In his latest doc­u­ment­ary film piece, Pil­grim­age From Scattered Points, Luke Fowler outlines the history of The Scratch Orchestra, composer Cornelius Cardew’s free-thinking grouping of musicians, non-musicians and other in­ter­es­ted parties.

Using archive footage - much of it culled from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 tele­vi­sion film Journey To The North Pole - alongside in­ter­views, rostrum shots of ephemera and Super-8 vignettes, Pil­grim­age From Scattered Points is at once a coherent narrative essay on the Orchestra’s history, and a fluid portrait in film of Cardew and his confreres. Divided into seven sections, the film runs from the group’s formation in 1969 to it’s rancorous split in the mid-1970s, by which time tensions between two factions, fostered by divisive debates on the function of art - a Maoist tendency who argued for making music to serve the people and a ‘bour­geois­ie idealist’ camp devoted to formal ex­per­i­ment - had risen to boiling point. Along the way, we learn that the Scratch Orchestra - defined in their ‘Draft Manifesto’ as ‘a large number of en­thu­si­asts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and as­sem­bling for action (music-making, per­for­m­ances, edi­fic­a­tion)’ - im­pro­vised from visual scores, including in one case a dog-eared copy of the Radio Times, and took a re­volu­tion­ary approach to music making in more ways than one.

This clear narrative, un­der­mined though it is by free-wheeling editing and narration by un­iden­ti­fied members of the Orchestra or other com­ment­at­ors, sets Pil­grim­age… apart from Fowler’s past work. His previous films, What You See Is Where You’re At, on maverick psy­cho­lo­gist R.D. Laing, and The Way out, a biography of Xentos Jones, lead singer of pseudo-punks the Ho­mo­sexu­als, were both hewn from archive footage and re­cord­ings, but both were closer to im­pres­sion­ist­ic, sometimes be­wil­der­ing, near psy­che­del­ic portraits of their subjects than doc­u­ment­ar­ies from which a clear picture could be gleaned. Indeed, at least one reviewer took Xentos Jones to be a fictional character, cypher, or mythic stand-in for every un­der­ground obscurity with a cult following.

And yet, this latest film can be seen as key to Fowler’s practice to date. While a little closer to doc­u­ment­ary in the con­ven­tion­al sense, it covers similar ground to the earlier works, with an emphasis on the eccentric (a tag that fits Laing, Jones and the key players in The Scratch Orchestra, but does none of them justice) on utopian idealism, on col­l­ab­or­a­tion, and on im­pro­visa­tion. These last three tenets could almost serve as Fowler’s own manifesto. Shaddaz, Fowler’s record label, fanzine and DVD imprint was set up to foster col­l­ab­or­a­tion between visual artists and musicians. In his group Rude Pravo, named after the official newspaper of the Czech communist party, Fowler im­pro­vises with tape loops and un­con­ven­tion­al in­stru­ment­a­tion, an aspect of his musical practice he takes further when per­form­ing with fellow im­pro­vis­or John Fail.

The show ac­com­pa­ny­ing the debut screen­ings of Pil­grim­age… is, too, an odd admixture of curation, ap­pro­pri­a­tion and col­l­ab­or­a­tion. In it, pho­to­graphs of The Scratch Orchestra taken by Alec Hill were digitally reprinted by Fowler, with the two sharing credit, and a silk­screen print of Keith Rowe’s ‘Village Concert’ poster was on show, matched by the only ‘original’ Fowler, another poster collaging scores, texts and newspaper clippings relating to the Orchestra. Two specially com­mis­sioned an­im­a­tions, one by Alasdair Willis, another by Rude Pravo member Lucile Desamory, were displayed on monitors in the gallery, as well as being folded into Fowler’s film, em­phas­ising the fact that film-making is, in­ev­it­ably, a col­l­ab­or­at­ive process.

Pil­grim­age From Scattered Points can, then, be seen not just as a con­t­inu­a­tion of Fowler’s practice, its subject matter following his es­t­ab­l­ished interests, but a re­flec­tion of that practice. Fowler’s anti-auteur­ship is twinned with, or, perhaps, a more suc­cess­ful ex­pres­sion of, Cardew’s ex­per­i­ment in or­ches­trated democracy, and the non-musician members of The Scratch Orchestra match Fowler’s status as, if not a non-artist, an artist of a different stripe, combining roles - film-maker, musician, publisher, enabler and col­l­ab­or­at­or­ - more often found outside the gallery than in.

This review was first published in Map in May, 2006.