“People in Britain can handle modernist painting, as you can see from the reaction to the Rothkos,” says Fowler. “But they have a real problem with any kind of abstraction in film.”

Luke Fowler is a 31 year old media Artist that has risen from the diverse and vibrant Glasgow art scene. Using documentary film, projections and photographic media, Fowler attempts to question the boundaries between fact and interpretation, Art and Film. His current exhibition at the Serpentine combines experimentation and documentation in equal measure. Drawing on inspiration from radical film makers and artists of the seventies, his densely layered videos take us on a journey through the minds of disturbed, deranged and introverted patients of Kingsley Hall, right through to the genius of composer Cornelius Cardew.

The exhibition begins in collaboration with the Japanese sound Artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Composition for the Flutter Screen (2008) is the most recent and experimental work that Fowler has to offer us. On entering the opening foyer, one is hit with the whirring of projectors and the ‘fluttering’ of 16mm film. Each video tries to depict various phenomena, such as light or sound that engulf simple objects under changing conditions. From this agitated series of filmic abstractions, the exhibition progresses with two documentaries.

The first entitled The Nine Monads of David Bell (2006) is both shocking and compelling in its honesty and intrusiveness. The film is predominantly concerned with Bell, a resident of the Kingsley Hall refuge facility set up by rebel psychiatrist R. D. Laing.

With its anti-authoritarian ethos and questioning of established ideas about sanity and insanity, normality and abnormality, Kingsley Hall was an important focal point for the newly emerging ‘counter culture’ in Britain, and Mr. Bell embodies this sense of the outsider and the ‘avante garde’. He is the perfect metaphor for 70’s Britain, both brilliant and lost. From meeting Bell and some of the other patients, one simply cannot keep track of this film. The characters move backwards and forwards through time, the voiceovers are often out of sync with the visuals, and the edits are confused, all of which help to encourage the feeling of discomfort that marks this work from beginning to end. What Fowler has done is to force the viewer to question their sanity, their morality, and integral to the show as a whole, how they view film.

Nine Monads of David Bell & Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006)

It is true testament to Fowler’s ability as both a film-maker and an artist that his second documentary has such a different feel to it. Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) focuses on the English composer Cornelius Cardew, and is arguably Fowler’s most famous work. Combining archival footage, photographs, interviews and previously unreleased music recordings, Fowler tells the story of Cardew’s experimental ‘Scratch Orchestra’ of the 1960s/70s. Whilst Fowler wishes us to view the film as a documentary, his technique hints at something more. Visuals are shown out of time with the soundtrack, various formal images of light and shadow are interspersed with images of the orchestra and interviewees, and at times the documentary comes across more as a video installation, forcing the viewer out of a comfortable narrative flow. As with the previous film this is quite deliberate.

The ‘Scratch Orchestra’ is made up of various untrained musicians all trying to find their way through each musical piece. The pieces that they are attempting to play are loud, uninstructed and made up of many individual voices and instruments. Listening to the music is challenging and rewarding because so much of what we hear is open to interpretation. What Cardew attempted 40 years ago with music, Fowler asks us to apply to film. We, the viewers, are challenged to mould and construct the event on film so that it unfolds only for us.

Fowler’s films are frustrating, entertaining, compelling, uncomfortable, inspiring and hard work, but in the end Fowler has successfully evoked a time in which Art was political, and more importantly, when Art did more than just sell.

“My success – if that’s what it is – would probably be repulsive to many of the people I’ve depicted,” he says. “But if it means there’s a hunger for films that don’t offer the audience an easy way out, that don’t patronise them the way so much television does, then perhaps it’s a good thing.”

Fowler’s work can be seen in the Barbican’s (London, UK) upcoming exhibition ‘Radical Nature, Art & Architecture for a changing planet‘ 19/06/09 – 20/09/09.