April 02, 2001
Two Es And A Viagra
A world exclusive installation of London-based video artist and activist Peter Rigby.
2nd April - 21st April 2001
From his roots with Jim Haines ( International Times, Suck, the Arts Lab ) in early Underground British filmmaking, to his arrest and subsequent front page of the News Of The World after being wrongly accused of video piracy and conspiracy to defraud 6 major film companies, through extreme hedonism in club culture with the Jolly Roger Video Company at the ultraclub ‘Heaven’ in the early Eighties to his current experiments in surveillance, Rigby’s vast body of work encompasses post-structuralist video at its most personal and radical - forging new perspectives on the politics of the self and documentation -reflecting the dichotomy between a culture of surveillance and the individual.
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The installation takes select work from his collection, including timelapse footage compiled obsessively over a five year period using a custom-built camera; vintage visuals and installation of multiscopes from Heaven during the early Eighties, as well as screening Britain’s first ever gay television channel, ‘M.S.C.TV ’, amazingly made in 1974, to his current work : ‘ Two Es and a Viagra ’ ( so called because of the intake it took to make it ) which documents his explorations around London’s West End naked but for his camera - leading to his eventual arrest, including ‘ A Chat with Lewis ’ - a harrowing ordeal with a drug dealer who has failed to provide the goods.
Spanning three decades of hitherto publicly unseen footage, this retrospective posits Rigby as Britain’s foremost ‘outsider’ video artist.
posted by Patrick on April 2, 2001 01:08 PM