Luke Fowler - The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott
Scottish National National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until November 2nd Four stars Luke Fowler's ongoing fascination with icons of radical thought has extended from film-works on punk band The Homosexuals and composer Cornelius Cardew to his Turner nominated dissection of anti-psychiatrist RD Laing. Each of these has cut-and-pasted sound-and-vision collages of archive footage and newly filmed work to create a set of suitably world-turned-upside-down narratives. Like them, this 2012 study of Marxist historian and CND activist E.P. Thompson's involvement with the Workers Educational Movement is both an impressionistic portrait of its subject as well as a timely reminder of a vital figure all but airbrushed out of official history. For this sixty-one minute piece originally commissioned by the Hepworth, Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella, and now shown in Scotland for the first time as part of GENERATION, Fowler slows things down to