Cues for reviewing this production: JW's resonant text on the invite,which on the reverse depicts him behind a soft-focus spider web, reading a newspaper in harsh spotlight, and a perspex head in front of a monitor. Also: pages of my notes, scrawled in huge spiderscript in gloom of performance. And millions of expiring neurons, or hazy holograms or buzzing peptides.

I am writing this on Monday, August 3, 1987 . Recollection of 30.7.87 is already filtered through the weekend of friends visiting from the country, entertained by performances:

balletic leaping and beaming of burgomeisters

standard high art stylee

The Theatre of Greed my old brown son

Ayckbourne takes care of bizness

portly and black-shirted as a bear-shaped Russiam anarchist

Don Weller plays at the Bull's Head, £.5.00, concs. £2.50

I warned Jackie (JW's wife) that I couldn't write reviews any more, that I'd be a whisper of Chinese Echoes, Astral Garble from the Grand Bogus. I am re-writing this on March 21, 2003.

Muggy evening, an empty street. I pause outside the high brick warehouse, corrugated iron over windows, battered doors and hatchways. I notice a man in black, fair, fine-featured, almond eyes. They look up quizzically as he touches the bellpush. Nobody comes from the studio at the top. Everyone has gone to the pub. He tells me that he knows Jez (JW), that they were students together years ago in Leeds. I tell him that I know Jackie, that we are workers together for the Inner London Education Authority. On this basis, we will go to the pub. His name? "Fast..." I presume that, as he has a soft American accent, that this is some obscure Germanic derivative (Fastolf?).

We go to the wrong pub. And he is not American. And he is not not merely "Fast" but Fast Forward". He is not a video/performance artist like Jez, nor, indeed, a visual artist at all. He is a composer in New York. No, not an admirer of Varese, really. More into John Cage... He smiles with ironic grace.

We will drink deeply. To his relatives in Stevenage, to the rich musical heritage of the old freewheeling British Art School system and its drop-outs, to the serious rich and very fast money of the New York Art Scene system, to the pleasures of non European systems of notation. We establish that Jez works for London Video Arts, that he has performed, exhibited and broadcast in Canada and the States, that he once arranged his body in the shape of the letters of the alphabet, to the outrage of a Sunday paper...

Time has passed and we hurry to the studio.

The loft is a long -low-lighted brick space. Half-way across , the folding partition is almost shut, and people are circulating near the entrance. Wine bubbles into plastic cups, and Jackie is greeting us. I return her Marquez paperback that I have battered, and she introduces me to her husband, who is dressed sharp, the Man in Black Pt. 2. We agree to chat later. Soon I'm talking to another ex-art-student, John, who has progressed from art therapy to social work . We agree that we are both media constructs. Children totter around the space, offspring of the Welsh's neighbours in Lewisham London SE 13, who form the bulk of the audience, as if attending a small impromptu party in somebody's back garden.

The assemblage of hardware, wedged into a corner of the space, includes slide projectors; tape recorders and mixer; VCRs; and a video camera. "He says the documentation will be almost as important as the performance." Did Jackie say that that tonight? Or last week, in the staff-room, at work? The outline of the voice is there , but the visual context will go almost completely.

LEFT

SCREEN

RIGHT

SPOTLIT

LOW TABLE

WOODEN CHAIR

So there's image and actuality. But already it's going to be difficult to recall which is/was which, or what goes after which, or where is who? As the lights go down, we all hit the deck, I grope for a notebook but might as well be scripting it in braille, so I'll just have to reconstruct it my way, as crime families are fond of singing, especially in colour, in East End pubs, when they're not playing Video Bombers.

·

Actuality

Enter JW to blow out an imaginary candle?

he sits in the hot wood seat

to juggle small ball like casual

Very deliberately, he lets it roll

"Take a random sample. Reflect on it." And as he goes on his RAM

is in good shape. We are currently enfolded in ice patterns

of baroque music. Fingering a slice of springy perspex

he back-announces echoes of language, echoes of the image, "walls of mirrored

labyrinths". Fingering his way into a white lacey glove-, he

lets the screen play with a spider image, "Who is the Spider, who is the fly?"

sound: carefully sampled gonking noises

Imagery of glass towers, balconies, boardroom vistas, reflex-blink

of eyeless Moloch structures, all across the USA, coast to coast

glassware, glasswearing of steel skeletal spider t owers, gloss of Babel,ya?

The towers riff past, as they did in my old poem...

and as video facades slide in and out of human faces

Video monologue: I'm lost for words.. All I wannabee is TV MEEE

trying to work on the next move...keep my options... for a quick

getaway...it's a dog-eating jungle..

There's something creeping in about fingers on buttons, the Myth of Sisyphus

but my old pre-Gutenberg scriptorium technologies of pen

and paper in an £1.50 notebook, have strayed into

Huge faces slide blankly down the cliffs of glass . "This is the

Playboy Bui lding...This is the Sears Building...World Trade Tower..

and so it goes. With models of the Eiffel Tower, die-cast tourist

ikons, a global ikon of wonderbook hi-tech direct from the homebase

of semiology.

Jez moves left: into the spot in front of the screen. Red photogravure

dots across him. He mimes:

Jez takes the elegant spidernet glove, fetish of high society gallery openings. He pulls it all about. He relates an anecdote about Toronto: A deaf and dumb man in a bar hands out pocket guides to sign language, with a printed invite:

Sourcing material from the Sun and the National Enquirer (editor Generoso Pope Jr) Jez rampages through the world's novelties, a raree show of death dwarfs 'n sex gimmix, I know I am loving it too eagerly, I love it to death, I have a black hole that's voracious for this stuff, spooky but disposable, like the Plastic Reconstruction of Stonehenge for Tourists ONLY. Now to the serious bizness:

Will he make it? Will he give it the old King Kong chop kick, just to vandalise his own environment? We've all heard about this auto-destructive art - back in the 60s Otto Muehl blowing up a dead sheep - so is he gonna give it the big bang?

Video:

THIS IS THE FUTURE - a cross-scratching of old Channel 4 video , sourced from USA 1950 - Dynaflow homes, Stratocruising autos, Hydramatic cities. A nostagia for the future which somehow bypassed us on the cloverleaf interchange of alternate time-lines.

Jez on the mic, talking up travelogues, Pentax, holiday holograms, the framing of all experience, all this obsessive documentation.

Via video we enter the operatics of Space. With the Starship Enterprise, boldly going with Scotty. To zap the aliens with deadly games. This is the Day the Earth Stood Still, anthem-footage of the Fantasy Robot, very reliable, sexually viable.

Live-wire Jez talks through media fantasies of science, pointy headed scientists are evil and have no sex , or too much, but good old grey ones smile, our wise ancestors. He instructs us to listen out...

Lights up. We mill about and I congratulate the artist. We agree to chat.

But I end up in the wrong pub again, this time with Jackie and her neighbours. She likes my enthusiasm for the work. "If you had a video you could send yourself around in a jiffy bag."

Eventually Jez arrives and I buy him a drink. For the first time in the nine months he has been preparing the piece, he drops and breaks a glass.