Gothic Revival [electronic resource].

NN Contemporary Art 2023

Open access content

Gothic Revival is a new audio-visual commission by Jarman Award-winning artist, David Panos. Part film, part musical score, Gothic Revival is a poetic exploration of place; a cinematic tapestry that interweaves digitally manipulated footage with film, sound recordings and fragments of video collected in Northampton. The artist’s process began through exploring the connections between Northampton’s Gothic Revival architecture and the legacy of its post-punk music scene, which birthed the band Bauhaus, credited with initiating the ‘gothic rock’ music genre. Seeking to explore the descendents of such an ‘alternative scene’, the film documents local band Raven Rust, whose rehearsal of Bauhaus’ most famous track, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, recurs across the piece, almost as a modern act of establishing tradition through repetition. Panos engages with the town’s often overlooked voices, seeking to understand the complex dynamics of identity, tradition, and meaning in such contexts. He contrasts DIY scenes like the remnants of the alternative/gothic subculture with archaic, institutional structures, exemplified by a choir rehearsing at Northampton’s All Saints Church. The work contrasts these two very different musical spaces – however a paradox unfolds where modern, socially liberal ‘alternative’ signifiers and pre-modern religious structures can both be evoked by ‘gothic’ forms. The commision was an opportunity for the artist to engage with the concept of the British town in contrast to a London-centric artworld; Northampton in its historical specificity but also as the site as emblematic of contemporary regional Britain. Gothic Revival resonates with Northampton as a fractured microcosm of the challenges faced by small towns and communities in post-Covid, Brexit England; the assemblage of sound and image unraveling the complexities of a society grappling with a crisis of meaning. It raises questions about the preservation of cultural traditions, the decline of communal spaces,
https://www.librarystack.org/gothic-revival/?ref=unknown

Motion pictures
Music
Rock music

Text

David Panos
Emer Grant
Gareth Horner
Laura Sykes