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Oliver Payne & Nick Relph talk about mixtape, 2002

by michael wilson

We went to Kingston University because we thought of it as a place without a reputation--something interesting to fuck with. We thought that at least there'd be some cool kids there who'd been rejected from Central St. Martin's, but in fact it was a deeply conservative institution, suburban in the worst sense of the word. Nevertheless, it was something to react against, and although we hated art school, we'd thoroughly recommend it. We started working together soon after we arrived. Our first show was of every Polaroid we'd ever taken, about 1,700 in all. That consolidated our shared outlooks and beliefs. Then Oliver had an idea for a film (Driftwood), so we teamed up to work on that. We come from the same area, listen to the same music, so we don't need to spend much time explaining things to each other.

In Mixtape we wanted to exhaust people--hurt their eyes and make them feel a little sick--but make the experience enjoyable. We used certain images from earlier works, like the line dancers from House & Garage, to have fun with our aesthetic. Mixtape is a celebration of young people, but it also touches on the idea of what one critic called "youth under siege by youth culture." So Starbucks is "cool" because they'll employ you even if you have piercings, but they'll make you wear ludicrous hygienic blue bandages over them. Scooters are "cool" because they're aimed at "youngcles," twenty-somethings stuck in adolescence, but if you stick two kids on a scooter on a treadmill, they still ain't going nowhere. Our images are a "fuck you" to corporate intervention in youth culture, whether it's hardcore, punk rock, skateboarding, graffiti, whatever. We wanted to celebrate the other to that: the pure, raw cane sugar.

After listening a lot to the Terry Riley song, we constructed a series of images and sequences that connected with these ideas and had a place within the music. Absurd or funny, poignant or romantic, we wrote them all down and assembled the best of them around the track. It's about fifty-fifty sound and vision. We tried to be aware of the music while we were editing. The strobe lights and the hunting scenes, for instance, begin just as the track goes mental. It would have been a drag to edit everything right on the beat. It's like a Krautrock record, a Neu! or Can track, in which a single phrase is repeated until it begins to generate new rhythms. The economy of the cuts in Mixtape is critical. The editing is crass at points, but we were mindful of a disjunction between sound and vision as well as a connection. Mixtape was shot on film, so it looks different from our previous work. We wanted it to look like a cross between an insurance ad and Schindler's List: heavy and ugly and stupid. But at times it also h as a brash, colorful Carry On appearance to it. We didn't want to make another shaky handheld film. The more we see films shot through plastic bags, the more we want to make refined, "straight" classics.

There's a lot of dancing in Mixtape, for the simple reason that we love to see dancing on film. Dance is a primal celebration of life. In House & Garage we made the point that two kids playing bedroom DJs--what's called having a little rinse-out--are participating in the same tradition as a suburban divorcee going line dancing. Watching a good skateboarding video is like watching ballet--we're interested in that kind of grace in movement and in different uses of space, whether it's dancing with a partner at a community center or making backside boardslides on a park bench. Read the entire article here Source: findarticles.com

Craving Grace
Nick Relph & Oliver Payne
by Jerry Saltz

When it comes to making their feelings known, Oliver Payne, 23, and Nick Relph, 21—two British video makers who describe themselves respectively as "failed" and "expelled" from art school—don't beat around the bush. About the English art world, the duo claims, "The only shocking thing about British art is its total insignificance to anything going on in modern Britain. Young British art speaks a dead language. It resides in London"—which they denounce as "a city so assured of its brilliance that it constantly forgets to do anything noteworthy. Madonna has moved here because it's so fucking boring." They brand the British press's regular adulation of English artists as a "weekly congratulations card to smug Londoners, fooling the capital into believing that Emin and Hirst are suss and savvy."

Payne and Relph's video trilogy, now on view at Gavin Brown, vividly portrays the pair's misgivings about life in present-day Great Britain. Stylistically, Driftwood, House & Garage, and Jungle are part documentary, part surveillance video, and part tirade. Together they form a kind of howl or lamentation—a love song to their native London, albeit sung in the key of spleen. Throughout the trilogy, but especially in Driftwood, the first and best part, the duo's antipathy for artiness is evident, but their compassion and grace are unmistakable. Their condemnation of the vapidity of much of today's architecture suggests Driftwood ought to be required viewing for all architects—especially those currently drooling over the opportunity of building on the burial mound that is the World Trade Center site. The freshness, fluency, and fearlessness apparent in Driftwood and House & Garage make these videos recommended viewing for anyone interested in the medium.

Payne and Relph rely heavily on attitudinal posturing and an array of influences, from MTV and BBC documentaries to Dan Graham and Wolfgang Tillmans. But they do so with tenderness, intelligence, and dash. All three videos, each about 30 minutes long, lambaste the British powers that turned London and its suburbs into "a heaping mass of degradation." House & Garage, the impressionistic middle section, exudes an entropic pall and deals with forlorn suburbia. Rilke's line "Joy gone astray" could be its subtitle. Employing laconic, Wim Wenders-like camera work, blurry shots of joggers, line dancers, and wayward youth reading Oscar Wilde or idling in bedrooms, House & Garage is all but devoid of narration and ends with a resolutely neoromantic image: fireworks screened in reverse. In the background we hear the Sex Pistols' nihilistic anthem "No Future," and the voice-over's admonition-cum-benediction: "This isn't a joke, so don't you dare laugh. . . . Drugs and violence, and joys of London life. Youth disappeared in the night, leaving a void filled only with regrets." Jungle, the weakest installment, focuses on the region just beyond the suburbs, and comes off as a muddled Blair Witch Project made by animal rights activists. Murky and piecemeal, it examines the pettiness and complacency of regional politics—in this case, country factions divided between those who approve and disapprove of fox hunting. Read the entire article here Source: villagevoice.com

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