LUKE FOWLER


"What You See Is Where Your At"
(2001, DVD 28mins, UK).

    



Luke Fowler's films demonstrate an interest in ideas that oppose the normal orthodoxies and in figures whose actions have challenged authority. Although it is a somewhat reductive way to characterise the subjects he explores, the description is one that could be seen to reflect Fowler's own approach to making work. His documentaries, as they might loosely be called, do not borrow from textbooks of filmmaking or documentary theory. If he has read these books, you rather suspect that his inclination would be to disregard them. Instead, what has drawn Fowler to film is an interest in the medium's unique ability to facilitate access to a subject, to act as a passport for his investigation into radical thinkers and those responsible for the development of progressive ideas. In the films that he has completed to date the normal hierarchies are challenged and break down in a number of different ways.
 
   

Fowler has now completed two films and is currently working on a third major project. The first, completed in 2001, was entitled What you see is Where you're at and took as its subject The Kingsley Hall experiment. Conceived on the initiative of the Scottish psychiatrist and writer R. D. Laing and the 'Philadelphia Association' Kingsley Hall was in operation from 1965 to 1969. The social experiment aimed to create an alternative to the psychiatric institutions where Laing and his colleagues had worked and to dismantle the preconceived rules and roles of doctor-patient relationships. At Kingsley Hall, in London's East End, Laing and his associates created a space of asylum or refuge for residents where they might live unfettered, to work through their experiences of "madness" rather than being subject to the drug-and-shock treatments embraced by traditional psychiatric methodology
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Whether by accident or design, it is clear from this film that Fowler navigates his way through the material - in this case almost exclusively archive footage - somewhat intuitively. It is the artist's untangling of the various perspectives and facets of the subject that lead the film's development, with the voices of the participants given predominance rather than overwhelmed. That What you see. seems almost entirely unmediated by the presence of an authorial voice perhaps reflects Fowler's disinterest in defining for himself a singular artistic persona within the film; he frequently uses collaborative models of working in other activities, too, his organisation of the Glasgow-based multi-media label 'Shadazz' being one example. Instead, the emphasis on various different perspectives - often in conflict - is evident particularly in the use of signs, symbols and texts produced by the residents of Kingsley Hall. Fowler seems largely to function as a cipher rather than preaching any preconceived agenda and, through the opposition and association of ideas, the film says as much about the value and status assigned to creative expression within society as it tells us about the Kingsley Hall experiment itself.
 
   
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