Jud Yalkut on Yukihisa Isobe:
Digitizations from Community of Images Exhibition
Installation view of Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s exhibition (June 14—August 9, 2024). Photograph by Constance Mensh.
Featuring the digitization projects that were part of the Community of Images exhibition, we are pleased to share with our online members selected works and moving image materials that were on view during the show.
September’s Members Viewing will feature selected archival reels by Jud Yalkut that were presented in Gallery B in the exhibition. This gallery featured artist and urban planner Yukihisa Isobe and an archival rendition of his collaborative piece with filmmaker Jud Yalkut titled Dream Reel, a mixed media performance in Isobe’s Floating Theater, originally presented at State University at Oneonta, March 23, 1969. Alongside this parachute installation were Yalkut’s insightful and artful documentation of Yukihisa Isobe’s air art projects, including:
Documentation of Air Dome, a large air structure mounted in Unison Square in 1970 as part of the first Earth Day Celebration.
Testing the setup for Floating Theater, and air balloon flight.
Through the fall, we will be presenting a selection of digitization projects, bringing access to some of the show to an international audience.
For more context on Yalkut and Isobe, check out our written resources on the artists linked at the bottom of the page.
THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.
Become a member for just $5 a month to access our monthly programs, and share your thoughts on our screenings with us via Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.
Documentation of Air Dome, 6:27 min, 16mm, color, silent
Air Dome was a large air structure designed by Isobe, mounted collaboratively in Manhattan’s Union Square in 1970 as part of the first Earth Day Celebration. Through a fisheye lens, Yalkut films the community preparations for the event: streets being cleaned, people working together to unroll the large plastic sheeting which would form the dome, and finally, its dramatic inflation.
Testing the setup for Floating Theater, and air balloon flight, 9 min, 16mm, color, silent
A fast-motion montage shows the parachute designed by Isobe, Floating Theater, being set up. Floating Theater was born from his interest in air as a material for art creation, leading to creating a canopy-shaped parachute held aloft by air blown from below. In a multi-media performance undertaken in spring 1969, Dream Reel, filmmaker Jud Yalkut projected film imagery on Isobe’s parachute canopy and added music. A restaging of Dream Real/Floating Theater was included in the Community of Images exhibition.
The second part of the film documents with a fisheye lens the rippling rhythms of the launch, flight and descent of a hot air balloon, in connection with the 1970 Phoenix House Summer Happening at Hart Island, NYC. This was a “drug free” rock music festival event which Isobe was involved in organizing.
Installation view of Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s exhibition (June 14—August 9, 2024). Photograph by Constance Mensh.
Yukihisa Isobe (b. 1935) began his career as an avant-garde painter in Japan before relocating to New York in 1965 where he moved into the field of urban and ecological planning. In the summer of 1965, after visiting Europe for a solo exhibition at a Venice gallery, Isobe traveled around Europe, then visited New York and settled there, remaining in the USA until the mid-seventies. Isobe was already interested in modular constructions using wood, when he saw Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and became interested in new materials and structures. Initially interested in tent and hanging structures, he gradually focused on constructed air structures using vinyl material. His Double Skin Structure (1968) was presented in “Some More Beginnings” Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” exhibition of 1968 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His interest in air as a material for art creation next led to creating a canopy-shaped parachute held aloft by air blown from below, titled Floating Theater. In a multi-media performance undertaken in spring 1969, Dream Reel, filmmaker Jud Yalkut projected film imagery on Isobe’s parachute canopy and added music. During the same period, Isobe collaborated with Light Art artists, Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, in producing “Theater of Light.” After embarking on a project using a hot air balloon through his employment with the New York City parks department, Isobe was then invited to participate in organizing the Summer Happening in New York City’s Hart Island for Phoenix House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. He collaborated with David Behrman in 1969 on a balloon-driven remote audio feedback system which served as the basis for their unrealized Pepsi Pavilion event proposal for Expo ‘70.
Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was an experimental film and video artist from New York and a member of the countercultural media collective USCO, known for his film performances. In 1966 he began a long-term collaboration with Nam June Paik that resulted in hybrid conversations between the media of film and video, and created filmic reworkings of performances by other Fluxus members, including Charlotte Moorman. In 1967 he made a film with Yayoi Kusama entitled Kusama's Self-Obliteration, and he would also collaborate with the Japanese environmental designer Yukihisa Isobe to create Dream Reel/Floating Theater (1969), an installation in which film was projected onto a large parachute object.
Related
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
This exhibition is on show at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9, 2024.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.