Time’? Artist’s Work in Slide-Tape in the UK Since the 1970s

This article will address the use of slide-tape by artists during the 1970s and 1980s in the United Kingdom. Slide-tape is seen now as a form that was abandoned and barely worthy of mention by critics and historians, and so has been largely elided in the literature. However, it is significant in the UK for being used by a number of key and emerging artists during the period, where it became a distinctive approach to using image and sound. The aesthetic qualities of slide-tape and the physical presence of media apparatus were exploited in both its performance and installation by a range of artists who are associated with experimental approaches to time-based media. It was also developed as a critical tool by women artists and black artists, and this too is overlooked and that moment forgotten. Overall, artists work in this form has been ignored. I speculate on the reasons why this has happened, having recounted some key points in its development and make an argument for its contribution to artists’ moving image media, whose histories are still being written.


Introduction
The beginnings of slide-tape are ignoble and its trajectory complicated. As a form, slide-tape was a series of projected 35mm transparency slides synchronised with a tape soundtrack and used by artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Slide-tape synchronised two (or more) projectors with a pulse command on a tape soundtrack, allowing images to fade between one projector and the other, and synchronise with the sound. In the late 1970s slide-tape was relieved of its conventional use as an educational and presentational tool and used to make experimental art works. This became a moment when avant-garde artists in the United Kingdom, in particular, found a different technology with which to explore images and sound. During the 1960s and early 1970s artists had developed a range of art practices in time-based media, including film, video, expanded cinema, performance and installation. These practices attest to the development of media forms that were in clear opposition to the history and traditions of painting and sculpture, where artists developed experimental practices to address the contemporary social and political landscape.
It was in this context that the use of slide-tape by artists emerged in the UK. Artists who worked in film, installation and performance used slide-tape during this short period, which had ended by 1990 when it was superseded by video technologies.
There was no comparable body of work made in the United States in the same form, although Chrissie Iles and Darsie Alexander have identified a major body of screenbased and projected works (Iles 2001;Alexander 2005). Whilst this work emerged both prior to and in the same period as that in the UK it was based on a different set of formal concerns. These works were less concerned with social and political issues and were made in response to the crisis in representation that had been brought about by the end of minimalism (Iles 2001). Distinctly these works, with very few exceptions, although projected did not use a sound (or tape) element as in the slidetape work made in the UK.
The, now familiar, histories of time-based media and artists' film in the UK during the period are increasingly well documented by writers, curators and critics.
David Curtis and A.L Rees, as well as others, have made a significant contribution to this however, slide-tape is not included in this relatively recent literature (Curtis 2006;Rees 1999). An absence of any significant literature is a key factor here where records of these works are fleeting and scattered across a number of archives. Slidetape is accounted for in a number of exhibition catalogues and referred to in the publications noted here but this amounts to a scant offering. Likewise, slide-tape works in archives are few in number, and others that exist are in private collections.

Key Stages
The period during which slide-tape work circulated in galleries in the UK is marked by two key exhibitions. At the high point of its use slide-tape was included in 'About  The following year, a group of women initiated the exhibition 'Women's Images women artists in slide-tape were made possible by the access to the form. As before, work could be made without funding or hiring a great deal of equipment, at least in its initial stages. It was a form that could be worked on with the aid of a light box in the domestic space. However work produced in slide-tape should not be seen as an engagement with a basic technology. The sequencing of images in a timeline forced an analytic approach to considering the affect of one image to another, and to this was added the projector fade and layering sequences, which were linked to a pulsed soundtrack in the presentation of the work. Slide-tape, for all its apparent direct qualities had also forced an approach that made it a kind of cinema.
During the same period Black Audio Film Collective were also producing slidetape work. Their first project as a collective group used slide-tape forms, prior to their well-known film work of the period, Handsworth Songs (1986).  . The fact that Coleman titles the medium of his work 'projected slide images with synchronized audio narration' is accurate and at a clear remove from its usual term, 'slide-tape'. Krauss, whilst not disavowing work made by other artists suggests that slide-tape has no aesthetic lineage to call upon and to adopt it as a medium, in the way that Coleman has, can only be a singular undertaking (Krauss 1997).
Whilst, for Krauss this may be the case, slide-tape had produced a distinct aesthetic presence; one where images and sound could explore new narrative forms and involve the materiality and the physical presence of the projection apparatus itself. The medium is part of the performance of the work producing a distinctive and evocative presence; one where there is no escape from the sound of the carousel of slides reversing and reloading to repeat its sequence. Given that slide-tape had both distinctive aesthetic and formal qualities this can now lead to a speculative account of its demise and omission.

Speculation
It is clear that the complex performative aspect of slide-tape and its archival and access requirements may account, in part, for its absence in holdings, at least in the UK. The original slide-tape projector units in working order that were used to present works are redundant and, if any do exist, are rare pieces of equipment.
Although there have been recent efforts by the Tate to add a number of slide-tape works to their collection, the unreliability of slide-tape formats meant that many artists quickly transferred works to video; once these formats became more widely available, the original format was no longer used. Slide-tape had been cheap and accessible; initially this was to its advantage, but subsequently became one the reasons why slide-tape work was taken less seriously as it was perceived as a crude form in comparison to video or film. The subject matter of some works, which was often political and critical, and made relatively swiftly in response to issues that were current, may also account for its disappearance.
There can be no argument that artists' work in slide-tape has been overlooked, its use so brief that it seems it is hardly worth mentioning. It was a form that was accessible to women artists, black artists and artists on the margins of the mainstream gallery system, and when this factor is taken into consideration, the reasons behind  (2013) and Postscript II (Berlin) (2013). These artists use of slidetape continues to further the formal aspects of its legacy to contemporary practice aligning them as they do, in these works, with recollection, memory and narrative.
The contemporary use of slide-tape suggests that it has proved to be more resilient than previously thought and the form persists in providing artists with an available aesthetic language, one amongst many in the current visual field. This, although not continuous use of the form, does suggest that it occupies a place in both historical and contemporary practices. Whilst slide-tape is still seen to be resistant to categorisation and is not claimed by either artists' film or moving image cultures it reverts to being a singular practice. Much of the work described above, has suggested that a heterogeneous view of artists' moving image media and the historical moments that produced it can only be offered when slide-tape is included in its present narratives. It is clear that the range of artists who had worked in slide-tape forms and technologies during this earlier period did further establish themselves making this an approach that had a clear relationship to film and the broader field of installation. Moving image installations have become familiar to visitors to galleries and museums for at least the past five decades and the publication of the histories of artists' film and moving image are becoming ever more frequent but slide-tape is rarely, if ever, mentioned in these accounts. Given the range of works that have been discussed, the distinct aesthetic that these works produced and the status of the artists and filmmakers who made them, slide-tape can be seen to have made a contribution to the development of artists' moving image media and the form should be acknowledged in future accounts. After all, isn't it about time?