The earliest of the five short videos Bonnie Camplin presented as part of the Tate’s “Light Box” series of artist’s films and videos was Good Health, 2003, and it set the tone as well as the formal parameters for the rest. What’s immediately striking about Good Health (as with most of the other works) is the importance of its sound track, as signaled by the fact that one hears it before seeing anything: The video opens with the music accompanied by (which is not to say accompanying) a white screen. Similarly, the most recent work on view, Terrazzo, 2008, begins with sound accompanied by a black

Having previously coated small models of gothic cathedrals, car engines, and other objects in bright blue copper sulphate crystals, sculptor Roger Hiorns took this technique to virtuosic heights with Seizure, 2008, encrusting an entire apartment wall-to-ceiling in sparkling azure crystals. This startling superimposition of nature onto culture was achieved by first sealing watertight an empty three-room apartment in a 1960s public-housing block condemned for demolition. A hole drilled into the ceiling from the apartment above allowed the artist to pour more than eighteen thousand gallons of the

You can watch excerpts from all three films by the late John Samson on view here on YouTube—Tattoo, 1975, Dressing for Pleasure, 1977, and Arrows, 1979—and see for yourself how spectacularly dreary Britain was in the 1970s. Samson made these documentary-style films around the time Dick Hebdige was researching his seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), and you understand why both observers found these thriving subcultural scenes—gangs, fetishists, punks, teddy boys—so worthy of attention. The rest of this bunch of islanders, poorly dressed and eager to vote Margaret Thatcher into office