November Eleven
U-matic video, 18 minutes, 1979
John Hughes, Andrew Scollo with Peter Kennedy
Sound: John Scott, Robert Moore
Video colorizing Robert Randall, Frank Bendinelli

November Eleven is the moving image component of an installation work designed by Peter Kennedy for the Biennale of Sydney in 1979.

Featuring the two combined elements of painted banner (‘November Eleven’, oil on canvas, 274 x 305 cm) 1978-79,1 and video (‘November Eleven’, U-matic video), this installation was produced in the aftermath of Australia’s “constitutional coup” when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was dismissed by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.

While the banner references trade union banners of the 1890s – the period when Australia’s constitution was written – the video deploys found material (dada-like) from radio and television coverage of the events of 1975 in a form later known as ‘scratch video’, to evoke an oppositional polemic using the ephemera of broadcasting.

1Nick Waterlow (curator) and Kerry Crowley (ed.), European Dialogue: The Third Biennale of Sydney, Sydney: Biennale of Sydney. Catalogue of the exhibition held at the AGNSW, 14 April – 27 May 1979.