Hello and welcome to Culture Kingston and this, our inaugural review!

Appropriately the focus of this first edition is another pioneer and one of Kinston’s most famous sons, photographic innovator Eadweard Muybridge (or Edward Muggeridge depending on who you ask!).

Born in 1830, he spent much of his career in the American west, notably San Francisco, documenting with artistry the dynamism of this frontier land in the aftermath of the Civil War. Later, having changed the spelling of his name to match that on the Coronation Stone outside the Guildhall in Kingston, he turned to the work for which he is perhaps best remembered, studies of animals and people in motion (including The Horse in Motion in which Muybridge settled the contemporary debate over the notion of ‘unsupported transit’) and their presentation through what might be considered the world’s first movie projector, the zoopraxiscope.

He also visited Alaska and Central America during an eventful life that included being acquitted of the murder of his wife’s lover on grounds of ‘justifiable homicide’, eventually returning to Kingston in 1894 where he died ten years later.

Muybridge bequeathed a significant body of work to the town of his birth, which is currently the subject of Muybridge in Kingston (www.muybridgeinkingston.com) a programme of events across the town celebrating and investigating this world-class collection.

A selection of the artefacts, including some never before seen pieces, are currently part of Muybridge Revolutions at Kingston Museum (Wheatfield Way – Daily 10am to 5pm except Wednesdays and Sundays until 12^th February, Free Admission), whilst a contemporary perspective on the Museum’s collection is provided by acclaimed South African photographer Trevor Appleson’s Dance of Ordinariness at the Stanley Picker Gallery (Knights Park – Tue to Fri 12pm to 6pm, Sat 12pm to 4pm, Mon by appointment until 13^th November, Free Admission).

Culture Kingston were at the launch event on the 18^th September and can fully recommend a visit.

At the Museum, the collection has broken out of its permanent home in the darkened corridor under the stairs to fill the first floor gallery in what is a very professional display and a real credit to all those involved. A concise and informative chronology takes the visitor through the development of moving image technology, before leading on to a superb back-lit array of Muybridge’s glass discs and digitally re-created footage as they would have appeared at one of his lectures.

With his zoopraxiscope, of which a replica of the original is centre of the first room, Muybridge combined the illusion of animated movement found in other nineteenth century moving image toys such as the zoetrope and phenakistoscope (examples of which are amongst the exhibits here for people to use) with the projection of the magic lantern to create a revolution in moving image technology.

However, from artistically manipulating the dimensions to appear more lifelike and create more interesting kinetic motions, to creating simple stories through ground-breaking sequential editing, this work survived only a small window in time before Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumiere brothers Cinematographe introduced perforated image reels for individual and then mass presentation respectively.

For despite his advances, there have been those who have questioned Muybridge’s motives and the place of his work in the history of the moving image.

Indeed, notwithstanding his elevation to the pantheon of cinematographic pioneers, the story of Muybridge is also one of a businessman in the long tradition of Victorian-era entertainers, hawking pseudo-scientific credibility in his studies of human and animal motion in pursuit of patronage, or a profitable return. The discs themselves only remain because his demand that they be destroyed on discovering that they had become obsolete was thankfully not carried through.

But in the beauty of the discs on display here, not least ‘Birds Flock’ and ‘Man Somersaulting, Bull Galloping, Dog Running’, there is worthy artistic merit and in  the epochal moments captured in ‘Horse Trotting: Occident’ and ‘Skeleton of a Horse’ (the foundation of stop-motion animation), an incontrovertible timelessness.

He may have been a man whom one might feel uncomfortable about including on the Christmas card list, but his influence and inspiration on later filmmakers and artists is plain.

Indeed, it still inspires today and intimate access to the rare material held in the archive forms the basis of new work at the Stanley Picker Gallery, to which the private view crowd then decanted after a couple of complimentary Kronenbourgs.

Here Trevor Appleson’s Dance of Ordinariness presents moving-image works inspired by the famous collotype sequences of human figures, reinterpreting the gestures and actions in Muybridge’s motion studies and catalogue of fleeting moments.

Entering the gallery from bright sunshine, the viewer is plunged into a pitch black space in which three screens are suspended. Here the series of short, prosaic narratives are played out by dancers from the London Contemporary Dance School.

There are studies of walking, hopping, mounting, dismounting, smashing eggs, cleaning up smashed eggs, bursting balloons, all considered and gracefully performed and the influence is plain. This is Muybridge brought in to the twenty-first century and a challenging reflection on the relationship between film-maker, spectator and subject.

There were two things though which I feel I failed to appreciate. Firstly, despite the featureless black stage on which they were performed, for some reason the sound track insisted that all the scenes were taking place in a windy park (one of those typically gnawing installation accompaniments featuring tweeting birds and aeroplanes and being played too loud). I’m sure this is all part of the ‘everyday’ theme, but it just seems inappropriate here.

It is not as irritating however, as the incessant bleeping and fanfares from the final piece. A television screen is mounted on the wall in a recessed part of the gallery where a video is played in which a camera is fixed on a young woman playing on a hand held computer console. This is an interesting study, but it suffers from its open proximity to the main work and, once my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I began to see the light it threw out only as detracting from that experience.

Despite this though, it is still well worth a visit and, if you’re not already familiar with it, particularly when having first taken in the Museum collection. The legacy of Muybridge still lives and it lives in Kingston!