Jud Yalkut

EAI and Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ) are thrilled to present a selection of video and film highlighting the exchange of avant-garde experimentation in New York and Japan during the 1960s and 70s. The screening is organized in anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s, on view at Philadelphia Art Alliance of the University of the Arts June 14-August 9. The program will be introduced by Ann Adachi-Tasch, Executive Director of Collaborative Cataloging Japan. RSVP here.

Jud Yalkut’s moving image account of the 4th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, held in Central Park in 1966, accompanies works by Japanese artists Masanori Ōe and Akiko Iimura, underscoring shared engagement with intermedia innovation, psychedelia, and ongoing political upheaval occurring simultaneously in the United States and Japan. Both Yalkut’s film-video and Ōe’s Head Game (1967) use their own experimental practices to document countercultural events in Central Park, framing the realignment of humanity’s relationship with nature and the senses as fundamental to forming a new, harmonious social order. In Yalkut’s piece, shot on film and edited on video, artists and their families take over the park with performance and installation, and in Head Game, participants stage “The Great Be-In” in protest of the Vietnam war. Engagement with then-burgeoning media technology, generating vivid new sounds and images, serves a double purpose in resisting war, social conformism, governmental authoritarianism, and the top-down media practices in mainstream journalism reifying these realities.

Akiko Imura, an active participant in the New York underground scene, and the partner of Takahiko Iimura, also layers experimental imagery over a natural setting in Mon Petit Album (1974), folding sprawling, overlapped film footage of a pastoral scene under an original soundtrack by Jacques Bekaert combining flute and violin phrasings atop subtly processed sounds. Iimura herself drifts in and out of the frame, making direct eye contact with the camera while embedded in the landscape—a powerful act asserting autonomy over her own image as a woman. Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut’s technological, visual, and aural experimentation opens sideways realities at once distinctly subjective and grounded in the universe outside the image.

Through engagement with their respective avant-garde scenes in Japan and New York, Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut share many points of contact—artists like Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, and Alvin and Mary Lucier, and collectives like USCO (Us Company or the Company of Us), Newsreel, and Third World Studios. These artists, their peers, and the interplay between their aesthetic and political inquiries paint a picture of an international avant-garde far more vast than Western art history’s commentary on the U.S. and Europe, with invaluable exchange between New York and Japan.

Collaborative Cataloging Japan is an international non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Japanese experimental moving image produced from the 1950s through 1980s, including fine art on film and video, documentations of performance, independently produced documentaries, experimental animation and experimental television. The mission of CCJ is to preserve, document and disseminate these works, and enable their appreciation by a wider audience.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.

EAI is pleased to present an evening focused on groundbreaking performance artist Charlotte Moorman's rarely screened performances for and with television and video. Centered around her extraordinary 1973 televisual "realization" of John Cage's 26' 1.1499" For A String Player at the WNET/Thirteen TV Lab, with collaborators Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, this program highlights how radically Moorman calibrated her performances for unconventional contexts, further disrupting traditional artistic hierarchies. Barbara Moore, independent scholar and close associate throughout Moorman's professional career, will be in conversation following the screening.

This program is organized in conjunction with the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s-1980s, on view at NYU's Grey Art Gallery through December 10, 2016.

EAI was pleased to collaborate with Anthology Film Archives to present two tribute programs featuring the work of Jud Yalkut (1938-2013). Yalkut's moving image work transcended and transformed media as he explored and merged film, video, expanded cinema, performance, and installation. This approach embodied the "intermix" that was at the core of Howard Wise's founding manifesto for EAI. Jud Yalkut was a multi-media pioneer whose radical films and videos remain as trippy and innovative today as they were back then. Born and raised in NYC, Yalkut studied literature before turning to experimental cinema in the early 1960s.

Starting in 1966 and continuing into the 1970s, he collaborated with Nam June Paik on a series of significant video-film pieces, creating extraordinary conversations between the medium of film and the electronic manipulations of video. These ideas extended to kinetic reworkings of performances and art events, as seen in his 1973 video realization of Paik and Charlotte Moorman performing John Cage's 26'.1.1499' FOR STRING PLAYER, and his digital rendering of Moholy-Nagy's 1930 kinetic sculpture LIGHT-SPACE MODULATOR. These two screenings at Anthology Film archives featured some of Yalkut's best-known works alongside an exciting array of never-before-seen footage.

EAI paid tribute to pioneering intermedia artist and filmmaker Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) with a daylong celebration of his extraordinary moving image art. EAI screened twenty of Yalkut's short film and video pieces, spanning the years 1965 to 2002, from early performance renderings and poetic filmic experiments to his groundbreaking video-film collaborations with Nam June Paik.

Paik and Yalkut's iconic video-film hybrids, including Videotape Study No. 3, Beatles Electroniques and Cinema Metaphysique, were shown together with Yalkut's kinetic reworkings of seminal performances and art events, including his visions of the 1966 and 1969 Avant-Garde Festivals; his vibrant 16mm film of the landmark 1969 exhibition TV as a Creative Medium; a 1973 video realization of Paik and Charlotte Moorman performing John Cage's 26'.1.1499" for String Player; and his digital rendering of László Moholy-Nagy's 1930 sculpture Light-Space Modulator, among others.

Please join EAI for Participation, a special three-hour video program that will be screened continuously from noon-6pm on Friday, May 10th and Saturday, May 11th. Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ant Farm, Charlotte Moorman and Jud Yalkut, Carolee Schneemann, and Jean Dupuy, Participation looks to a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw a profusion of artist-initiated projects, collaborative experimentation, and an inclusive, improvisational ethos. The screening features rare footage of performances and happenings, pioneering video documents, and experimental participatory works, capturing a community of young artists responding to the countercultural sensibility and social transformations of that era. Using newly available portable video technology as well as 16mm film, these artists created extraordinary documents that allow viewers in 2013 to experience something of the multi-disciplinary, interactive and process-based spirit that defined the alternative artistic and cultural scenes of that time.

ESSAY
CHECKLIST
EXHIBITION BROCHURE
INSTALLATION VIEWS
CONVERSATIONS AT DIA:BEACON: Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos, and Paul Ryan with Lori Zippay
PRESS: New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Bullett
PHOTOS: Circa 1971 Gallery Talk with Lori Zippay, February 2012

Dia Art Foundation presented Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Circa 1971 brought together 20 moving image works from EAI's collection of over 3,500 media artworks. Celebrating EAI's 40th anniversary, the exhibition was organized by guest curator Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI.

Circa 1971 included pieces by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Shirley Clarke, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, TVTV, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

Taking the year of EAI's founding as its point of departure, the exhibition set in dialogue a series of diverse works created in and around 1971, which are linked by alternative artistic and activist impulses. Circa 1971 exposed the generative encounters among these artists and influences and initiates unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate works.

Famously described by composer Edgar Varese as "the Jeanne d'Arc of new music," Charlotte Moorman was a central figure of the New York avant garde of the 1960s and '70s. As a performer, she was a longtime collaborator of Nam June Paik, who created many of his best-known pieces for her, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV Cello (1971). At X, EAI presents videos by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut that capture Moorman's unique performances. Included in the program are Yalkut's realization of Moorman and Paik's extraordinary performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player, documentation of Moorman's first performance on Paik's TV Cello in 1971, and rare performance documentation from Paik's archive of Moorman playing the TV Cello while lying on Paik's TV Bed and early performances in Germany and New York from the 1960s.

"Cinema On Air" featured an evening of projected silent video works, selected from the EAI Collection, accompanied by two simultaneous sound performances heard through radio headphones. Audience members could tune in to either of the two live soundtracks, watch the works in silence, or sample all three experiences.

This event was co-presented by Electronic Arts Intermix, free103point9, and Socrates Sculpture Park. "Cinema On Air" was the concluding event of Socrates' "Summer Solstice" programs.

The third in free103point9's Tune(In))) series, Tune(In))) Santa Fe featured sound and video artists transmitting works directly into four separate FM frequencies. This sound installation/event was designed for a virtually silent environment in which listeners heard live performances through individual radio headsets. Video Tune(In))), presented in collaboration with EAI, featured a selection of single-channel video works that addressed transmission themes. The program included works by Klaus vom Bruch, Gary Hill, Kristin Lucas, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Jud Yalkut.

Co-presented by The Kitchen and transmission arts organization free103point9, in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Tune(In))) The Kitchen featured a silent environment in which listeners heard live performances through radio headphones. The event included over forty artists and was a part of the city-wide festival, New Sound, New York. The video program, Video Tune(In))), selected from the EAI Collection, contained works by Klaus vom Bruch, Gary Hill, Kristin Lucas, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, and Steina and Woody Vasulka.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a selection of early works from the EAI collection that feature some of contemporary art's most legendary artist/muse collaborations Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, William Wegman and Man Ray, and Andy Warhol and the Superstars. The screening was preceded by a special evening viewing of the group exhibition The Muse at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, which also explored the role of the muse in contemporary art.

Video Tune(In))) was presented by EAI on the occasion of free103point9's Tune(In))) which featured audio from over 60 artists routed into six transmitters. Attendees accessed the performances with radio headphones included with admission. Video Tune(In))) included works by Klaus vom Bruch, Gary Hill, Kristin Lucas, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, and Steina and Woody Vasulka.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.

The Summer 2000 edition of this ongoing program of EAI works for the Dia rooftop Video Salon and Cafe featured works by artists including Klaus vom Bruch, Martha Rosler, Michael Smith, and Jud Yalkut.