Towards Intuition: An American Landscape1981

Having created a set of works on analogue video between 1976 and 1980 we (Vida) decided to go to America to drive across the dream of America in search of the source of intuition. The US had provided not only Americans but people around the world - such as we three British people - with a promise of improvement, not only of our circumstance, but of ourselves. As a sometimes musician, poet, writer and painter I’d become familiar with the use of improvisation to create various artefacts and moments and recognised that element when constructing moving images on a timeline into an act of durational statement. As members of London Video Arts we’d swapped tapes with the Bay Area Video Coalition and were familiar with experiments in other countries work in this area. It seemed natural to go in a spirit of discovery within the landscape of America in the hope of finding the source of several ideas that might be located in the same place. We found various performers and eventually a healer who could speak about the furthest outpost of the improvisatory faculty who had adopted their behaviours and could cast off into an intuitive space and having achieved that then come back to articulate what that faculty was about. In this search we three English people (and child Timothy) also had to leave behind fixed opinions and attitudes and try enable a way of dissolving ourselves and culture in America’s culture and landscape.