Matthew Harle

Art Class (2020, 49 mins) is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.

After 26 years of presenting alternative and underground culture, the future of the Horse Hospital hangs in the balance. Its landlords have demanded a 333% increase in rent and the Horse Hospital has been given a deadline to negotiate with their proprietors, otherwise it faces eviction. Here, we contextualize the Horse Hospital’s current struggle in moving image history in an impressionistic, carefully compiled mix, drawing from a rich array of sources, including: broadcast television, community video, corporate video, and alternative film. The material dates as far back as the very early 1960s and runs virtually to the present day. It includes historic reenactments, situationist-style interventions and the recollections of Kenneth Williams.