George Barber / Beyond Language
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010
Venue: Phoenix
George Barber's work presents a complex and highly personal strategy of non-conformity that defines appropriation, collage and parody as the essential forms of contemporary art-practice. Barber's work is often categorised in three groups: Scratch videos, slacker videos and more recently performance videos. However, his voice is most coherent when his work is viewed as a single artistic project.
His consistent use of parody at the meeting points of culture is more than flippant humour; in satirising the platitudes of art and culture his work grapples with the postmodern condition and addresses the legacies of Duchamp and Warhol, and creates a unique position in relation to artists such as Sturtevant and Richard Prince.
Barber paints a picture of a world obsessed with uniqueness, but only capable of producing banality. He is a chronicler of contemporary culture, a soothsayer of aesthetic discords and a philosopher of spiritual decline. The works in this programme demonstrate the singular voice of George Barber, an artist concerned with artistic integrity and the complexities of language.
George Barber was born in Georgetown, Guyana and went to St Martins and The Slade. His compilation "The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video" is internationally known and has been featured in many galleries and festivals across the world. His two contributions to the tape, 'Absence of Satan' and ' Yes Frank No Smoke' are still screened regularly and are important in the history of British Video Art.
