Oliver Payne and Nick Relph at Gavin Brown's enterprise. . - New York - Driftwood - House & Garage - Jungle - movie review

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Elizabeth Schambelan

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are two young British artists (born in 1977 and '79, respectively) who work collaboratively, and whose short films Driftwood, House & Garage and Jungle recently had their U.S. debut at Gavin Brown. Together, these pseudo-documentaries comprise a unified-field view of contemporary Britain, beginning at the urban center and moving outward concentrically. The earliest, Driftwood (1999), is a psycho-geography of London in which skateboarders are posited as modern-day flaneurs, "repo men on wheels," who accomplish a subversive reclamation of public space. House & Garage (2000) is a funny, melancholy look at life in London's exurbs, loosely organized around the notion of musical subcultures and unified by recurring imagery of somnolent people line-dancing in a community center. The most recent film, Jungle (2001), is a largely nocturnal exploration of England's farm country. Taking a cue from The Blair Witch Project, Payne and Relph bring a handheld camera into the woods at night and, in the wobbling beam of a camera-mounted light, find disorienting imagery that modernizes the visual vocabulary of the Gothic.

Throughout the trilogy, Payne and Relph use voice-overs or intertitles to air their views on everything from mad cow disease to Soho gentrification. As social critics, they are trenchant and savage, just as one might expect of two former art students who cut their teeth on the Sex Pistols and the Situationists. They are clearly influenced by Patrick Keiller, and in a perverse way their work also recalls the avant-garde documentaries of Humphrey Jennings, who created expressionistic paeans to the British character; the entropic formlessness of Payne and Relph's films is like a joking inversion of Jennings's valedictory lyricism.

Payne and Relph's relationship to the documentary genre is slippery. They continually tip us off to the fact that, though they may have assumed the personas of documentary filmmakers and intellectuals engages, they think like painters and esthetes. Again and again, their camera wanders away from a tenuous thread of narrative and fixates rapturously on a near-abstract image: crows in a white sky; sunlight streaming through the dirty, greenish lens of a tourist's viewfinder. In one sequence in Jungle, the artists discuss some footage of rolling hills and grazing cows. "Whistlery. Whistleresque," says one. The comment echoes a moment near the end of House & Garage, where footage of fireworks is run in reverse slow motion, so that the fireworks seem to be majestically retracting themselves from existence. It's a frankly gorgeous image, a Whistleresque nocturne. Whatever their interests in social critique, Payne and Relph are also profoundly interested in the way things look, and it is their unabashed estheticism that raises their work above posture and precociousness.