Easy Piece

“Partridge’s first works, which still hold good today, and continue to inspire new generations who see them, were essentially performance pieces. This was before the age of edit-suites, when crude splicing was the only option to straight duration and when all video-pictures were grey and visibly ‘degraded’. The image-word pulsing of Easy Piece, 1974, was made by fading in and out the key word of its title – ‘Easy’ – spoken on the soundtrack by a woman’s voice. Again, video’s real-time recording and instant playback – which most evidently made it not film – impelled the still stunning manipulations of Monitor, 1975, with its deep regress of angled tv’s in a sequence of chinese boxes, frames within frames. This was live art underscored by basic playback. Like much of the work to come, both pieces assert their modernist origins. The flat picture-plane of Easy Piece, with its printed word as visual icon, telescopes a fifty-year history from cubism and abstract art to postwar dada. “- Al Rees