Jud Yalkut has been a media arts pioneer since the early days of video. A multi-disciplinary artist, Yalkut has created a broad range of work from collage to single channel videos to interactive video installations.
For more information on Jud Yalkut, please his website.
Excerpt from: Outside the Box: New Cinematic Experiences (2005)
Transcript
NARRATOR
Communes, hippies and anti-establishment are common buzzwords that sometimes define the 1960’s in America. Jud Yalkut, a pioneer in video art, embraced the counter-culture movement and created some of the most poignant works that help describe these times. The guiding theme within Yalkut’s forty plus year career as an image-maker has been “spiritual transformation.”
JUD YALKUT
By 1965, I was involved in multimedia shows with the USCO group involving film combined with slides and electronics and many other things and it was that time that I started filming the pieces by Nam June Paik which were television pieces that did not exist on video tape and I would turn it into film material and that began our collaboration. So at that point on Video and film really progressed simultaneously for me as two things. Although I didn’t start working in video myself until 1968 when the first video portable equipment was available.
NARRATOR
Yalkut’s work is abstract. Rather than attempting to create a clear, crisp narrative film, he seeks to manipulate, abstract and transform filmed events, objects, and people from popular culture and the “natural world.”
JUD YALKUT
I like to build imagery so that there’s kind of a flow that happens. Dynamic tranquility is a term which I discovered, for example, like watching a sunset over the Pacific ocean when I was living in Big Sur and being aware of how calm it was, but how things were happening every second…the changes in color … in the air… and things, living things. there was something; there was energy that was constantly dynamic and changing and yet the whole thing was a very very kind of peaceful and meditative thing and so I thought of “dynamic tranquility” to capture that. And that’s a quality that I like to bring to a number of the things that I do in my media work.
NARRATOR
AS a filmmaker, Yalkut was one of the first to embrace video technology as a mode of artistic expression. According to Yalkut, before artists started making videotapes they were recording off of the video monitor and onto film. This is how, Turn, Turn, Turn began and his Collaboration with Nam June Paik started.
JUD YALKUT
There’s a kind of sensory overload that happens to people when they first see that film quite often, because of the different levels. but actually…but once you see the film again another time I think you can get into a meditative experience with it.
NARRATOR
Combining film and video did not begin without controversy.
JUD YALKUT
When video became available, People working in film. Well many of them were purists and Felt that film was something that shouldn’t be adulterated with this other new form.
JUD YALKUT
I always felt that working in both media was a way of like, as I used to put it, polishing each medium by rubbing them against each other so that they polished themselves into their essential essence.
NARRATOR
In 1972, after relocating from New York City to Southwest Ohio, Yalkut began working mostly with video due to cost and the lack of film Processing facilities nearby.
JUD YALKUT
I don’t call myself a Filmmaker or video artist anymore. i am a media artist because all of the media come into play. And whether its a single screen or multiple projection or installation work, it’s part of the same growth pattern for me—making new discoveries and sharing them through experiences with audiences can possibly appreciate and get into.
NARRATOR
In the year 2000, Jud Yalkut completed the video installation, “Vision Cantos” for his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
JUD YALKUT
It works between two channels, one has to do with sentient life on the earth and the other channel which is the human moving into the divine channel, which uses Tibetan iconography from the Tibetan museum in Staten Island, New York and this is all image processed material again and the original installation at the Whitney Museum the sentient channel was on either side of you, while the central channel was shrine-like with Tibetan iconography evolution, which you watched as you sat on yoga mats in a middle of a meditative immersive environment.
NARRATOR
Yalkut’s work has been described as “psychedelic.” However, he believes that it goes much deeper than mere physical perception.
JUD YALKUT
The experience I would like to see people have is an enhancing of their life Appreciative powers. To be able to see themselves in the world and the world around them in new and different ways once they experience the environment, the work–to see new colors, to see new aspects of how things evolve in the world and also relate better to the natural world in such a way that it becomes a harmonious experience rather than a disharmonious and destructive experience, which is what we are faced with in a good deal of contemporary life. so it is an enhancement of all of these positive aspects of what exists in creation and it’s a spiritual process which is becoming deeper and more important to me as my media work continues in both installation and single channel pieces.