Nine Years Later (Girlfriend In A Coma)

Robert Beck recontextualises videotaped performances he created in the late 1980’s to music by The Smiths. By turns gruesome and ironic, these three home-made ‘music videos’, including Panic, Big Mouth Strikes Again and Girlfriend In A Coma, are brought to their ultimate and canny conclusion only with Beck’s long delayed return to them. Revisiting his highly self-concious and idiosyncratic performances Beck betrays the apparent ease and economy of the original clips by deftly editing them against the awkwardness and obsessiveness of their numerous out-takes. Wittingly, with intertitles and voice-over, Beck calibrates his performances retrospectively with the video technology that recorded them, and inadvertently traverses a decade of video history…from the mainstream-media inspired work of the 1980’s to the more reflexive performance-based practices of the 1990’s.