Nam June Paik

Bye Bye Kipling

Nam June Paik

Dick Cavett, Ryuichi Sakamoto

This ambitious live satellite link-up of Japan, Korea and the United States features interviews with Keith Haring and architect Arata Isozaki, and performances and works by Philip Glass and the Kodo Drummers, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Lou Reed. In an extraordinary section, a performance in Japan of classical Western music is accompanied by a group of Kabuki dancers.

George

Jeffrey Perkins

Yōko Ono, Jonas Mekas

In 1961 Lithuanian American artist and impresario George Maciunas established the avant-garde art movement Fluxus. George details the rise of Fluxus following a sensationalized tour of “concerts” in Europe in 1962, and continuing in New York for most of the 1960s and ’70s. During this time Maciunas was converting the dying industrial buildings of Soho into a network of artists’ lofts, creating one of the first official real estate co-ops of artist-owned buildings. Maciunas’s life and legacy—as recounted by artists of his generation, including Yoko Ono and Jonas Mekas—ignited debates that remain pivotal to artists working today.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

Jonas Mekas

Kenneth Anger, Adolfo Arrieta

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Fluxfilm Anthology 1962-1970

Mike Parr, Owen Land

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

Guadalcanal Requiem

Nam June Paik

Charlotte Moorman

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles.

Kill Your TV: Jim Moir’s Weird World of Video Art

Sebastian Barfield

Vic Reeves, Isaac Julien

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

Global Groove

John Godfrey, Nam June Paik

John Cage, Russell Connor

Global Groove was a collaborative piece by Nam June Paik and John Godfrey. Paik, amongst other artists who shared the same vision in the 1960s, saw the potential in the television beyond it being a one-sided medium to present programs and commercials. Instead, he saw it more as a place to facilitate a free flow of information exchange. He wanted to strip away the limitations from copyright system and network restrictions and bring in a new TV culture where information could be accessed inexpensively and conveniently. The full length of the piece ran 28 minutes and was first broadcasted in January 30, 1974 on WNET.

‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen

Michael Snow

Kevin Wenzel, Munro Ferguson

Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”

Waiting for Commercials

Jud Yalkut, Nam June Paik

Part of a restored collection of rare early works by Nam June Paik, Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. This early example of Paik's use of appropriated television imagery as pop cultural artifact was originally created for a performance piece of the same name, which featured Charlotte Moorman and her cello.

"Topless Cellist" Charlotte Moorman

Howard Weinberg, Nam June Paik

Charlie Morrow, Yōko Ono

Nam June Paik's first single-channel videotape since 1989 is a heartfelt tribute to his long-time collaborator Charlotte Moorman. This portrait traces Moorman's career as an avant-garde performer, from her classical training to her notorious arrest as the "Topless Cellist" and subsequent talk-show celebrity. Rare documentations of Moorman's performances include Otto Piene's Sky Kiss and Jim McWilliams' Chocolate Cello. Interviews with Moorman's friends, family and collaborators, such as Yoko Ono, Christo and Jeanne Claude, Otto Piene, and Barbara Moore, among others, provide intimate recollections of the inimitable Moorman.

Suite 212

Nam June Paik

Russell Connor, Charlotte Moorman

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries; Collaborators Yalkut, Davis and Kubota contribute their own vibrant and punchy segments.

Beatles Electroniques

Jud Yalkut, Nam June Paik

Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik, the haunting Beatles Electronique reveals Paik's engagement with manipulation of pop icons and electronic images. Snippets of footage from A Hard Day's Night are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.

Zen for Film

Nam June Paik

In an endless loop, unexposed film runs through the projector. The resulting projected image shows a surface illuminated by a bright light, occasionally altered by the appearance of scratches and dust particles in the surface of the damaged film material. This a film which depicts only its own material qualities; An "anti-film", meant to encourage viewers to focus on the lack of concrete images.

Back to Fucking Cambridge

Terese Panoutsopoulos

Theo Altenberg, Otto Muehl

About a group of graduates from Cambridge University who go back to their college to visit a friend who has stayed on there. Otto Muehl founded a community of artists in Vienna in 1970 with the aim of exploring a completely free life practice. Since 1972, this society experiment at the Friedrichshof in Burgenland, 60 kilometers from Vienna, further developed. From the mid-1970s, other municipalities were founded in 30 European cities. At Friedrichshof itself lived at times up to 240 members and visitors.

Kunst und Ketchup

Elmar Hügler

Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys

Early documentary about the pop art scene and happenings in Germany.