Olivia Plender
Monitor (2007)

Horsebridge Arts & Community Centre, Gallery 1
10:00-18:00 Tuesday - Sunday

Olivia Plender’s Monitor takes its title from a BBC television arts programme that ran from 1958 until 1965. Plender uses the original interviews from a report that followed four aspiring artists (none of them subsequently well known) as they tried to make their way in the London art scene of the 1960s. The video wryly asserts our present distance from the artists’ rhetoric of self-expression, but also from the somewhat high-handed commentary that was typical of arts broadcasting of the time. But Plender is well aware that economics and class have not ceased to determine success in the art world: her video shows the London districts once inhabited by poor art students, now gentrified and trading on their former bohemian reputations.