Robert Beck Nine Years Later ( Girlfriend In A Coma) (1998)

Robert Beck recontextualises videotaped performances he created in the late 1980 s to music by The Smiths. By turns gruesome and ironic, these three homemade music videos, including Panic, Big Mouth Strikes Again and Girlfriend In A Coma, are brought to their ultimate and canny conclusion only with Beck s long delayed return to them. Revisiting his highly selfconcious and idiosyncratic performances Beck betrays the apparent ease and economy of the original clips by deftly editing them against the awkwardness and obsessiveness of their numerous outtakes. Wittingly, with intertitles and voiceover, Beck calibrates his performances retrospectively with the video technology that recorded them, and inadvertently traverses a decade of video the mainstreammedia inspired work of the 1980 s to the more reflexive performancebased practices of the 1990 s.