmaktion in Liverpool.

To their advantage, and that of other artists who created experimental works at Gallery House, was the significant expanse and flexible nature of the spaces, which offered up to 14 rooms over four floors, which could be converted to a range of different situations. Freed from the temporal and spatial constraints of a conventional auditorium-based event, they developed installations in response to the space and the mobile audience, who were encouraged to engage directly with the work and the artist, and become more directly involved in the processes of performance and projection occurring around them. For Gallery House, as well as the New Arts Lab, freedom from rent restrictions enabled them to support experimental practices without the need for commercial sustainability. Before taking on the space at 50 Princes Gate, Krauss, for example, insisted to the director of the Goethe that he be allowed a “free hand,” and was not required to charge admission, close the gallery, or censor the artists.

However, it should also be stressed that neither Gallery House nor the Arts Lab received public arts funding to support their running costs, relying instead on the goodwill of individuals working without payment, private benefactors, and sporadic income from ticket sales in the case of the Arts Lab. This lack of public support indicated the Arts Council’s slowness during the 1960s to recognize the new hybridity of arts culture, and to reflect its practices in their funding allocation. As Hewison observes, “The Arts Council found it difficult to come to terms with the new forms of art that were being submitted for subsidy, for they did not conform to the old academic discipline of form and practice.”⁵³ Some acknowledgment came in 1968 with the establishment of the New Activities Committee, but its recommendations for a substantial amount to be awarded to artists working outside officially sanctioned art media, through a New Activities and Multi-media panel, was met with obstruction and disapproval by the Arts Council chairman Lord Goodman, and the small amount allocated did not consequently find its way to any of the organizations in question here, despite repeated applications from Haynes, and later David Curtis. As a result, this severely stretched the resources of many individuals involved, suggesting also that long-term sustainability might come at a cost. A 1970 letter from David Curtis to the Arts Council prior to the Art Lab’s closure, unsuccessfully seeking financial support for the cinema, talks about how, without funding, it would be “fruitless to attempt to continue to work on this scale.”⁵⁴

However, it could also be argued that this lack of security conferred a certain intensity and common purpose upon the activities of both organizations, which positioned itself in opposition to the cultural remits of government and market alike, and aligned itself to countercultural concerns. Gallery House also gave them access to a new type of spectator, one more attuned to, and expectant of, the mobile and contemplative mode of engagement associated to the art object. As Gill Eatherley remembers: “[A] lot of the pieces we did were actually worked out in the space … I think that generated a lot of energy and audience interest … instead of being hidden away in the projection box, you were down there with anyone who came into the gallery and you could talk to them.”⁵⁵ The suggestive film installation Sicher Heits, which Eatherley devised and presented in one of the rooms, represents one of the earliest examples of British film installation. Part of a series of film works called militaresque,⁵⁶ her sober installation combined an experimental electronic soundtrack with slides and film projections of a found film fragment of a missile ready for launch.

Annabel Nicolson’s film performance at Gallery House, referred to only as a “spatial projection event,” evokes Haynes’ laboratory model in its improvised and speculative register. Nicolson remembers: “ … looking at the tall windows in the little room I was using and holding up strips of film near the window and moving the shutters to alter the angle of light coming in, so the images were projected onto the wall by natural light … When people came in it was very difficult because I’d been building up a dialogue with the space and the materials, torn fragments of film, pulling them through the slide projector, holding those lenses in my hand, moving things, just in focus.”⁵⁷ Despite her concern about the intrusion of visitors, the imbrication of artist, space, and her materials captivated some, such that one visitor, David Miller, felt moved to write eloquently to the artist, going so far as to compare “the economy, the slowness, the modest proportions and range, and the quietude” of her work to the music of Morton Feldman.⁵⁸

Opening out her questioning exploration of the properties of film to the gaze of the spectator, Nicolson’s low-key confluence of different temporal and spatial elements—from artist presence to the flicker of filmic light play and the daylight streaming from the windows—might indeed be seen as a form of orchestration, which like Feldman or John Cage, used environmental contingency as a determining part of its score, where the visitor was invited to engage not as a bystander, but as another element of Nicolson’s creative dialogue. As she later articulated “ … it’s creating a situation which people can come into and certain resonances can be felt, rather than stating them or projecting them outward. It’s very much about inviting people in.”⁵⁹

In the loose improvisational orchestration of Nicolson’s film performance, accentuating the passage of time and the contingent movement of visitors, light, sound through her temporary make-shift studio, we might thus identify an exemplar of terrain vague articulated as a creative practice. Within the indeterminate environs of Gallery House, once a private townhouse, now briefly customised as a (counter) cultural space, the potency that Solà -Morales perceives in the lack or ‘absence’ of terrain vague, becomes in Nicolson’s work, ‘the space of the possible.’

And yet, it could be argued that the beguiling qualities that Miller experienced in her film performance were only possible because a trace of the building’s temporary and unresolved condition is inscribed within it. For it was not only the boundaries between art forms which were challenged and dismantled within the open ended briefs and open spaces of the Arts Lab or Gallery House. The boundaries between the spaces of production and presentation were also tested as the distinctions melted away between the private and public spheres designated for film and art practice of studio and gallery, darkroom and auditorium. This spatial dissolution closed the gap between the space of making and reception, creating an emphasis on film as experiential and participatory to the extent that the spaces, and roles, of maker and viewer become inextricably, symbiotically fused. Here I feel the efficacy of Haynes’ laboratory model is proved, as the improvisations and experiments normally kept private within the walls of the studio assume the dimension of public performance as they are opened up and played out to the spectator. As Nicolson’s film performance at Gallery House shows, time is reconfigured to the dynamic of studio processes: with a durational and developmental momentum open to incident rather than preplanning.

Therefore, it is imperative that these spaces of interdeterminacy are considered in the current scholarship of artists moving image, because a study of these indeterminate spaces, neither cinema or art museum, will enable us to resist the misrepresentations which current institutional rehabilitations unwittingly create. The Arts Lab, and Gallery House, as part of London’s countercultural dynamic, supported and encouraged the breaking down of boundaries between art forms, enabling early developments of the hybrid practices of film, performance, and installation. And in the dialectic created between their informal structures and the speculative and experimental practices that they supported and encouraged, moving image and its modes of spectatorship were liberated from the spatial and institutional constraints of both the cinema auditorium and the art museum. Now such a feature of artists’ moving image culture, the indeterminacy and promise of a terrain vague is inscribed in the loose and improvisational formulations of these pioneering film actions.

Lucy Reynolds has lectured and published extensively, most particularly focused on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice. 

This essay was originally written for the book Cinema in the Expanded Field (eds. François Bovier & Adeena Mey, JRP|Ringier, 2015) and is republished here on the occasion of This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect at Raven Row.

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Footnotes

[1] Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vagues,” in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.), Anyplace, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995, p. 119–120.