Stuart Marshall: Between melodrama and pedagogy

Introduction

Stuart Marshall was instrumental in changing video art in Britain in the late 1970s, ushering in new ways of thinking about art’s relation to television. Marshall died in 1993, but his influence was keenly felt by many of his students in the 1970s and 1980s, including video artist and academic Catherine Elwes (2005), as well as a later generation during the 1990s and early 2000s, such as the artist and educator Ian White (n/d), academic Roger Hallas (2009) and, more recently by myself, artist and researcher Conal McStravick (2015) and researcher Aimar Arriola (2016). Marshall’s ideas expanded along multiple fronts: in his writing for magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues, in his video-making practice as well as in his work as a teacher at art schools in London and Newcastle. His writing never settled on a single medium or methodological approach, but instead developed around a core set of concerns. Adopting and developing the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories that had gained prominence in British film studies and applying them to the emerging field of video art, Marshall rapidly moved from analysis of the distinctive features of video art in the mid-1970s to an examination of the signifying function of video as an ineluctably televisual form at the end of the decade.

These approaches were a radical departure from the formalist modernist practices of early video art dominant in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, which largely and quite deliberately avoided conventions of televisual realism in favour of the exploitation of video’s non-broadcast capacities, such as instant playback, time-shifting and CCTV monitoring. Marshall’s insight was that this modernist relation of video art to television was missing the big issues of representation, ideology and the complex arena of popular culture (1985). Indeed, Marshall’s own videotapes of the era moved away from modernist investigations of materiality and medium-specificity and towards ideas of representation and narrative. He made this point repeatedly in his own writing, asserting the need for an intervention at the level of ideology (1985: 70). As Ian White noted, Marshall’s desire was to develop ‘a special kind of intervention’ in television (n/d: 1) as a ‘counter-attack’ to prevailing prejudices (n/d: 7).

To resituate Marshall alongside oppositional cinematic practices that evolved through the 1970s yields necessary insights into how these developed in close relation to television (2016). I call these practices of ‘counter-television’ – a corollary to the notions of counter-cinema posited by Peter Wollen (1972) and the feminist counter-cinema that Claire Johnston (1976) advocated. Like these counter-cinemas, ‘counter-television’ must be understood as a series of critical interventions at the level of narrative and representation (see Heath, 1976). For Marshall, it was an intervention in the mainstream of televisual representation. In a series of video works made in 1979 (The Streets of…, Distinct and The Love Show), Marshall undertook extended analyses of television conventions such as melodrama, creating fractured potboiler mise-en-scene in a neo-Brechtian mode. If such work revealed a particularly Althusserian reading of ideology (developed in journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Screen) that has since fallen out of favour in both cinema and television studies, Marshall’s work is nevertheless significant in opening up the possibility for video artists to work within television against the prevalence of patriarchy and homophobia in the mass media (2016). Marshall himself never used the term ‘counter-television’, but he did increasingly use the term ‘independent video’ in a manner that specifically recalled developments in film culture in Britain at the time, notably the independent sector that had coalesced around the Independent Filmmakers’ Association (IFA, founded 1974), a key player in the foundation of Channel 4 (Perry, 2016).

Video art as antinomical television

Marshall’s counter-televisual practice should be understood as emerging both from and against the dominant model of modernist video art of the early 1970s. The key figure in British video art at the time was David Hall, an artist who worked between sculpture, video and film; he was also an arts writer and an influential teacher who founded the ‘Time-Based Media’ course at Maidstone College of Art in 1972. Hall’s work was rooted in a commitment to the idea of ‘autonomy’ of individual categories of artistic form, such as painting or sculpture, and he situated video art squarely in the framework of fine arts culture. In his essay ‘British Video Art: Towards an Autonomous Practice’ (1976), Hall asserts that video art should be ‘autonomous’ not only from other types of art but also from the messy terrain of television. Thankfully, Hall’s work was by no means as puritanical as this sounds, with many of his works revelling in visual wit and a kind of restrained anarchy: notably his TV Interruptions (1971), which were played on Scottish television in 1971 and appeared to show viewers’ screens filling with water or catching fire. Nevertheless, Hall’s arguments were that video art’s legitimacy lay in its relation to the distinctive properties of the medium, which for him meant their temporality (1976: 981). As his TV Interruptions demonstrated, his work was resolutely against television as a cultural form and broadcast technology.

Influenced by this prevailing climate of modernist autonomy and a broad anti-television bias, many video artists in Britain in the 1970s set out to explore video’s unique non-televisual properties (see, e.g. the early works of Steven Partridge or David Critchley). While such work seems at first sight hermetic, commentators were soon to note that video art was never fully separable from television. Hall, for example, worried that video art was under the ‘Giant Shadow’ of television (1976: 981). In his essay ‘Video: the Distinctive Features of the Medium’ (1986/1975), US writer David Antin asserts that while most video art of the time appeared to be ‘defined by a total absence of any of the features that define television’, it was in fact better to describe it as ‘a very definite and predictable inverse relation’ (1986: 155). Antin explains that modernist video art quite deliberately assumed a form that opposed television, notably in its temporal aspects: where TV utilised rapid edits to entertain, or brief advertising slots to sell products, video art had a ‘fundamental disdain for television time’ or what Antin calls its ‘money metric’ (he was writing particularly in the context of US commercial television). Video art, put another way, was very often quite deliberately slow, durational and wilfully boring. In other words, while modernist video art strove towards autonomy, it was haunted from the start by its relationship to the mass media, born as film-maker Hollis Frampton argued of the ‘Jovian backside’ of television (1982: 162).

In any case, it is evident that Hall’s vision of an autonomous modernist video art in Britain was largely a theoretical object. Most video art at this time actually was rather messier, emerging out of the intersection of formalist concerns developed in art schools in the United Kingdom, along with burgeoning live arts scenes at venues such as 2B Butler’s Wharf in London and the Basement in Newcastle (some of these connections are documented by Conal McStravick, 2015), of international counterculture and theoretical ideas of film, ideology and language. For example, Marshall’s early video works such as the Mouth Works series (1975–1976) relate to formalist modernism to the extent that they eschew narrative conventions in favour of analysis of video’s capacity to both capture and fracture speech. But these works are also rooted in Marshall’s practice as a sound artist and student of the American composer, Alvin Lucier. Marshall’s sound works, such as A Sagging and Reading Room (1972), were often concerned with the absurdity of systems and of the delightful absurdity of contradictions and entropy (Lucier, 2001). A Sagging and Reading Room featured performers attempting to follow instructions within a room, which became increasingly complex and impossible to carry out. Marshall wrote a text on Lucier in 1976, in which he praised the latter’s works’ ‘transgression of the linguistic code’ (1976a: 286). By the mid-1970s, Marshall’s work was also increasingly informed by his reading of recent psychoanalytic and semiotic theories. Ever more, he gravitated towards Julia Kristeva’s (1986) analysis of the disruptive powers of the speaking subject, a shift towards post-structuralism and the subversive potential of speech.

From the mid-to-late 1970s onwards, Marshall wrote a number of texts that developed a critical analysis of the limits of modernist video art. For him, in his essay ‘Video Art, The Imaginary and the Parole Vide’ published in the May/June 1976b edition of the arts magazine Studio International, video technologies, under conditions of modernist art, lead artists into solipsism. Because of this tendency, Marshall argued that it was video artists’ imperative to push against video’s solipsism, to create a critically reflective practice on issues of representation (e.g. sexual and gender representation). As Ian White notes, Marshall’s analysis in his 1976 essay bears similarities with Rosalind Krauss’s (Krauss R, 1976) more famous text, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’ published in the journal, October, in spring 1976. Both Krauss and Marshall use Lacanian theory to argue that any analysis of video as a medium with purely material properties is bound to fail because it records its information as signals on a magnetic strip, with the image itself only appearing during the act of playback. As Krauss asserts, ‘video’s real medium is a psychological situation’ (1976: 57). By the 1980s, Marshall had developed this insight into an argument that video art was always destined to be closely entwined with television, since the video monitor itself, whether fitted to receive broadcasts or not, would always resemble domestic TV. Ultimately, for Marshall (1979a), television should be a central concern of a radical, critical video art. As I shall now explore, this did not mean that television was to be celebrated. If for Marshall modernist video art was the antinomy of television, the new course for video art was to be a form of counter-television, working within representative conventions of narrative in order to expose ideological structures within culture.

Counter-television and the melodramatic imagination

In his writing and his video art, Marshall set out to reorientate video art discourse and practice towards developments in radical film culture and criticism in the 1970s. Unlike Hall’s ‘autonomous’ modernist video art, or the structural film-making of artists such as Peter Gidal, counter-cinema undertook avant-garde investigations into narrative, representation and genre conventions. For example, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Yvonne Rainer’s Film about a Woman Who… (1974) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) engage with a burgeoning feminist interest in melodrama in the 1970s. This interest in melodrama had first developed in the 1960s in auteur studies of directors such as Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray and Vincente Minnelli; and by the 1970s, this interest in melodrama and the ‘women’s film’ had also become yoked with an analysis of ideologies of patriarchy, class and capitalism. The centrality of feminist discourse to the engagement with melodrama in terms of both film and television theory and counter-cinema at this time opened a new space of affect and subjectivity outside of the directly agitprop style of cinema also prevalent at this time (e.g. the early work of Cinema Action or the British Newsreel Collective). Thus, in the writing of Johnston, Mulvey, Pam Cook and Mary-Ann Doane and others, the possibility of female pleasure was recuperated and transfigured into a tool of critical politics (for key texts, see Landy, 1991).

Key to this critical cultural production was the discourse published in Screen, which fused a range of discourses derived from Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and new translations of Bertolt Brecht’s writings, as well as French film writers including Christian Metz (1975), an intersecting discourse that DN Rodowick calls ‘political modernism’ (1994). In the Lacanian terminology of the times, counter-cinema was engaged in bringing the Imaginary into the Symbolic: that is, bringing the unspoken prejudices of cinematic images, sounds and narratives into a critical discourse about film as an ideological object. What this ‘political modernist’ discourse largely failed to do was to engage deeply with television: that work was, of course, left primarily to cultural and media studies. Nevertheless, it was largely from this Screen model that British video art in the early 1980s developed a critical engagement with television and televisual genre.

This shift was heralded by Marshall’s videos of the late 1970s, which reveal a playfully subversive engagement with televisual melodrama and soap opera. For example, Marshall’s Distinct (1979) features a generic melodrama set-up, with a husband and wife seated in the domestic setting of a living room, as if in a crisis meeting. If the mise en scène is familiar, the discourse is furiously obscure: she questions him on issues of sex and sexuality; he responds quoting arcane lines from Althusser’s writings. It is one of my favourite conceits in Marshall’s works, suggesting that an over-reliance on theory is a means of repressing sexuality and avoiding intimacy: a piss-take, perhaps, of the whole trajectory of film analysis in Screen in the mid-to-late 1970s (see also McStravick, 2016). In Distinct, Marshall also queries television melodrama by analysing how its conventional dramatic language restricts what can be said and what can be thought: notably, the social aspects of gender roles and sexuality. For Marshall, television was vital to understanding contemporary society, arguing in his essay, ‘Television/Video: Technology/Forms’ that, ‘The social world is constantly, theatrically produced in the sitting room’ (1980: 72).

Here, serious analysis meets ironic celebration of pop culture. These videos analyse, but also enjoy through the act of mocking and parody, that social form that Peter Brooks has called the ‘melodramatic imagination’ (1976): the vertiginous world of moral polarisation into good and evil played out through domestic and interfamilial conflict. This enjoyment can be felt viscerally at times in Marshall’s videos, which increasingly explored the sonic and visual conventions of television melodrama. Distinct closes with a sweeping orchestral score – the melos of melodrama – overlaid with a witty scrolling text outlining an absurd array of melodramatic plot lines. Marshall’s The Streets of…(1979a) recalls a well-known television series of the era, the ABC cop-series, The Streets of San Francisco (1972–1977), and features a funky disco soundtrack redolent of the television show. The core of the video is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek voice-over account of the experience of a television extra, and it also relishes in camp TV artifice, including green screen sequences and actors dressed in bright red and white costumes. Similar humorous motifs appear in The Love Show (1980) (see production image in this dossier), which is a structural analysis of television production norms, with actors reflexively performing the roles of various members of a television crew, again verging on camp. Similarly, a critical camp is evident in the introductory sequence of Bright Eyes (1984) that mimics the hyperbolic opening credits of the US hospital drama, General Hospital (1962–).

Marshall’s critical mocking of television genre conventions needs to be put into cultural and social context, as it drew from a number of strands. In the United States, a number of video artists had developed a keen critical response to television genres, for example, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), which mocks cookery shows, or Richard Serra and Robert Bell’s Prisoner’s Dilemma (1974), which does something similar to the game-show format. Furthermore, television itself has long been quite adept at self-mockery and these models would have been available to Marshall. For example, in the United States, a number of series set out to mock the febrile absurdities of televisual melodrama, including Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! (1976–1977) and Soap! (1977–1981) (Marshall may well have seen while visiting the States in the late 1970s). It should also be noted that Marshall had other rich sources of critical humour available to him, as he began to assert his sexuality in the late 1970s in London. In particular, he drew from the alternative gay theatre scene, at venues such as the Drill Hall on Chenies Street (Bartlett, 2013) and for the two actors he used repeatedly in his videos from the late 1970s onwards, Bruce Bailey and Grazyna Monvid (I owe these latter insights to Conal McStravick’s research). In particular, the Sweatshop’s As Time Goes By (Noel Grieg and Drew Griffiths, 1977), was a key influence in Marshall’s historical critique of sexual persecution and prejudice in Bright Eyes.

Independent television and video

I would also argue that the entwinement of British television and radical film and video practice is essential to an understanding of Marshall’s work in this period. By 1983, when he was commissioned to make his programme on AIDS for Channel 4, British television had ceased to be quite such an exclusionary terrain for socially committed and experimental film-makers. Many of Marshall’s key moving image works of the 1980s and early 1990s were commissioned by Channel 4: Bright Eyes, Desire (1990); Comrades in Arms (1990); Over Our Dead Bodies (1991) and Blue Boys (1992). The fact that Channel 4 was relatively welcoming to such radical work in this period was not an historical accident; rather, it was the result of a sustained campaign by independent film-makers and producers in the previous decade. Notably, it had been partly shaped by the efforts of the IFA, which was established in 1974 with members including leading advocates of counter-cinema (including Wollen and Johnston), as well as members from the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Throughout the 1970s, the IFA heavily petitioned the Annan Committee, which was charged with creating a new fourth television channel. When Channel 4 was finally launched in 1982, several commissioners and editors including Rod Stoneman and Alan Fountain were IFA members. Jeremy Isaacs, the channel’s new chief executive, had also been head of BFI Production Board, giving him a great deal of sympathy to radical film production (for further details, see the conversation between Caroline Spry and Rebecca Dobbs in this dossier).

Marshall was influenced here by a series of ongoing debates since the late 1960s into the possibility of political-left interventions in television and the media. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay ‘Constituents of a Theory of Media’ was translated in the New Left Review in 1970 and Raymond Williams (1974) and Stuart Hood’s (1972) popular works on television and the media were also important texts. These diverse figures asserted that the imperative of radical culture was to intervene in and change television. This was a shift in the debate away from the 1960s Underground’s commitment to establishing alternative publics (separate to the mainstream). It was also a shift away from a key influence on video cultures in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Marshall McLuhan. The McLuhan-esque model came to dominate alternative or ‘guerrilla’ television, whose ideas were promulgated in the United States and internationally in the magazine, Radical Software, and by groups such as TVTV. In the United Kingdom, the chief advocate for this type of work was John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, the earliest promoter of the Sony portapak, as well as a committed leader of the Underground (he had established the International Times in 1966). According to this model, video was an inherently democratic form that would break apart the monolith of television broadcasting. In his 1974 Television book, Williams had attacked McLuhan for this technological determinism, asserting that such a view failed to account for human agency: for television to change, people needed to intervene in it.

Throughout his writing, Marshall would criticise the utopianism of early video theory. In 1976, he dismissed the ‘quasi-cybernetic eulogy’ of the Radical Software generation. In his essay ‘Video: Technology and Practice’, published in Screen in 1979, Marshall drew from Williams to criticise populist conceptions of television as a cause of social ills such as apathy (while Marshall doesn’t cite sources, we could name some of the polemics of the time such as the one by Jerry Manders, 1977). For Marshall, this was ‘to deny a more subtle and useful analysis of television as the site of production of representations – as both an industry and a signifying practice’ (1979b: 110). He was keenly aware of the industry and technical issues barring independent work from broadcasting. For example, during the 1970s, the main television unions in the United Kingdom maintained a ban on broadcasting the lower gauge helical-scan used by most independent video makers. This effectively excluded video artists, as well as community and activist video makers from television (although, Marshall noted, there were exceptions on programmes such as the BBC’s ‘Open Door’ (series), 1973–1982). The union blockage of the technologies used by those independent producers was a means of protecting unionised jobs, but it nevertheless excluded independents engaged in diverse social and political issues. Marshall understood that television’s problems of representation – sexism, homophobia, racism – were as much a problem of industrial set-up as of the specific issues of genre. Marshall’s work from the late 1970s onwards nearly always give some insights into these issues of production: from the TV extras in The Streets of… to the various writers and technicians in The Love Show.

Conclusion

Stuart Marshall’s video art, writing and television programmes evolved in response to developments in television across the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s, with little outlet for working directly on television in the United Kingdom, his videotapes such as Distinct, The Streets of… and The Love Show parodied, analysed and critiqued televisual genres such as melodrama and soap opera. His videos of the late 1970s redeploy tactics of counter-cinema into television, including neo-Brechtian techniques of estrangement such as stilted acting, deliberately awkward dialogue and the use of extensively quoted texts. These techniques can be seen in Bright Eyes in 1984, as well as in a wide range of videos associated with ‘New Narrative’ video (Elwes, 2005), New Romantic and queer activist video (Hallas, 2009). Marshall’s work is what in art parlance is called ‘generative’: it suggests endless ways to think through the continued problems of the representation of social difference both in video art and in television.