A key figure within the 1970s conceptual art scene, John Hilliard began his photographic career by taking pictures of his site-specific installations. Confronted, however, with the representational limitations of the photographic image, he soon came to make works that questioned and interrogated assumptions about photographic objectivity. Exposure, focus, the negative, cropping, and the various viewpoints from which a subject was recorded became the themes of Hilliard’s work.
The 16mm black-and-white twin-screen film From and To was shot in the quadrangle of Brighton Polytechnic in 1971, where John Hilliard then taught. It was one of several films that came directly out of comparable work Hilliard was doing with still photographyin that same year, specifically charting a subject/object relationship between two cameras/operators. One cameraman is located at the centre of a circle, the other at its periphery, and they are choreographed to shoot through a systematic progression of circular movements and zooms. After the films were processed they were then projected in a viewing theatre, each cameraman in turn and in isolation being asked to spontaneously and subjectively voice their thoughts on seeing their own film. In the final double-screen projection the two voice-overs are heard simultaneously, overlapping and separating at various points, and adding another layer of subjectivity/objectivity to the film.
The Royal Pavilion & Museum has a historical collection of material relating to the early film pioneers of Brighton & Hove at the turn of the twentieth century and was recently awarded the Art Fund’s New Collecting Award to develop a more contemporary collection of artists’ moving-image works. The Contemporary Art Society recently gifted films by Ben Rivers and a collage by Jeff Keen to the museum to support its collecting strand of moving image work by artists who have close links to Brighton. From and To, which until now has not been held in any public collection or archive, has been re-mastered and digitised for this acquisition and is a great addition to the collection. From a key period in British art where traditional art practices were being challenged, From and To reflects the moment when the Brighton Polytechnic was, in Hilliard’s words, ‘a hotbed of experimental film and video work’.
