Photodirect Is Bending Time
At age 88, Alex Harsley is still uploading video art to YouTube almost every day
Words: Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura
Recently, while watching a 2019 lecture that Mark Leckey gave to students at Liverpool John Moores University, I was struck by a quiet admission: “I don’t know what art does now.” Seven years later, it’s a question that feels even more pressing. What can, or perhaps what should, art do?
The idea that art should be alive to the world, by having a transformative emotive impact through its formal autonomy, or being a more direct call to arms, is starting to feel like a thing of the past. Well into the 2020s, it feels like there are far too many exhibitions about art-making, in step with the bookshops full of novels about writing. This solipsistic turn, which seems to reflect the increasingly narrow strata of people who can actually afford to make art, is part of a wider failure to really engage with politics beyond virtue signalling.
There is, however, a little pocket universe that helps snap me out of my morose cynicism: Photodirect, the video archive of American artist Alex Harsley, whose wider practice spans photography, video art, and community building. The first Photodirect video was uploaded to YouTube in November 2006, just 18 months after the platform was founded, but the archive itself dates back to the beginning of Harsley’s video practice that started in the mid 1990s. Since 2006, Harsley has uploaded a video to the Photodirect channel continuously, sometimes daily, and in the time you’ve read this, he might even have added a few more. The archive now consists of approximately 1,500 videos, spanning nearly 20 years of uploads.
