The dry wit of acclaimed British video pioneer George Barber reaches a new level of understatement in “The Long Commute.” Projected onto a modernist sculptural form, a lone auto makes its way endlessly around and around. It moves as one drives on the way to work, with quiet resignation.

On one level, this is the quotidian reality of a middle class very British ‘anybody.’ The simple workman-like aesthetic stands in stark contrast to YBA flamboyance of the Thatcher era. Writes Barber:

Visually, the work is highly pleasurable and though the initial impression is one of graceful simplicity, the work has a mesmerizing quality, as the car in each piece works it way around the track, the repetition becomes comforting, as if the viewer is watching their own lives, draining away on each lap of this senseless journey. The piece has a timeless quality, as if the driving is a ritual or fact of life, as if the car is striving for more meaning, some spiritual road sign that will magically take it to where it really wants to park.

On another level, Barber plays with modern art, as he did for example in Automotive Action Painting, 2006, shown last year in “SingleShot” at the Tate Britain.

Barber—declared “The Henry Ford of independent video” by UK’s Art Monthly magazine—was a leading figure in British Scratch Video, a hugely influential movement of the 1980s and a founding member of the influential critical journal ZG Magazine. —Read Jeremy Welsh’s “On scratch video: One Nation Under A Will (of iron) (The shiny toys of Thatcher’s Children)”

Barber went on in the early 1990s to produce a significant new body of lo-tech work that helped to define the emergent Slacker aesthetic. Since that time, his tireless experiments continue to push the language of the medium. Read an extensive essay on the subject by TimeOut London’s Gareth Evans.

George Barber studied conceptual sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art and The Slade School of Fine Art, London. His output is a mixture of sculptures, paintings and video art. He was accepted at St Martin’s when he was 19 by presenting a motorized wedding cake at his interview.

Barber has had work shown at The Tate Britain, ICA, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, The Whitechapel Open, National Film Theatre and many international venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, The World Wide Video Festival, Holland, The Kitchen, New York and Pompidou Centre, Paris.