PROJECTING ON CASTLES IN THE AIR

By Jud Yalkut

First published in:
Seki, Naoko, and Nishikawa, Mihoko, editors. Landscape—Yukihisa Isobe: Artist-Ecological Planner. Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2007

I first met Yukihisa Isobe during 1969 in the unusual circumstances of being commissioned to write on article on his work, as part of a series of four pieces, for the Tokyo arts monthly Bijitsu Techo, an art magazine which had, for me as a writer for both national art magazines and the Underground Press, the almost unlikely circulation of approximately six million copies per issue. Also included in the package of articles I was to write was a long piece on the video art of Nam June Paik, with whom I had been collaborating since 1965 on what I termed VideoFilms, an interview and exposition on the work of The Living Theatre, and a comprehensive history of the New York Avant Garde Festival, directed by cellist Charlotte Moorman, and for which I had been for several years the Festival Film Program Coordinator.

            What I remember most distinctly about the meeting with the esteemed publisher of Bijitsu Techo, with whom all communication was through a translator, was that the main issue was how much I was going to get paid for the series of articles. These niceties finally out of the way, I was then free to get to know Mr. Isobe and his work, he being the only subject of my projected series with whom I had not been previously acquainted.

            Coming from an arts background with early work represented in a Museum of Modern Art show of “Contemporary Japanese Painting and Sculpture” after he came to New York in the beginning of 1966, Isobe was looking “to find something related between architecture and sculpture,” having studied both earlier at the Tokyo University of Arts. He became interested in modular structures related to his box pieces utilizing “typical Japanese heraldic motifs within Western heraldic shapes in a kind of bas-relief three-dimensional conception.”

            This minimalist vision translated into Isobe’s interest in pneumatic and air structure pieces, which he also recognized in Buckminster Fuller’s use of modular units. The major problem in architectural design is always dealing with the force of gravity and Isobe started approaching this problem with a “suspension” structure idea, first using a “space frame” supported by vertical trusses, progressing in 1968 in the use of “Pneumatic” structures, first using compression materials for support and then moving into air blower-supported structures with an automatic pressure gauge that reacted to the internal pressure.

            The natural progression for air structures moved into Isobe’s use of floating shapes using parachutes of various designs and colors, tethering the fabric by four or more corners and blowing “it up from underneath so it hangs in one spot.” This concept creates a structure that in effect would, in effect, be “hanging up:” rather than down, and created for Isobe what he saw not only as an architectural concept but as beautiful sculpture.

            As a filmmaker who had been working with multi-media projections since 1965, first as the filmmaker member of the pioneer USCO group in New York, I had long been interested in the translation of curved and surrounding projection environments. Many of the touring USCO programs, at venues like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of San Francisco, had involved creating either curved cycloramas or surrounding walls around an audience as projection surfaces, projecting an amalgam of film, slides, strobes and other devices.

            One particular USCO piece, which premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, was “Yin/Yang sine/pulse” which utilized a cluster of eight-foot translucent weather balloons, slowing rotating within a barrage of film and slides, the main images being a living Shiva-Shakti and abstract oscilloscopic Lissajous patterns, contrasting sensual flesh color with blue electronic light, the entirety of which was refracted by reflective Mylar plastic on all four walls. Variations of this balloon cluster projection environment were restaged in various other environments, including a weekend installation called “Openings” at the Black Gate Theatre, and then reconstructed as one of three installations in my 2000 Film/Video Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

            Having at one point designed a not-realized concept for a spherical projection environment within which the spectators would be hydraulically elevated to the focal center, I had long been interested in means for creating an enveloping but relatively portable projection environment. As I learned more about Isobe’s air structure concepts, it became apparent that a parachute air structure would well serve the purpose.

            Thus, came about the concept of the “Floating Theater.” For a 1969 multimedia performance at the State University College in Oneonta, New York on March 23rd, we utilized a 32-foot diameter circular parachute for use as a floating, hemispherical projection screen. Isobe’s concept of vented and sleeved parachutes for use as tent structures were subsumed here by leaving only a circular “oculus” at the top of the canopy as the structure was activated from below by four fans with a continuous air flow of 10-15,000 cfm, all set up inside within the college’s large gymnasium space.

            As I had written in my 1969 article on Isobe, published only in its Japanese translation: “All art is environment transforming” and with the merging of art and technology “the illusionary landscapes of easel painting have transmuted into actualized environment of the mind.” The “Floating Theater,” elevated by centrifugal air flow, became in effect both a front and rear projection-capable theater, with five projection stations manned with both film and slide projectors in elevated positions around the central parachute screen in a show called “Dream Reel.”

            As described by Gene Youngblood in his book “Expanded Cinema” (1970, Dutton, New York): “’Dream Reel’ is divided into three sections: ‘Paikpieces,’ ‘Festival Mix,’ and ‘Mixmanifestations.’ ‘Paikpieces’ is an environmental tribute to Nam June Paik, incorporating the video-film collaborations between Yalkut and Paik… in a performance of approximately fifteen minutes, set against the tape composition ‘Mano-Dharma No. 8’ by Takehisa Kosugi (1967)…with the contrast of Paik’s electronic imagery with the airy buoyance of the silky enclosure producing an ethereal evanescent atmosphere.

            “’Festival Mix’ is a multiple projection interpretation of the 1968 University of Cincinnati Spring Arts Festival, originally presented as an eleven-channel, multi-media ‘feedback’ mix as a recap and final performance of that ten-day festival… ‘I was unnerved and numb from the tremendous impact this had on my senses,’ one person commented after the performance.”

            I described “Mixmanifestations” as the most complex section of “Dream Reel” and as “a nonverbal communion and celebration for all channels within a totally surrounding environmental performance. Youngblood commented: “Visual elements include an exploding hydrogen bomb, the Living Theatre,  the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Yayoi Kusama (from Yalkut’s film ‘Self-Obliteration’), and various be-ins and peace marches. These are blended and juxtaposed with abstract meditational motifs culminating in a centralizing Mandalic experience utilizing both visual and aural loop techniques for the alternating pulse and phase-out of simultaneous temporal interference fields.”

            The Oneonta “Floating Theater” experience was highly successful, and a proposal was made to present it at the Trinity Spring Festival at the Austin Arts Center, to culminate with Earth Day on April 23, 1970. Though the “Floating Theater” was not realized at Trinity because of budgetary concerns, Isobe did other pneumatic events there, and served as a co-director of this festival themed as “Environmentals: Man, Art and Community.” The original proposal was for a multimedia happening as a champagne opening “consisting of a total environmental experiment with film,” with coordinators Jud Yalkut and Bud Wirtschafter, and sounds by Kenneth Werner, and with Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik as the first performance event.

I had earlier filmed an orange-and-white parachute air structure by Isobe at Gimbel’s department store in New York’s Herald Square, and also filmed several hot air balloon ascensions staged by Isobe, one on Hart Island in the East River in a “Summer End Happening” for Phoenix House, and another for a special event in Central Park for the first Moon Landing in July, with the live space event broadcast by the three major television networks on giant projection screens around the Sheep Meadow. Film from these three events has been transferred to digital video and will be projected on a new inflatable structure by Mr. Isobe for his retrospective at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 1970 began my involvement with a new multimedia theater project called “Mushroom.” This was a classic period theater commune experience created by several former members of the hippie musical “Hair,” who humorously sometimes referred to themselves as “Hair drop-outs.” Led by singer/performer John Aman, the concept behind the “Mushroom” project, whose logo was two abstracted figures wound round each other under a mushroom cap, was for a musical theater of new songs and music to be performed within a large vinyl inflatable, upon the surface of which would be projected the environment and sets within which the audience would watch the performance. The projection stations would all be situated around the outside perimeter of the inflatable theater.

I introduced Isobe to the principals of the “Mushroom” company and plans began for designing an appropriate inflatable theater space or “bubble,” as members of the company would later affectionately call it. Materials needed, in Isobe’s original proposal, were 20 mil Vinyl sheeting, in eleven rolls of 8” x 300’, 24 to 29 rolls pf 4-6” polyethylene tape for a single taping or 48 plus 6 rolls for double taping, 2,500 feet of polypropylene rope for ground anchoring to 24 5 foot length augers with a tensile strength up to 1,300, two blowers of 2,500 cfm capacity for an inner pressure between 0.3 to 0.5 inches of H²O, and two 50’ x 50’ construction sheet canvas for floor protection.

Isobe’s proposal was taken into consideration by the “Mushroom” company, and though the later work of a young Philadelphia architect who joined the company was later utilized, provided the basis for the concept of a “Mushroom” theater which was first installed in the summer on a farm in Clove Valley outside of New Paltz, New York. This Multi-media Musical Celebration for Total Environmental Theatre, was a “Rock-Theatre Communion” of thirty young entertainers, many of whom came together from California, Florida, New York and Virginia for the avowed “sole purpose of turning people on” with Rock music, films and light shows, dancing, singing, improvisations, and total audience participation.

The content of the multi-media show included shoeless entry into an entrance maze into the “OM-DOME” through a slit-door and immersion into the show fantasy with the ancient chant “OM” in the darkness, followed by a rock cantata called “The Blue Planet,” and a succession of sequences that move through concepts of sexual freedom, love, awakeness, “Utopia,” and the ritual simulation of the eating of the mushroom.

Two later summer performances by the Mushroom Company followed in the early fall of 1971 in a show called “Don’t Walk on the Clouds” at the Delaware Valley College near Doylestown, Pennsylvania, then without the inflatable in an Off-Broadway performance at Saint Clement’s Church in New York, and finally as “a simulensory circus” in July 1972 at the Hollywood Sportatorium in Hollywood, Florida.

 The “Floating Theater” was resurrected by Jud Yalkut, with full attribution for design to Yukihisa Isobe, in a modified form in the summer of 1976 as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Courthouse Square in Dayton, Ohio, where I was then living and working as a Professor of Film and Video at Wright State University. Again using a 32-foor diameter parachute tethered to the pavement of the public square and suspended by four large industrial fans provided by the Lau Company, and with support of the Montgomery County Bicentennial Commission, the performance in the “Floating Theater” was now partially geared to an aerospace theme, Dayton being the home and birthplace of the Wright Brothers. The total effect, with projections from five scaffold towers, was like a brilliant multi-media UFO landing in the center of the city’s largest public space and the morning “Journal Herald” newspaper proclaimed: “Fluttery Flick Clicks.”

Now, after a long hiatus, it is my pleasure to recall and to work in a new capacity with Yukihisa Isobe, who so greatly deserves the long-awaited recognition of his multiple roles and achievements as artist and city planner over the years. It has been my privilege to share with him some ground-breaking and historically significant moments in the fusion of art and technology, and of experimental architecture and experimental media.