paper

THE MUTABILITY OF MEDIA: FILM AND THE ART OF NAM JUNE PAIK

BY JUD YALKUT

The 1960s was a time of change and ferment in the art and media world. Nam June Paik taught himself the fundamentals of electronics and television, allying himself with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, beginning with the attempt to construct a “Build the Video Recorder Yourself” project, looking back as he wrote “with a bitter grin of having paid 25 dollars for a fraud instruction and of the desperate struggle to make it.” This collaboration with Abe, begun in 1963, led to the eventual construction of the seminal Paik-Abe synthesizer at WGBH-TV in Boston in 1969. His earlier and highly significant excursion into film was his “Zen for Film,” 1200 feet of clear leader which was intentionally pervious to dust and scratches so that, as John Cage wrote in 1962-64, comparing it to his “4’33” silent piece and Rauschenberg’s white canvases, “The nature of the environment is more on the film.”

Before my wondrous and eternal encounter with Nam June, I dove unattended into the medium of film in 1961, a field which had no real teachers or courses at the time, though I later became such a teacher starting in 1968. My interest in the cinema developed early on, spurred by the availability of a student membership to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when I started attending the High School of Music & Art at the age of 12, and the following gift of a regular 8mm film camera as a Bar-Mitzvah present. An intense immersion into the art, foreign and experimental film programs at MOMA, augmented not long after with attending Cinema 16, concretized my commitment to the avant garde through such icons as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Moholy-Nagy, and later the work of filmmakers a decade older than me like Brakhage, Markopoulos, Cocteau, and Cornell.

After a long period as a young practicing poet in the Beat generation and a year living in Big Sur, California, I returned to the visual world, and another 8mm camera materialized as a 1961 gift in New York from my first wife. Several completed films later, and the proud acquisition of a used16mm Reflex Bolex camera in 1964, my role in life was firmly established. 1965 was a decisive year, with my collaboration as filmmaker member of the pioneering multimedia group USCO, and the beginning later that year of my continuing involvement with Paik.

I knew of Nam June’s work as a performer and composer, and of his groundbreaking experiments with the television medium, having attended his 1965 New School program and the New York Avant Garde Festival’s performance of Stockhausen’s multimedia opera “Originale.” Many avant garde artists had become my friends and acquaintances including minimalist composers, New Thing jazz musicians, dancers and performance artists, poets, and other filmmakers, all in overlapping circles like Venn diagrams.

Working on a project with USCO, I was shooting and producing a film to be called “Turn Turn Turn” which focused on kinetic and luministic art in a camera-composed composition with the work of the motorized light towers of Nicholas Schöffer, the kinetic light compositions of Julio LeParc, and the electronically-inspired, diffracted and stroboscopic creations of the USCO group. Realizing that proper culmination of this kinetic-luministic progression would be pure electronically manipulated light, it was fortuitous that this need coincided with Paik’s first New York exhibition at the Bonino Gallery in November-December 1965. Nam June agreed with my filming of all of the pieces in this “Electronic Art” show, and portions of this material concluded the finished film. We also agreed on my filming his works-in-progress at his Canal Street studio, and out of this further evolved the realization of film concepts that percolated between us and which eventually produced a body of work collected as a “VideoFilm Concert,” which premiered at the Millennium Film Workshop and was a Cineprobe program at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

Paik’s extraordinary modulations of the television signal were created by detuning the set, isolating the horizontal and vertical controls and injecting various electronic pulses and electromagnetic interferences. As he recounted to Doug Davis in “Art and the Future”: “My real breakthrough was what Fred Barzyk of WGBH called ‘the dancing pattern’.., which I made from internal modulation of three audio signals to make variable patterns, particularly on color sets… The dancing patterns form themselves directly out of the studio signals… they move very slowly, and I can control them by modulating the sounds. They are like the Pop mentality, a very slow thing.”

Nam June got his first Sony videotape recorder, a huge two-handled block of a machine with a pop-up black-and-white monitor, the first such machine available and purchased through a John D. Rockefeller grant in October 1965. “The first thing I discovered,” he said, “was the stop-frame technique, the freezing that makes strange images. Also, repetition of the same thing, with a videotape loop. I made a tape of John Lindsay’s election eve, too…which was a very moving thing, when he got elected Mayor of New York. But I made a very funny tape out of Lindsay, and with Jud Yalkut we turned it into a film.”

This film, shot on 16mm in 1967, was “Videotape Study No. 3.” Paik’s manual manipulation of the ½” tape back and forth over the video heads, which produced grotesque stoppages as the image skewed itself into twisted patterns was, like many of the more abstract patterns produced both in black-and-white and on electromagnetically altered color sets, were impossible to record onto videotape as they circumvented the video sync signal. Thus the only means of capturing these images was on film, which I found with the Bolex was a rate of fifteen frames per second to avoid drift lines between the discrepancies of television scanning and film shutter speeds. Other taped sequences included in the film were an extended sequence of LBJ’s face, and a brief flash of Kosygin, omitting other experiments done with Castro. The film in its silent form was screened together with a political speech mash-up by David Behrman at the “Electric Ear” series accompanied by giant political effigies with loudspeakers for heads by sculptor Shari Dienes in 1969, and with David’s acquiescence was edited by fellow composer Ken Werner to fit the four minute film. Interestingly, the film which has a minimum of forty film splices and which was the first thing I had transferred to a video master when I first accessed WNET Television Laboratory in 1972, reads out as video piece, belying its origin as a film though it is presently distributed in both forms. As an example of McLuhan’s “obsolescence theory” where the new medium subsumes the old medium, people still refer to things being “filmed” when they are captured on videotape, or even new digital media.

(BREAK): Screening of “Videotape Study No. 3.” (DVD)

The term “VideoFilm” was one I coined to represent the interfacing of the two media, both of which were attractive to me because of the variations in their tactilities, and I was later in 1968 able to do preliminary work with the earliest portable black-and-white Sony Portapaks through the auspices of the Raindance Foundation. I also found it fitting to produce titles for our films over loops employing the imperfections of both film, with its end of the roll perforations, and video with its signal loss of “video snow.” But in early 1966, Nam June and I filmed his experiment with producing a round moon form which could gradually fade in and fade out. The first “Electronic Moon” was silent and almost invisible, so intangible that it proved impossible to reproduce in release prints from the film laboratory, disappearing whether the exposure was heightened or lessened to any degree. Consequently, it has only been shown in live concert form, initially with an idiosyncratic live performance by Paik of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata. This original version exists and is only judicially projected, currently with a CD version of Nam June performing at the Anthology Film Archives, graciously recorded by Stephen Vitiello. Two other sections exist in sound versions, with the blue filtered moon slowly fading out and then fading in magenta to the accompaniment of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” The 1972 released version of “Electronic Moon No. 2” has been called a film haiku by several critics and curators, and interplays the lunar analogies of a plate and fork, a swinging lens satellite, and a woman’s breast, with oscillating electromagnetic variations of the magnified red, green and blue phosphors, all to my favorite performance of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” played by Walter Geiseking.

Paik generated much material from the black-and-white broadcast images of the Beatles appearing both on the Ed Sullivan television show and from their famous Shea Stadium concert. These images were whorled and distorted by electromagnetic means, including a large degaussing coil, and filmed by me off the screen, then edited into an “A” roll, and composited with a “B” roll of color footage sequences similar to the “dancing patterns” and Lissajous patterns generated by pulse waves moving in and out of sync. “Beatles Electroniques,” here representing Nam June’s recurring penchant for French appellations, appeared first in black-and white in 1966 and was composite printed in 1967 with a soundtrack by Ken Werner called “Four Loops” based on electronically synthesized fragments of Beatles’ songs.

BREAK: Screening of “Beatles Electroniques.” (DVD)

Our film work together was a constant exploration and interchange. During the early years of our collaboration, besides working with the USCO group, I was holding down a 40 hour-a-week job managing the record warehouse of New York’s largest record dealer, Sam Goody’s, working a six-day week until finally there were enough “commercial” assignments arranged by USCO to finally, as they said, “get Jud out of the basement.” As soon as I got out of work each day, my life as a filmmaker commenced, sometimes working on editing into the night. Consequentially, I financed all the production costs for the films produced with Nam June, because other finances were low, and in the end he generously decided that the film royalties and their release in video form would accrue to me.

We published the Objectives of our work in the “Expanded Arts” Issue No.43 of Film Culture magazine in the winter of 1966, listed separately under both our names. We had agreed to Paik’s suggestion that the listing of our credits for the films would be interchangeable in order for any listing or program. Our Objectives read: 1. Study of electronic images composed by purely electronic means directly on cathode ray screen, adapted mainly from Bonino Gallery exhibition and further experiments. 2. Introduction of metaphysics to cinema, aiming to deepen the ontological meaning of boredom. A third unvocalized maxim involved the transformation of cultural icons into subjects of art. I am reminded of Paik’s comments to Grace Glueck in the New York times of May 5, 1968:

“The world is so boring,” he sighs, “I have to think of things continually to keep myself tense.”

Among the pieces listed in our objectives were some either unrealized or executed purely as performance pieces. “Batman Electronique” (1966) was listed and was probably based on an idea relating to the montage piece for the Batman theme song as one of the many top-30 double-screen features I produced for the Murray the K’s Discotheque in Long Island with USCO. “Rhapsody in Black Et Noire” (1966) was a conceptual performance piece in which a print of the burlesque routine of Sally Rand’s Fan Dance was projected through a dark filter so as to be almost totally unrecognizable. This black-and-white footage, which I obtained through my film lab, was later recycled, processed and colored through the Paik/Abe synthesizer for Nam June’s “Global Groove.” Recycling images and sequences was always part of his battery of materials, and many film elements created by me recurred in his later studio productions.

I have always thought of Paik’s electromagnetic and switching manipulations of the television image while I was filming as performances which I was capturing in the moment. Performance was always a predominant factor in Nam June’s thinking and was an element in our work together. This became coupled with the Zen-like perception of activity and non-activity which constantly surfaced in our mutual philosophies. One concept which produced a suite of what I would call “non-video VideoFilms” is the five parts of the “Cinema Metaphysique” series. Starting with the precept of commenting on the variant scale between film and video, “No. 1,” which was affectionately called the “Micro-TV,” had a small 13” Black-and-white monitor in the far bottom corner of the black screen, and through the silence was briefly joined by a second monitor image in the upper left, and then had the room light turned on for a split second revealing dimly the background curtain, an abrupt performance element by Paik. On the lower right TV appeared at one point the image of a violinist playing before an audience, and I synced in the final bars of a Heifetz recital with the applause coinciding with the audiences hands, and then the piece returned to silence for the short remainder.

The remaining “Cinema Metaphysique” pieces were predicated on the then prevalent phenomenon of the “safe area” of the screen where the edges of a film frame were subsumed by the video frame, and where one was cautioned by broadcasters not to place anything that would appear on television because it would disappear. Paik’s suggestion was that we should make films in which the action took place entirely in the “unsafe” area and thus would reveal only the black center during broadcast.

To realize this concept, I availed myself of a matte box for the Bolex, cutting mattes to include only portions of the image: just a left band in “No. 2” which had a agonizingly slow performance by Paik’s hand slowly swinging or making a tight and tortured fist; “No 3” with a band on the bottom which showed the eyes of Paik and Kosugi looking and avoiding looking at each other to the sound of Zen monks chanting; and “No. 4” which betrayed the “safe area” concept by being hilariously split-screen, and utilizing a torn matte for irregular shapes through which cigars were smoked and a loaf of Levi’s rye bread (“You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levi’s”) was eaten. “Nos. 2-4 were released as one film, with “2” and “4” to a soundtrack selected from Kosugi’s “Manodharma #8.”

“Cinema Metaphysique No. 5” was integral in itself, silent, and in color, and occurred on all four sides of the screen, with the left featuring a hand and head-beating action by Paik, and the bottom his two finger and head and shoe banging on a piano keyboard. “No. 5” required four runs of the film through the camera and four separate matte placements. The “Cinema Metaphysique” series was eventually released in video through over-scanning which broadened the picture area. We will now screen “No. 5” in its film form.

BREAK: Screening of “Cinema Metaphysique No. 5.” (16mm silent film)

One of the strongest relationships concerning Nam June and myself was the dauntless and loving spirit of Charlotte Moorman. I filmed many versions of Charlotte and Paik performing John Cage’s “24’ 1.449” for String Player,” and multiple times projected past segments during part of a live performance. Three years of such film footage was transformed by the Paik-Abe synthesizer into a background mix tape for when I produced my version of Charlotte and Paik performing the composition by Cage at the WNET Television Laboratory in 1973. This distributed version lasted 42 minutes because it contained many of the post-it-note events added to Cage’s score by Charlotte.

I projected our films as well through most of the concerts that Nam June and Charlotte performed in this country. When they traveled on tour to Europe, they would take films with them to include on concert programs. I received a 1966 postcard from Paik in Germany which had on the picture side beer-drinking characters from a theater production in Cologne. The text read:

“Things are going not bad. We are having tough days but trying our best. I couldn’t pick the films up in Italy, because they asked the import license, but we played ‘P+A-I(K)’ (NOTE: my film which includes the NY premiere of Robot K-456), Zen film, and Butterfly (NOTE: I believe the film I made for ‘The World’ discotheque to the song ‘Elusive Butterfly’). In Cologne ‘Electronic Moon’ and Small TV were well received, but

‘P+A-I(K)’ was broken in the middle. In Berlin projector was knocked down in the middle of Micro-TV. Ha ha ha. We are asking now more qualified projectionists in the remaining concerts. –Paik.”

Having turned Nam June’s remarkable television permutations to film for such a long time, it was totally fitting to me that next I would be providing him with film material to be transformed during his various video residencies at both WNET in New York and WGBH in Boston, the two East Coast bastions supporting Video Art. I was the major cameraman for the “John Cage at 60” program in New York, and auxiliary cameraman working with the crew in Boston. Various film segments of mine were included in the mix for “Global Groove” at WNET including aerial footage of the Statue of Liberty and my stop-motion capture of The Living Theatre in “Paradise Now.

Nam June and I worked for over a year on the WNET series “Suite 212” (a title I suggested incorporating Paik’s musical interest and New York’s area code). The premise was a series of thirty approximately five minute segments, each representing some little known but significant area of New York City, in which film shot in multiple locations would be processed in the studio on the Paik/Abe. I was loaned a very nice Nizo Super-8mm camera by the studio for the year of gathering material and finally, in lieu of having a Super-8 film chain in the studio, the films were projected on a white wall and reshot by a studio television camera. The series was designed to conclude the broadcast day of WNET-TV, usually around 11 pm, and to play for the thirty days of April 1975.

To conclude this personal Odyssey of back-and forth media, and my long-held conviction that each medium polishes its own essence by brushing against the other,

we will now screen the “Skating” segment of “Suite 212” joining Central Park’s Wollman rink with the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. My original footage contained both stop motion and slow motion sequences, further manipulated by Paik in the studio.

BREAK: Screening of “Skating” from “Suite 212.” (DVD)