Push Comes to Shove

Push Comes to Shove is a collaborative installation with Denise Hawrysio which showed in the exhibition Analogue & Digital at Fieldgate Gallery and later in Transcentric at Lethaby Gallery. The work superimposes found soundtracks onto digitised Super-8 films shot by Hawrysio in the 1980s. These films were part of a series made by attaching a camera to various machines, including a jackhammer, a snow plough, an asphalt cooker, and a shovel. In each case, the machine operator became a participant in the filmmaking; the framing and movement were determined entirely by their labour. There is no editing or manipulation of the footage outside of the camera.

The soundtracks consist of unmanipulated clips from a clandestine telephone conversation, found on a cassette tape purchased for 25¢ from a street vendor in New York City, and a police radio recording made in the South London squat where the artists lived in the mid-80s. The latter was picked up using an old radio receiver found on the street. The speakers used in the installation were likewise salvaged from the streets of London. In the gallery, viewers are left to decide which soundtrack corresponds to which film.

For the three-monitor version exhibited in the Lethaby Gallery, a third film from the same series is added. In this iteration, the sound is restricted to the New York phone conversation, which slowly rises up tall columns of loudspeakers as the tension in the dialogue escalates. The sound reaches the top of the columns just as one of the subjects mutters “Motherfucker” and hangs up. The 2 videos used for the Fieldgate show can be seen below.