16. Visitors to Strategy: Get Arts (1970) inspecting work along the first-floor south corridor (from E.22 to E.25)

The studios off the South Corridor on the First Floor of ECA contained many artworks, including landscape paintings by Gerhard Richter.

Tony Morgan (1938-2004) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was the only British artist at Strategy: Get Arts. He brought no less than 12 films with him to SGA.

This included the film Description (1970), which was made specifically for SGA, and featured many of the artists who participated. The film starts with head-and-shoulder shots of couples - male artists viewed frontally with their female partners in side profile. The couples are not ‘talking heads’, they are not speaking to each other or to the camera. The camerawork is shaky, deliberately so, with couples in and out of focus. We slowly become aware that we are watching a film of a video. The 16mm film switches quickly between on-screen couples and there are snippets of mostly female voices describing their partners.

This film was screened in the Film Room (ECA studio C.06), but Morgan also had his own space off the south corridor on the first floor in a partitioned section of E.22. This was used for his fibreglass sculptural installation entitled Five Hung Red, which looked as if it had been freshly painted.

Down the same corridor, Ferdinand Kriwet (1942-2018) displayed various concentric text-objects, whirlpools of words and sans-serif swirls on stamped aluminium. Finally, a painting by Gerhard Richter (b. 1930) entitled Corsica Fire (1969) was hung along this corridor outside E.24, effectively signposting the visitor to the other Richter paintings that could be seen inside this studio.

For much more detail on the contribution of these artists to SGA, please see Christian Weikop, Strategy: Get Arts. 35 Artists Who Broke the Rules (EUP, 2021).

C.W.

Related links

Watch Tony Morgan's Description (1970) (from Richard Salton Gallery's website)