Jud Yalkut

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

An unreleased diary film shot during the Fairleigh-Dickinson Artist Seminar simultaneous to the production of Back and Forth by Michael Snow.

The ritual of amorous adventure among the domestic peccaries of North America.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, this piece is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Video Tape Study No.3 is a direct media intervention, in which Paik distorts and manipulates footage from news conferences by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and New York Mayor Lindsey.

"This sensuous sea of color, motion, light that seems to surround us completely and we swim in it almost bodily and it is like going through the most fantastic dream." - Jonas Mekas

An unreleased diary film shot during the Fairleigh-Dickinson Artist Seminar simultaneous to the production of Back and Forth by Michael Snow.

The ritual of amorous adventure among the domestic peccaries of North America.

Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, this piece is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Video Tape Study No.3 is a direct media intervention, in which Paik distorts and manipulates footage from news conferences by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and New York Mayor Lindsey.

"This sensuous sea of color, motion, light that seems to surround us completely and we swim in it almost bodily and it is like going through the most fantastic dream." - Jonas Mekas

Part of the "Video-Film Concert" collection on EAI. From 1966 - 1972. Music by K. S. Narayanaswami.

USCO light, Beatles sound. A visionary realization of the USCO Riverside Museum installation exhibition in New York, the show which introduced the word 'Be-In' to the English language. Acid visuals accompanied by a muddy recording of The Beatles playing Tomorrow Never Knows.

Yalkut's film is the only record of Nam June Paik's legendary 1967 performance Opera Sextronique in New York, which was interrupted by the arrest of cellist Charlotte Moorman, who was performing topless. The incident led to Moorman's subsequent notoriety as the "Topless Cellist." This restaging of the first two movements of Opera Sextronique, performed by Moorman and filmed by Yalkut in a studio, was shot immediately after the arrest incident to present at Moorman's trial. (The judge did not permit it to be shown in court.)

1965, black- and-white, 8 min., double-screen projection.

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 the feature film A Hard Day's Night and the "Rain" promotional film are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.

PLANES is an exploration of the corollaries between psychic space and the physical escape of consciousness beyond the earth's biosphere.

Part of a restored collection of rare early works by Nam June Paik, Electronic Fables is an example of Paik's early improvisations and experiments with electronic image manipulation, prior to his invention of the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. This piece also makes use of anecdotes by John Cage and other influential artists and cultural figures.

A film directed by Jud Yalkut

A four-screen within one frame film, shot in un-slit regular 8mm, in four sections of four performance / happening / destruction art events presented in 1967 at the Judson Gallery below Washington Square in New York City. SOME MANIPULATIONS captures the confrontational light pieces of Jean Toche, an avant garde musical performance by Nam June Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman, an actionist painting event by Steve Rose, and a classic Dada lecture/performance by Al Hansen. SOME MANIPULATIONS was premiered in December 1967 as one of the continuous loop elements in Jud Yalkut's DESTRUCT FILM environment, in which spectator/participants were obliged to walk, sit on, and dive into a floor covered with unrolled "junk" 16mm film in order to view the rotating slide and film projections. The film's inclusion represented an instance of ultimate feedback of events back into the space in which they had been presented.

A poetic montage of the 'sculpture garden house' of 67 year old hermit-builder Clarence Schmidt of Woodstock, New York, appraised as 'a really great work of folk art' by curators Lawrence Alloway and Henry Geldzahler. The film includes some of the only footage taken of Clarence living within the seven-story mountain interior of his creation, which was tragically gutted by fire in the winter of 1967-68. A homage to Clarence and his more than forty years of devotion to the transmutation of cast-off objects into an environment or beauty and love.

Abstract light poem tribute to Julio Le Parc, first winner at the 1966 Venice Biennial of a Painting Prize for Kinetic Art, filmed at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Premiered at the Gate Theater, New York.

A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. —Jud Yalkut

This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this extraordinary performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik and Moorman play Cage's score on a collection of "instruments" that include a pistol, a dish of mushrooms, balloons, a practice aerial bomb, and a telephone call to President Nixon.

"Comprises film and videotape from the August (1969) epic freak-out in New York State (White Lake- "Woodstock") with all the groups you can name, and a cast of half a million. Unlike the Rolling Stones films shown on British television, this is full-color and the techniques are more imaginative and acid-based than the Stones film, good as that was." – Alex Gross, London "International Times." Selected for the Montreal International Festival of Film in 16mm at the Museé des Beaux Arts; the Encounter With The American Cinema at Sorrento, Italy, 1970 (Selection of Martin Scorcese); and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris American Underground Film Weekend. Silent version premiered in 1969, accompanied by video and light show, in the extended opening program of Global Village in New York City.

Part of the "Video-Film Concert" collection released by EAI. From 1966 - 1972.

This early work belongs in the company of Paik and Yalkut's classic collaborative "video-films," including Video Tape Study No. 3, Beatles Electronique, and Missa of Zen. To the accompaniment of the abrupt sonic interjections of Fluxus-affiliated composer Takehisa Kosugi, Yalkut's black and white film records brief, masked actions: an arm with clenching fist; a pair of faces, visible only about the eyes, which squint, gaze, and rest; Paik eating a slice of bread. Reminiscent of Beckett's theater, as well as the minimal movements of 1960s avant-garde dance, Cinéma Metaphysique is a study in gesture and stillness, noise and silence.

Marked by a playful, irreverent sense of improvisation and experimentation, these experiments with image manipulation and synthesis form a link between Paik's performance and sculptural works of the 1950s and early 1960s and the celebrated video works and installations of his later years.

In 1969, Howard Wise presented the landmark exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at his eponymous gallery on 57th Street in New York. The exhibition is recognized as the first in the United States devoted to video (or television) as an emergent art form. Jud Yalkut's silent 16mm film footage is a vibrant document of the seminal works in the exhibition, including Nam June Paik's Participation TV, Paul Ryan's Everyman's Mobius Strip, Thomas Tadlock's Archetron, Eric Siegel's Psychedelevision in Color, Charlotte Moorman's first performance of Paik's TV Bra For Living Sculpture, and Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette's installation Wipe Cycle.

"Filmic impressions of composer John Cage, mushroom hunting on his home ground of Stony Point, New York; visiting his home for the last time; radiating love towards his friends; and buying fruits and vegetables at the farm market before returning to New York City." —Jud Yalkut

Video Commune is Jud Yalkut's free-form documentation of Nam June Paik's first interactive television "performance" at the public television station WGBH in Boston. Subtitled "Beatles from Beginning to End," this was a live broadcast in which Paik created a freewheeling collage of recorded images, image-processing and Beatles music.

1966, 16mm film on video, black-and-white and color; 10 minutes

Document of 1960's rock-and-roll cult band The Godz. Contains footage of a few mid-60's performances as well as candid footage of the band.

In Missa of Zen, a TV screen, filmed from an extremely oblique angle, appears as a ghostly, flickering sliver at the side of a darkened frame. The images playing across its surface are rendered abstract by the perspective: we witness the transmission of information, but at a great distance. Isolated in silence and darkness, the television set slips into the realm of the unheimlich — an uncanny object, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Situating mediated America at the crossroads of missa — Latin for the Christian mass — and Zen Buddhism, Paik highlights the connections between mass culture and the transcendental.

Loops within loops, audio and video mutually affective and early computer-generated delay and window effects. -ETC

Credits: Slides by Jackie Cassen. Choreography by Mary McKay and danced by her. Sound: Bach, The Beatles, and the voice of Ralph Metzner reading a "Psychedelic Prayer" by Timothy Leary.

TV Cello Premiere is a silent film documentation of Charlotte Moorman in her first performance on Paik's eponymous TV Cello at the Bonino Gallery in New York in 1971.

Video computer imagery inspired by Sufi poet Jala al-Din Rumi, Father of the Whirling Dervishes.

Yalkut creates a poetic homage to Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's pioneering 1930 kinetic sculpture Light-Space Modulator, which was reconstructed at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1970. Yalkut's silent Light Display: Color combines processed analogue and digital imagery derived from the original 16mm film that he shot at the gallery. -eai

Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. "Beckett wrote 'Waiting for Godot' twenty years ago, but instead of Godot, TV commercial after TV commercial arrived". 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.

As though one gradually becomes aware of the music of the universe, the Dead break into consciousness as their images merge with the oneness of light, becoming discrete momentarily, then dancing away to the cosmic rhythm that permeates reality. A film composed in the camera in the heat of intuition frame-by-frame, and then recomposed frame-by-frame in the optical printer.

Unused material: Yalkut documented Kusama's Body Festivals throughout the so-called Summer of Love, including one staged in the studio of WBAI and broadcast live on Bob Fass's late night Radio Unnameable.

A portrait of Nam June Paik produced as a 'video catalog' for the exhibition 'The Electronic Super Highway', which premiered at The Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with recent installations, historical background and interviews.

A hybrid film-video work that combines moving image technologies, electronic manipulations, performance and installation.

A kinetic alchemy of light and the electronic works of Nicolas Schoffer, Julio Le Parc, USCO, and Nam June Paik. An exploration of the effect-versus-content thesis of Marshall McLuhan. "TURN TURN TURN, a film of the eye-shattering, flashing, rotating light sculptures programmed by USCO to [...] the popular song, a rich electronic fugue on the word NOW: Let's take the OW out of NOW; let's turn the NO out of NOW." – Film Quarterly, 1966.

Yalkut's rare historical document was recorded at the 4th Avant Garde Festival in 1966, which was held outdoors in Central Park. It featured over 65 events with artists, musicians and performers, including Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Christo, Shigeko Kubota, Joseph Beuys, and Alison Knowles, among many others.

Timothy Leary at the Village Theatre, Kusama at the Cooper Square Playhouse, Hermann Nitsch “Orgy-Mystery” at the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque; Living Theatre’s “Paradise Now” at BAM; 7th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Wards Island, “Television as a creative medium” Howard Wise Gallery and more. – Anthology Film Archives