Video master

WIDE ANGLE

Weddings are dominated by them, Rob Lowe's career ended because of one, and they record the news every day. We are of course talking about the humble video camera. Once the preserve of Japanese tourists and badly lit BBC costume dramas, videos now record the minutiae of each late 20th- century day, their grainy testimony turning up everywhere from You've Been Framed to the Old Bailey.

"Found" and contrived, seen and unseen, it is this profusion of images that fascinates film-maker John Maybury, whose video artistry is presently enjoying a retrospective at the Lux Cinema. A leading light of the early 1980s art movement known as the New Romantics, Maybury has, throughout his career, explored innovative and challenging ways in which to combine the moving image with dance, music and text in a richly textured style.

While still a student of fine art at North London Polytechnic, Maybury helped design Derek Jarman's poetic polemic, Jubilee, but it is as much to popular culture as to such avant-garde works that he looks for inspiration. Referencing everything from the gay club scene to fashion, the visual excess of Maybury's works reflects and examines the confusion of today's visual overload.

In the post-modern way of things Maybury has himself added to that confusion, cooking up dazzling pop promos for the likes of Neneh Cherry, Boy George and Sinead O'Connor. Unlike some experimental film-snobs, however, who see such MTV outings as the lowest form of video-life, Maybury relishes their bite-size bricolage. In a recent interview, the artist eschewed fashionable doom-mongering about falling concentration levels to argue for a pop-led visual democracy: "I still feel a great sense of optimism in the face of this barrage of information. MTV and its imitators have created a whole generation of kids who possess an unprecedented audio- visual literacy. They have developed an understanding of non-narrative structures, of montage and even picture quality and manipulation which, 20 years ago, was only the preserve of a few sad structural film-makers."

In anticipation of Maybury's new film about Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil (starring Derek Jacobi) and the exhibition of his work staged by London Electronic Arts (which plunders Maybury archives from as far back as 1977), the Lux Cinema is currently running a season of radical works chosen by the artist. Tonight sees a screening of Jarman's Sebastiane, which imagines the Christian martyr as a Roman soldier billeted to a remote coastal garrison where he is abused by the homophobic captain for his mysticism. (Jarman apparently screened his film to the British Board of Film Censors in the wrong ratio, to conceal the erections.)

Another landmark in the history of gay underground cinema follows later the same evening: Jean Genet's 1950 erotic fantasy Les Chants D'Amour. And after Genet's film, a slyly reflexive triple bill offers Genetron, Maybury's poetic homage to the gay writer, and Todd Haynes's queer portmanteau film Poison, which includes Haynes's own striking Genet pastiche.

Equally effective programming tomorrow twins Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour with Maybury's brilliant 1993 film Remembrance of Things Fast. Scripted by Marguerite Duras, Resnais' film offers an emotional microscope on world events through the relationship between a Japanese man and French woman meeting in Hiroshima. Maybury's Remembrance, meanwhile, is "a conflagration of global TV". A hypnotic and trenchant barrage of imagery, it features performances by Tilda Swinton and Rupert Everett.

With Maybury's five-minute short Absurd showing as an introduction to each screening, his gloriously titled Premonitions of Absurd Perversion in Sexual Personae, Part One playing in the foyer, and London Electronic Arts' exhibition of archive footage dating back to 1977 (see picture, featuring Leigh Bowery), this is a rare chance to get up to speed on one of Britain's most innovative visual artists.

So why not skip Blockbusters for a couple of nights and watch some proper videos instead?

The 'John in Love' season of Maybury-selected films runs at the Lux Cinema, 2-4 Hoxton Square N1 (0171 684 0201) to 16 Apr;

The exhibition 'John Maybury' is at the LEA Gallery 2-4 Hoxton Square N1 (0171-684 2785) 17 Apr-30 May; Gallery open Wed-Fri 12-7pm, Saturday and Sunday 12-6pm