Nightcleaners (Part 1). (UK / Reino Unido) Berwick Street Collective, 1972 A documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphrey Trevelyan), about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner's Action Group and the unions - and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labour. It is increasingly recognised as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice.
Art Is Political (EUA) Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, 1975 Art Is Political is a series of nine black and white images that narrate Condé and Beveridge’s journey from a formalist to a politicized art.The images are based on taped conversations the artists had with each other during the summer and fall of 1975 in which they questioned the art market and the ideological assumptions behind it. The work was influenced by both Chinese propaganda musicals of the 1970's and the New York modernist dance of artists such as Yvonne Rainer.
Read the Masks, Tradition Is Not Given. Annette Krauss y Petra Bauer, Holanda 2009, Part of an ongoing project of the same title, which questions the Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). The feast of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) is one of the most celebrated Dutch traditions. Sinterklaas arrives in the Netherlands by boat to deliver gifts to the children, and with him are his servants, numerous Zwarte Pieten, black-faced assistants with red lips and dark curly hair. The problematical aspects of the figure of Zwarte Piet have only rarely been discussed in the mainstream media. The project included an installation with placards and banners at the Van Abbemuseum, and a (eventually cancelled) protest march / performance in the streets of Eindhoven which would have publicly given voice to a long-marginalised and suppressed critique of the Zwarte Piet phenomenon.
