Stephen Sutcliffe

(I was going to write more about the habit of collecting but somehow this turned more into an amateurish review for an event I attended yesterday - oh well)

You can't have everything - where would you put it? - Steven Wright

It was oddly appropriate that the Stephen Sutcliffe talk at The Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield coincided with Guy Fawkes Night. One moment you're in the company of a man who has spent 25 years amassing a highly personal and important archive of television, music, radio, film, documentaries and video on over 800 VHS tapes; the next you're brutishly burning whatever is at hand in an almost primal state. One advocates the preservation of the archaic, the other calls for the end of tradition - both memorialize the redundant, the passé. Which is more important - the trophy or the effigy? What do you choose to keep, to collect, to accumulate - and what do you dismiss, dispose of, destroy?

The Glasgow-based artist is well known for his videos that combine appropriation, comical juxtaposition and archive from an esoteric range of borrowed media. Fresh from his first solo show at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh (which a few of us attended not long ago), he presented a "lecture-performance" that was a selection of audio and video clips interspersed with spoken recollections of his history. The occasion was not without welcome; although born in Harrogate in 1968, Sutcliffe was raised in Wakefield and spent his formal young adult years there before pursuing Fine Art education in 1994.

The talk opened with this audio clip of Steve Martin - the final line of the routine being the clincher for this afternoon's presentation. Sutcliffe then spoke about how at the age of 25, he "fell out with music", realising that it didn't satisfy him anymore (presumably the process of videotaping which he begun in his teens in the mid 1980s occupied his interests more). He revealed his father had a similar revelation at 25 years old and thus justified it by getting rid of all his records; Sutcliffe admitted he kept his records for the cover art alone. The magical power of the trophy - even when an object is no longer used for its original purpose or is inferior in some way, it still holds a value to the owner solely because it constitutes part of a collection. For an artist like Sutcliffe, the watermarked, degraded image of a film taped off Channel 5 onto bulky VHS is infinitely more powerful than a pristine remastered Blu-Ray sold by the mass in a retail shop - it symbolises a personal moment in time; a memory. Besides, the VHS tape itself (much like a vinyl record) is far more fetishistic in design than a mass marketed product or non-tangible- contained in a shrinkwrapped/forbidden case like Pandora's box, the shiny black exterior recalls leather or polished latex; the industrial design uniform yet distinctive enough through labels and markings that tease you of its contents; a delectable smorgasbord of textures, orifices and mechanisms ready to be caressed, stroked and prodded; and then there's the insertion of the tape into the front of a VCR, that brief moment of the tape leaving your hand and being sucked into the void... anyway, I digress.

Speaking with a slight hesitation and reluctance from a typed script in front of him, the lecture continued on the subject of music and Sutcliffe's distrust of it through spoken interjections, sardonic quotes on the screen (sadly I didn't note them down), and archival clips - Morrissey discussing Madonna and The Smiths as the natural end of popular music, Alexei Sayle on Yahama organs and neighbours - before discussing music's potentially parodic use with film in his own work. One features a sax solo over footage of poverty in Asia that slowly reveals itself to be WHAM!'s Careless Whisper; another has Barry Manilow's Could It Be Magic synced up to Pasolini's infamous film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom that squicked the mind like the piano music from 2 Girl 1 Cup. He examined the manipulative power of music - John Barry's score to the Oscar winning film Out Of Africa saved what was an otherwise poorly tested film to screening audiences; the tempo of Mahler's Fifth Symphony synchronized to the action in Visconti's Death In Venice rather than the other way round (resulting in controversy amongst classical music purists), diagetic sound in Anderson's O Lucky Man! - and finally finished up the lecture with "the most embarrassing moment in his life" - a radio interview with the artist by an overexcited/unnamed radio DJ who, perhaps through editing by the artist, continually interrupts his answers with new questions before he can even finish a sentence. The discussion subject? Sutcliffe's obsession with taping and collecting amateurish radio talk shows. Perfect, another one for the archive.

Lasting a spritely 30 minutes - quite long by his standards judging his often short video work - and not having had a chance to talk to Sutcliffe in person (not only did I miss the presentation he gave at the University last year but he made a point of stating before his lecture that he wouldn't do a Q&A session after he finished his lecture), I left the auditorium thinking more about his archive - the key to his creativity. What else has Stephen recorded that reveals more about him? What other memories and moments remain unlocked on those VHS tapes spanning 25 years that effectively mirror my own 25 year lifetime? Mulling over his opening statements, choice videos and thoughts left me thinking about my own obsessions and why we collect, document and archive. By collecting, are we trying to prove our worth to ourselves or to others? If I've seen a film at a cinema, why do I feel compelled to keep the ticket stub regardless of whether it was a good film or not? Is collecting an effective way to channel our desires, or does it merely try to satisfy a missing part of ourselves? Why does one person continue to hold onto everything regardless of whether they use it (like Stephen), whereas another gets rid of it (like his father)?

Archiving, collecting, accumulating; it's another form of superstition, a quest for the unattainable. Watching Sutcliffe's lecture reminded me of Alan Zweig's terrific yet disturbing documentary Vinyl about record collectors; interviewing Harvey Pekar, Zweig asks him if he found a new measure of clarity in his life after he decided to completely get rid of his 5,000+ strong record collection: deadpan he answers, "Nah, I started collecting books". I wonder if Stephen Sutcliffe's father found a new form of trophy to substitute records too? Once you complete one collection, you start another - to possess something is to be possessed yourself.

John