Mixmanifestations, the most complex section of Dream Reel, is described by Yalkut as "a nonverbal communion and celebration for all channels within a totally surrounding environmental performance." 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 twenty-minute performance includes four to five 16mm. projectors, two 8mm. projectors, four carousel slide projectors, and two four-track stereo tape systems for the simultaneous playback of tapes and tape-loop cartridges.
The Single Wing Turquoise Bird
The Los Angeles group Single Wing Turquoise Bird came out of the environmental rock concert and light show genre that characterized the pop scene of the mid-sixties. Initially they staged huge three hundred and sixty-degree light shows for rock concerts at the Shrine Exposition Hall from 1967 to 1968. However, after the rock mania subsided, the group became affiliated with artist Sam Francis, who sponsored studios for them, first in Venice, then in an abandoned hotel on the beach in Santa Monica. In almost total obscurity the group perfected an art of light manipulation virtually unequaled by any mixed-media organization with the possible exception of USCO.
Partially-opened parachute (top) becomes Isobe's Floating Theatre for presentation of Jud Yalkut's Dream Reel intermedia environment at Oneonta, New York, March, 1969. Photos: courtesy of Yukihisa Isobe.
It's a combination of Jackson Pollock and 2001, of Hieronymus Bosch and Victor Vasarely, of Dali and Buckminster Fuller. Time-lapse clouds run across magenta bull's-eyes. Horses charge in slow motion through solar fires. The hands of a clock run backward. The moon revolves around the earth in a galaxy of Op Art polka dots. Flashing trapezoids and rhomboids whirl out of Buddha's eye. Pristine polygraphic forms are suspended in a phosphate void. Exploding isometrics give birth to insects. A praying mantis dances across an Oriental garden. Spiraling cellular cubes crash into electric-green fossil molds. The organic symbiosis of universal man. A huge magnified centipede creeps across a glowing sun. Cascading phosphorescent sparks. Waffle grid-patterns strobe-flash over Roy Lichtenstein's 1930's Ultramoderne architecture. A butterfly emerges from its cocoon. New dimensions of space and time. Bodies become plants. White translucent squids wrestle with geometric clusters. The sound is Terry Riley and LaMonte Young and Mozart, seasoned with Pink Floyd, spiked with Cream.
Unlike other light artists, The Single Wing Turquoise Bird has no definite program; each presentation evolves from the interacting egos of the group working in harmony. What we see cannot be called a work of art as traditionally conceived: a unique, perishable, nonreplaceable entity reflecting the talents of an individual. They don't produce an object in the sense that a movie is an object; they produce software, not hardware. We witness an expression of group consciousness at any given moment. The range of their vocabulary is limitless because it's not confined to one point in time, one idea, one emotion. Depending on the variety of basic materials (they use everything from liquids to video projection to laser interferometry) they can continue into infinity, never repeating a single "word," always evolving visual-kinetic equivalents of the psychic-social climate of the moment. Their work strikes one precisely as a synaesthetic movie, yet a movie in which each image emanates from its own projector, its own human sensitivity.
Two images from the constantly-evolving lightworks of the Single Wing Turquoise Bird in their studio at Venice, California.
Photo: Gene Youngblood.
The group: Jeff Perkins, films and slides; Peter Mays, films and slides; Jon Greene, overhead projectors, liquids, technical innovations; Michael Scroggins, overhead projectors, liquids, technical innovations; Allen Keesling, slides, rheostats, improvised equipment; Charles Lippincott, group management.
"Previously," remarked Peter Mays, "all my experience in art was very personal where I had total control. Working with a group there's a whole different kind of feeling, a kind of communication, a collective vision and meaning that's like Hermann Hesse's idea in The Glass Bead Game— taking everything in all cultures and communicating comprehensively on all levels of society simultaneously. In a sense that's what the new consciousness is about, comprehensive living. Our language definitely is anti-Minimal. It's a reaction to Minimal Art just as Minimal Art was a reaction to the complexities of Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism. We're making Maximal Art. I see the whole history of visual art in one historical progression and the light show occupies a very crucial position in that line. It seems that the spirit of Abstract Expressionism has been distilled into a pure form in the light show; sort of carrying on the tradition while at the same time transforming it into something more universal."
Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern: Theatre of Light
The image of a water fountain illuminated by strobe light from below— each droplet frozen in its arc like some priceless crystal in metamorphosis— characterizes the ephemeral beauty of Cassen's and Stern's "Kinetic Light" compositions. Their art is contemplative and peaceful as opposed to the chaos of most intermedia environments. They seek to sharpen one's consciousness, not to overwhelm it. Almost symbolically, their studio/home "and small cosmic game room" in New York is situated just around the corner from the 1920's site of Thomas Wilfred's Art Institute of Light.
Sequence of images from Circles, a kinetic composition by Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, Theatre of Light, New York, 1969. Photo: Roy Blakey.
Reclining on black cushions in a black-draped room, one encounters light used not as a backdrop for a rock-and-roll group but as "a medium struggling to stand quite independently, a catalyst for its own kind of experience." A typical presentation may incorporate as many as six-thousand slides and twenty-five different projectors, many of them designed especially by Cassen and Stern. This The-atre of Light has been seen with opera, in Stravinsky's Rake's Prog-ress for the Boston Opera Company; with dance, in the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins at Vancouver's Art Festival; with the music of Berg, Messiaen, Mozart, and Scriabin as played by Peter Serkin at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto; for Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House; and for Timothy Leary's "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" psychedelic celebrations.
In collaboration with the visionary Japanese architect Yukihisa Isobe, they have performed kinetic-light events in black vinyl pneumatic domes, transparent inflatables, and other tensile struc-tures. They have extended the use of fiber optics into dazzling per-ceptual exercises. In Vibrations at the New York Architectural League in the winter of 1967-68 they constructed a shimmering universe of mirrored mylar surfaces, water pools and fountains, plexiglass cubes, geodesic, and other polyhedral structures, front and rear projections, and light-activated sound events in which photoelectric cells responded to color as well as intensity.