In association with the New Zealand Film Archive, Elam School of Fine Arts and Gus Fisher Gallery present The Image of Time, a one-night-only film and video performance on October 23 by British film, video and performance artist Malcolm Le Grice.

In association with the New Zealand Film Archive, Elam School of Fine Arts and Gus Fisher Gallery present The Image of Time, a one-night-only film and video performance on October 23 by British film, video and performance artist Malcolm Le Grice. The Image of Time is a screening of work spanning almost 50 years of moving image practice. 

In his first visit to New Zealand Le Grice will present a collection of material from 1967-2006. This will include his 1970 collaboration with Brian Eno, Berlin Horse, a recent video made using software from a packet of corn-flakes, and work generated on 16mm film, computer and digital video. 

Le Grice initially studied as a painter in the early 1960s but shifted to film, re-using cast-offs from London production companies. “I started pulling 16mm film out of the dust bins in Soho. I built up all this kind of ‘found footage.’”

Building a 16mm processing system in his own home, Le Grice began copying fragments of newsreels and feature films, which he mixed with his own material. Berlin Horse (1970) was made by copying two brief sequences of a running horse. Over the top he superimposed bursts of primary colour and versions of the same footage to create an ecstatic cycle of time and motion. The film was rendered complete after musician Brian Eno recognised a kindred spirit and offered the film-maker a soundtrack.

One of his most recent works is Digital Aberration (2004), a short video with a pulsing techno soundtrack generated with a music programme he found in a box of cereal. The images were based on a rapid-fire series of scene transitions from a digital editing programme. “I hated them and never used them – but being perverse and always doing what I should not, I decided to make a short work using all the transitions. In both cases I was interested in turning something crass into something exciting.” 

Throughout his career Le Grice has been a fearless adopter of new technology. His 1971 work Your Lips (1971) is often described as Britain’s first artwork generated on computer. Remarkably, Your Lips took Le Grice 9 months of computer punch-card programming but generated just 10 seconds of video. “I had no idea what I would produce when I started – I just programmed what I was capable of – but I knew it would be abstract...”

Your Lips resembles a series of expanding circles, which Le Grice incorporated into Threshold (1970), a film made as a pointed reaction to the Cold War and the use of armed force. In this context Your Lips suggested a gun-sight or a target. 

In the early 1980s, Le Grice made three feature-length films for British television that were radical explorations of narrative. He subsequently returned to making shorter pieces that referenced nature, family and drew on the influence of Cubism and post-impressionist painters such as Seurat and Cezanne. 

While painting and sculpture produce a definitive work, Le Grice has happily reworked his older film pieces, adapting them for contemporary digital technology or different screening environments. Le Grice draws a parallel with musical improvisation, saying "I question the single authentic work". 

Le Grice’s tour of New Zealand has been organised by New Zealand Film Archive Exhibitions Manager Mark Williams, who spent three months in London last year working on Le Grice’s collection at the film agency Lux. He says, “Malcolm has an incredible drive to produce new work, so it was good to track down his older material before it gets lost or beyond repair. There was lots of memorabilia, slide pieces that hadn’t been seen for 40 years and several cans of film sitting in Malcolm’s closet, very near a tap. It was great to sort it all out and put the film in a vault.”

So what brings Le Grice to New Zealand? “I have never been south of the equator and I am now 70 so it’s almost now or never. Also all my friends who have been to New Zealand have said what a beautiful and friendly country it is. Bonuses will be to meet film and video artists from NZ and OZ and to see the Len Lye archive in New Plymouth.”

The Image of Time includes several works that Le Grice performs for up to three screens, moving, adjusting and combining the images. The artist retains a keen sense of his film work as a live event designed to involve the viewer.

“It’s about spectacle and scale... I want the experience to have a conceptual/intellectual element to it, but it’s not a demonstration of a concept, it’s about an experience.”