London Video Arts (LVA) was founded for the promotion, distribution and exhibition of

video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...

Art form

By 1976 video art had emerged as a viable time-based art form, which was beginning to establish its own aesthetic identity and theoretical discourse distinct from film. Following the influential Video Show at the

Serpentine Gallery The Serpentine Galleries are two contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Central London. Recently rebranded to just Serpentine, the organisation is split across Serpentine South, previously known as the Serpentine Gallery, ...

in May 1975, which brought the work of international video artists to London and showcased British artists working in the medium, it became apparent that the increased activity in British video art required an organisation to provide support for the artists involved. The idea for London Video Arts (LVA) was initiated by David Hall and founded in summer 1976 by a group of video artists including Roger Barnard, David Critchley,

Tamara Krikorian Tamara Seta Krikorian (5 July 1944–11 July 2009) was a British video artist and a public art curator. Biography Born in Dorset from an Armenian family, she was educated in London where she studied music. In 1966 she moved to Edinburgh, ...

, Brian Hoey, Pete Livingstone, Stuart Marshall,

Stephen Partridge Stephen Partridge (born 1953) is an English video artist

, John Turpie and Hall. "A History of Video Art"
Chris Meigh-Andrews (Berg 2006), p. 56.

London Video Arts

LVA aimed to provide video artists with support promoting their work, beginning as Stuart Marshall later put it as "a pressure group" for the autonomy of video as an art practice, with its own systems of exhibition and distribution. This is apparent in the first LVA catalogue, produced in 1978, which places emphasis on "artists′ work on videotape, video performance and video installations…". LVA acted as a regular screening venue for video art with a distribution library that provided access to a selection of tapes by international as well as British artists working in the field. In the early days there were no production facilities, due in part to the unwieldy and expensive nature of the technology then available. It was not until the early 1980s that LVA managed to secure sufficient funding to set up a permanent office, employ staff and set up their first production facility, this was heralded in LVA's second 1984 catalogue by David Critchley. "We now have, in March 1984, an organisation which is ‘up and running’ in all of the areas it was intended to cover by its founder members back in 1976...LVA can now offer facilities for the production and post-production of video programmes, can exhibit those programmes through its own shows series, and can distribute them worldwide with the help of this catalogue."''Reaching Audiences Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image''
Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, Intellect (2012), pp. a 116; b 245. As video art became more established throughout the 1980s LVA changed to accommodate the different concerns which emerged across the decade. The phenomenon of

Scratch video Scratch video was a British video art movement that emerged in the early to mid-1980s. It was characterised by the use of Found footage (appropriation), found footage, fast cutting and multi-layered rhythms. It is significant in that, as a form o ...

, for example, and the rise of the music video and cheaper and more available video "camcorder" technology produced a different aesthetic less connected to the modernist concern for medium specificity which first characterised video. In 1988, after some disagreements with

John Cleese John Marwood Cleese ( ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and ...

’s video production company (Video Arts) over company names, LVA became London Video Access, and indeed its production facilities were in great demand at the expense of its distribution library during this period, showing a shift towards broadcast and the independent video sector and away from the arts. By 1994 another change of title to London Electronic Arts reflected developments in video technology towards a more dispersed digital media and again reasserted the artist led nature of the organisation. A further move to Lottery funded premises at the Lux Centre in 1996 also provided a purpose built gallery space to accompany distribution and production facilities. Under the pressure of funding cuts, and perhaps also determined by the increasingly blurred distinctions which now existed between video and other moving image media, LEA merged with the

London Film-Makers' Co-op The London Film-makers' Co-op, or LFMC, was a British film-making workshop founded in 1966. It ceased to exist in 1999 when it merged with London Video Arts to form LUX. It grew out of film screenings at the Better Books bookstore, part of the 196 ...

with whom it shared a venue under the collective name of the Lux Centre, continuing until the eventual demise of the Centre in 2001. Its extensive library of video tapes, attesting to the rich history of British and international video art which LVA first helped to promote, continues to find distribution through LUX, as do many of the artists originally involved.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Film & Video Distribution Database
database of material and information about the organisations distributing experimental film and video art in the UK, including London Video Access/Electronic Arts, London Film-makers' Co-op, Lux, Circles/Cinenova, and Film and Video Umbrella. Video art

Art form

London Video Arts

See also

References

External links