Television as a Creative Medium

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.

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.

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

"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.

A Tribute to John Cage is Paik's homage to avant-garde composer John Cage. A major figure in contemporary art and music, Cage was one of the primary influences on Paik's work, as well as his friend and frequent collaborator. In this multifaceted portrait, Paik creates a pastiche of Cage's performances and anecdotes, interviews with friends and colleagues, and examples of Paik's participatory music and television works that parallel Cage's strategies and concerns. The methodology and philosophies that inform Cage's radical musical aesthetic — chance, randomness, the democratization of sounds — are evident as he performs such seminal pieces as 4'33" (of complete silence) in Harvard Square, or throws the I Ching to determine performance sites. Among the collage of elements included in this work are segments from Paik's Zen for TV; Paik and Charlotte Moorman in early performances, including the TV Bra; and anecdotes from composer Alvin Lucier.

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

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

"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

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.

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.

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.)

A film directed by Jud Yalkut

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

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.

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.

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.