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Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler (b. 1978) lives and works in Glasgow. He has had solo exhibitions at, among other venues, the Serpentine Gallery (London), Kunsthalle Zürich, Extra City (Antwerp) and The Modern Institute (Glasgow). He has participated in a long succession of group exhibitions and film festivals all over the world.

Luke Fowler is one of the most talked-about young British artists of recent years. His films are documentaries which at the same time express an experimental attitude to the fi lm medium, in a continuation of the avant-garde fi lm tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. They often also portray historical cultural fi gures who operate on the extreme periphery of established society. The subject is usually a type of outsider fi gure with radical ambitions to challenge existing society. Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), perhaps Fowler’s best known fi lm portrait, deals with the British composer and activist Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), following the development of the composer’s ground-breaking Scratch Orchestra project through its break down to final collapse. The orchestra, which consisted of both professional musici ans and amateurs, challenged established conventions and distanced itself from the use of traditional notation and performance arenas. It was a social experiment that ended in a rupture, splitting its membership into two factions.

Fowler’s film sheds light on the group’s struggle, during which Cardew himself became a Maoist. For him, music was a tool for studying man’s ability to cooperate, as well as a means of investigating society’s capacity to tolerate the unacceptable. Fowler’s portrait films themselves have a political motivation and show, through a close reading of historical fi gures, how alternative ways of thinking are possible.