Monitor: Watch

Britain's New Angry Young Men

Words: Lina D. Russell

Neither Nick Relph nor Oliver Payne made it through art school. Relph was thrown out. Payne failed. But it didn't take long for this British filmmaking duo to be catapulted into the international art world with a series of gritty punk-rock shorts that rip open the underbelly of today's Britain. Last year brought screenings at New York's Gavin Brown's Enterprise, London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts and a nomination for Britain's Becks Futures art prize.

Best known for their documentary-style trilogy Driftwood, House and Garage and Jungle, each a 30-minute mélange of DV and film, the pair's critical musings draw on their experiences as young punk skate-kids hanging around the Blair-branded capital of "Cool Britannia."

Their emotionally charged, psycho-geographical journeys live somewhere between documentary, travelogue and surveillance video -- in a place where Harmony Korine meets Patrick Keiller to a Sex Pistols soundtrack. Driftwood, a skateboarder's view of London's youth culture and public space, exposes the head-on collisions of authority and street culture. House and Garage examines the suburbs through a free-flow textured collage, while Jungle is an effort to expose the filmmakers' own preconceptions towards the country.

Having grown up in London suburbs, Relph and Payne are bemused by the hype surrounding the capital and its art scene as they refuse to be associated with the yBa (young British artists) ranks: "The problem of London is fascinating to us," they say. "It is a city that refuses to grow up, a city so assured of its brilliance that it constantly forgets to do anything noteworthy. The only shocking thing about modern British art is its total insignificance to anything going on in modern Britain. Young British Art speaks a dead language."

Having become the youngest artists ever to be nominated for the Becks Futures prize, Relph and Payne's world doesn't appear to have changed much as a result of last year's success. They continue to skate, DJ and work in a t-shirt shop as they gather further material for the next addition to their compelling critique.