George Barber

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and cliché. George Barber is one of the pioneers of Scratch Video which emerged in the UK during the mid-1980s. Scratch video makes use of found images from films and television, cutting seemingly incongruous imagery together to make a new meaning; it has been compared to the record-scratching techniques of hip-hop music, hence the name. (lux.org.uk)

George Barber deconstructs two feature films, The Blue Lagoon and The Deep, pillaging ‘moments’ which when re-edited constitute a new totality.

An unmanned drone deviates from its destined flight path, as it wanders through time and space its camera surveys its surroundings and the robot narrates its findings.

A home movie on permanent loop. Live action up for grabs. A family walk the walk across a field, disappearing into memory as they do. Who knows where the families go? In the countryside on a sunny day a family group repeatedly walk towards the camera. The ‘home movie’ is looped and the footage is digitally manipulated so that each time they pass, the family members steadily disappear, the landscape also appearing to 'withdraw'.

Actor Brian Hickey performs a parody of a TV weatherman in a film which reminds us just how mannered most weather presentations are.

This revolves around Tim West, an advertising executive who is developing a Channel 4 programme on cooking for terrorists. Disillusioned by the hyper-reality of the media world, he joins Robert de Niro evening classes, but also falls under the pastoral influence of Johnny Morris. From the opening images of night-time, car-ridden streets accompanied by languorous sax on the soundtrack, through to the sub-Chandleresque voice-over narration, Taxi Driver II strikes you with its clever knowingness. But it's more than just a clever nod in the direction of contemporary film noir, just as it's more than an incestuous joke at the expense of the London based media world: it's a telling comment on the contemporary media culture of postmodernism.

What’s it like being a Renaissance man when your host is a jerk-of-all-trades? What’s it like being obsessed with memory when you host lives in the perpetual present? George Barber’s The Venetian Ghost has as its hero a former ruler of Venice who, as a result of a semantic boo-boo, finds himself catapulted from the High Culture of Venice, Italia, to the High camp of Venice, LA. Barber plays up these oppositions in his usual offbeat style; having the figure of the ghost keyed in cartoon – like with Charlie and family – good-time Californians to a fault.

A film about the discrepancy between the random and the intended. Chance meetings, chance adventures, holiday anecdotes and the slowed down inevitability of an eagle catching a fish.

Barber constructs a curious biography around his father's relationship to his nephew Alan Rickman who he dislikes one Christmas for refusing to eat potatoes – and the Barber family are later shocked at the Premiere to find that Rickman has ripped them off and used their father's speech in the movie Michael Collins.

Short film.

Promo video for the Arts Council

Video art by George Barber.

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Thirsty? The longing created by advertising is satirised in this remix of Schweppes advertising.

On the left side of this video diptych sequences of a typical Hollywood movie of the genre "airplane catastrophy" are showing, while on the right side a man liying in a bath tub talks about how he gradually came to terms with the actual trauma of such a catastrophy and his fear of water. Not only by the contrast of documentary interview and fictional processing of the same topic, but by the redundancies of sound and images between both "panels", telling itself and being told has come to the point.

Made using footage from USA Olympics in Los Angeles 1984 and snippets of Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States. The footage was combined at Goldsmith's Art Department using an unusual Grass Valley mixer that had oscillating wipes which created the signature colours and wiggly lines. (Modern Art Oxford) Barber was always the most polished of the Scratch video artists, and Tilt shows his ability to make seductive, easy-viewing pieces, while maintaining a subversive undercurrent.

Film by George Barber.

Short film.

Short film.