Jud Yalkut

Video 26'1.1499" For A String Player (1973). Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix.

Jud Yalkut, For A String Player (1973). Still from the video. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix.

Jud Yalkut, For A String Player (1973). Still from the video. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix.

Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was an American pioneering intermedia artist and filmmaker. His remarkable body of moving image work, which spanned fifty years, ranged from early performance renderings and poetic filmic experiments to a series of groundbreaking hybrid video-film collaborations with Nam June Paik. Transcending and transforming media as he explored and merged film, video, expanded cinema, electronic manipulations, performance and installation, he created and collaborated on seminal intermedia projects with numerous artists, filmmakers, musicians and performers. Yalkut was also active as a teacher, curator and writer; his 350-page manuscript Electronic Zen is an essential cultural history of the nascent alternative video scene.

The VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK 2016 presents the video 26'1.1499" For A String Player (1973). 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.