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Félicité An Interview with Alain Gomis

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Félicité is a proud, free-willed woman working as a singer in a bar in Kinshasa. Her life is thrown into turmoil when her 14-year-old son falls victim to an accident.

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Full book: When the Moon Waxes Red, Representation Gender and Cultural Politics 1991 by Trinh T

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When The Moon Waxes Red Representation, Gender And Cultural Politics Trinh T. Minh

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When The Moon Waxes Red Representation, Gender And Cultural Politics Trinh T. Minh

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Trinh T - When the Moon Waxes Red Representation Gender and Cultural Politics_1991

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Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation

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Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation

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Video: liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph, Artist Talk

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liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph, Artist TalkNOT

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liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph, Artist TalkNOT

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liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph, Artist Talk

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liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph- Artist Talk. October 6, 2016.
 Full-Length Artist Talk

With Dr. Lauren Cramer (Pace University) and Dr. Alessandra Ranego (Georgia State University)

Video shot by Brandon Bristol
Edited by Reggie Hill & Anna Winter/Cedric Simmons

In conjunction with Symposium featuring: 

Regina Bradley (Armstrong State University, Savannah)
Derek Conrad Murray (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Lauren M. Cramer (Pace University)
Greg Zinman (Georgia Tech)
Kara Keeling (University of Southern California)

Panels facilitated by Jenny Gunn and Daren Fowler (GSU)

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Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness

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Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness

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Ontology -once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside- does not permit us to understand the being of the black...

-Frantz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness

For all of the vibrancy of the community described by black artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles in the 1970s-including the exhibitions at the Brockman Gallery, gatherings at Studio Z and Othervisions Studio, and collaboration throughout the city-mainstream critical writing's treatment of these artists and the scene that incubated them merely skims the surface. Certainly a number of these artists have, after the fact, gone down in history as important figures. Among them are Senga Nengudi, Barbara McCullough, Fred Eversley, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Charles White, and David Hammons. But many of these artists' careers skew in the direction of being "hometown heroes" in Los Angeles; they are ghettoized to consideration primarily when the art world wants to think local-a consistent trend when it comes to considering art that comes out of Los Angeles-or to think along racial lines.

Video and performance artist Ulysses Jenkins is but one of these under-recognized artists, despite his large and potent body of work and his involvement in collaborations with many artists throughout California through the collective of Othervisions Studio, Electronic Cafe International, and other initiatives. Jenkins, now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been included in retrospective exhibitions such as Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston). But when his work is discussed, it is almost always in passing-garnering no more than a few paragraphs of interest, the bulk of which considers it a commentary on positive and negative representations and stereotypes of black life - a fate that befalls many a black artist.

These readings of Jenkins's work lean heavily on his 1978 video Mass of Images, a recorded performance that does indeed engage black stereotypes perpetuated by the American media. In the work, Jenkins appears on a set accompanied by a stack of televisions, his face obscured by a plastic mask and sunglasses, neck wrapped in American-flag-print scarf, and sporting an Adidas t-shirt underneath a bathrobe, arranged such that only the "ID" of Adidas is visible. The video cuts between this scene and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American films and TV. Jenkins repeats a mantra as he settles into a wheelchair and wheels himself toward center stage: "You're just a mass of images you've gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows. / The hurting thing; the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins / I don't and I won't relate / and I think for some it's too late!"

Continuing the refrain, he gathers his strength and rears to smash the TVs but falters. He gasps and laughs, rather manically, and says, "Oh, I'd love to do this, but they won't let me." He turns toward the camera, repeats the mantra one more time, and then the screen goes dark.

The few published texts on the work that are in circulation-and they are minimal-focus on the inserted panels featuring images of Hattie McDaniel in her all too familiar mammy guise, Bert Williams in blackface, Allen Hoskins playing "Farina" in The Little Rascals, and other instances of blackface and racist imagery. The authors argue that Jenkins aims to illustrate the possibility of overcoming the power of these representations. In the catalog for Now Dig This!, for example, Roberto Tejada focuses on Jenkins's regaining of his composure following his outburst as signaling the "possibility of...self-possession within the mass of images that work to contain black bodies in representation." However, I would argue against Tejada's claim, because this possibility is unrealized in the work. At the video's closing, we leave Jenkins exactly where we found him, repeating the same refrain. Other readings of the video find Jenkins generally critiquing cultural stereotypes, again performing the work that has come to be expected of the black artist of his time.

Across all readings of Mass of Images, the lack of interest in Jenkins's failure to destroy the television sets is surprising. If the conceptual thrust of the work is meant to be the black-artist-as-subject's triumph over his flattened, essentialized, racist image-as readings so far have claimed it to be-then we must ask the question: Why doesn't Jenkins smash them? He tells us why. It is because "they won't let" him. The line "they won't let me" betrays a wholehearted desire to commit the act. Jenkins wants to smash the televisions but someone is stopping him. This moment, this break in the otherwise meditative pacing and relative calm of the video, becomes a focal point and in turn positions desire as the unseen force propelling the work. Jenkins noted, in a 2008 interview, that he very carefully positioned the bathrobe over his Adidas t-shirt such that only the "ID" is visible to the viewer, as a sly nod to Freud, signaling that he is concerned primarily with the libidinal economy of the work. Here, we are not quite within the domain of ethics or politics-the domains that the Black Nationalist agenda and Jenkins's Black Arts Movement contemporaries would have had him occupy. The only politics here is a desire to be himself.

Focusing on this break and viewing Mass of Images as an exercise in failure, rather than a victory over representation, we follow Jenkins into a rather unusual realm of inquiry, one that makes sense to have downplayed when it comes to historicizing black art of the period. Jenkins and his Los Angeles contemporaries, such as Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and (for a brief period) David Hammons, were often accused of making art that was not political enough or "black enough" due to their interest in new media and abstraction and their willingness to draw on sources from outside of the black tradition. Following Jenkins down this rabbit hole unravels much of the twentieth century's work toward a black politic of representation and provides a counter-argument against attempts by Black Arts Movement leaders, such as Larry Neal and Ron Karenga, toward a black aesthetic and a black art that articulates a self-determined blackness through images that "speak to and inspire black people." Jenkins departs from this concern over what Frank Wilderson III calls the "hegemonic value" and pedagogical power of visual representations of blackness and black people, which ruled black art criticism and black cinematic theory of the time. Instead, Jenkins is interested in questioning the very nature of blackness itself.

During the period from the creation of Mass of Images through the performance Adams Be Doggereal (1982), one finds Jenkins asking a specific set of questions. These works should be viewed as a marked period in Jenkins's oeuvre, one that goes beyond "cultural critique," reaching into a zone of inquiry less acceptable to the mainstream. During this period, which includes the video/performance Two Zone Transfer as well as the performance Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (both, 1979), we witness a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed on him and ends with an abandonment of this pursuit. By the end of this period, Jenkins-in a semi-linear progression-has moved away from grappling with the slippage between the black subject and its representation and toward a non-ontological blackness, or what he deems a new black universalism.

Let us begin again, from here. Jenkins started where many young black artists find themselves. Studying at Santa Monica College (SMC) and later at Otis College of Art and Design, "in the shadow of Hollywood," Jenkins was aware of the conflicting interests of the entertainment industry and the African-American community. The works he developed following shortly after his enrollment at SMC take to task the media's role in perpetuating these stereotypes, exploring the resultant exacerbation of a black "double-consciousness," to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois's terminology. Mass of Images is chronologically the first of these critiques, followed by Two Zone Transfer and Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (1979). Two Zone Transfer follows closely in the footsteps of Mass of Images, with Jenkins zeroing in on blackface and minstrelsy's effects on black Americans. The video, also staged as a performance at Otis College, opens with Jenkins boarding a city bus, where we witness white riders' suspicion of him as a black man. Jenkins drifts off to sleep, and a figure in a dream says, "You know why you can't sleep; it's the same old problem that every black person in this country has had." Jenkins replies: "You mean the misunderstandings I encounter, or the same old, basic image problem?" The "image problem" spoken of is the career-defining conundrum of black representation.

However, Two Zone Transfer marks a shift in Jenkins's approach to the image problem, away from the traditional inquiries of first wave black filmmaking and film theory-described by Frank Wilderson as an intense preoccupation with "identifying and critiquing the recurrence of stereotyped representation in Hollywood films," and exemplified in the writings of such critics as Don Bogle, Thomas Cripps, and Gladstone L. Yearwood. Instead, Jenkins looks to the source of the problem, interrogating the history of early twentieth century vaudeville. On screen, Jenkins is joined by three actors-Kerry James Marshall, Greg Pitts, and Ronnie Nichols-who wear masks in the likeness of presidents Nixon and Ford. In a strange layering of whiteface and blackface, the masks are smeared unevenly with black paint. The men brag about the history of minstrelsy in the United States and how they have, for years, manipulated and misused African-Americans' images and culture in order to distort society's understanding of black life.

Here, Jenkins recognizes blackness itself as an image rather than focusing on its inaccuracy when contrasted with what might be posed as an authentic black life, once again departing from the efforts of black art and cinematic theory of the time. "The image problem" is not that the image fails to correspond to reality, but that the image has partly crafted reality, inextricably linking Jenkins's own experience-as exemplified by his earlier interaction on the bus-to popular images of blackness and black people. The developing line of thought here resonates with Frantz Fanon's realization of blackness as some "impure product." As Fred Moten reads Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" (in Black Skin, White Masks), blackness has always been and always will be "a function of a making that is not its own, an intentionality that could never have been its own."

Traces of this position are also visible in the earlier Mass of Images. In Jenkins's refrain, he repeats: "The hurting thing / the hidden pain was written and bitten into your veins." If we take "the hurting thing / the hidden pain" as a reference to suffering as a constitutive element of black lived experience, then Mass of Images shares Two Zone Transfer 's emphasis on the origin of blackness as external to itself. Here, his use of "written" could be read as a gesture toward a biologically determined blackness, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek shout out to out-of-fashion scientific racism. Jenkins is a black person, an individual of African descent. Blackness is "written" into his DNA. In contrast, "bitten into your veins" points to blackness as a virus or contagion-a theme that we find throughout rhetoric around blackness and black cultural production, from racist associations between blackness and actual disease to the tendency to laud black music as "contagious" and black joy as "infectious." Whether "written" or "bitten," blackness appears caught in an apparent contradiction. Jenkins, in effect, admits the seemingly paradoxical distinction between written black and bitten blackness. Jenkins himself is black in all his appearances and in his biographical experience, but his blackness is, again, an "impure product." It is an external contagion, circulating independent of Jenkins's own embodiment, "bitten into his veins" by mass media, engineered by white America long before his birth.

Two Zone Transfer has, in essence, a dramatic "to be continued" ending. After the history lesson in Two Zone Transfer, the video cuts to Jenkins, dressed as a preacher, delivering a sermon about the biblical figure Noah; in the following scene, he performs a rendition of a James Brown song with the actors, now unmasked, singing back-up. The video ends with Jenkins waking up from the dream and saying, invigorated, "After a dream like that, I know I've got direction. I know what I'm up against."

Imagine a commercial break, and the next episode begins.

-

Later in 1979, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem opened at Otis College in a gallery that was empty except for a small table upon which sits a television set. Ulysses Jenkins, dressed as a janitor, tidies the small set while a confused audience waits for his performance to begin. Jenkins surprises them by sitting down at the table and opening a book; through his reading he discovers that "the African-American male is perceived as a sex object in the Blacksploitation [era] of the 1970s."

Jenkins pulls a cigar box from under the table, from which he procures a vibrating dildo. Importantly, it is a "white" dildo, with the glans, or head, painted black-a form of "blackface." Jenkins then disrobes, "revealing pasties with Superman's "S," a rhinestone in his bellybutton, and silver boxer shorts," suddenly embodying the sexualized black male that he's read about. Jenkins reacts by pulling out a fake pistol and shooting the dildo. The dildo falls into the view of a closed-circuit video camera, which in turn magnifies it on the monitor's screen. It visibly gyrates from the impact of the shots. As recounted on Jenkins's website, "the artist realizes [that this is] the perception he confronts in contemporary society and continues [to] shoot the dildo. This stereotype won't die...so he realize[s] he has to manually turn off [the television] and walk away."

The entire scene echoes "The Fact of Blackness," in which Fanon writes: "I came into the world imbued with the will to find meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects."

In "The Case of Blackness," Moten argues that "The Fact of Blackness" is a mistranslation; it should read: "The Lived-Experience of the Black," which would more openly signal Fanon's phenomenological interests. Moten narrates Fanon's realization of the ontological impossibility of a black subjectivity within civil society. Fanon argues, "The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man." Ontology-by way of Hegel-is attainable only when a consciousness confronts an "equally independent and self-contained" other. "Moreover, this other must have 'nothing in it which is not itself the origin." For the black (non)subject, this is an impossibility from the outset, as blackness itself is a condition whose very existence is contingent upon and derived from whiteness, making "the black" an always already impure other. In Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem, Jenkins thus parallels Fanon; the artist realizes that he himself exists at the limit-and beyond the limit-of ontology, unable to overtake his own representation, in this instance, as a sexual object. Caught in a literal closed circuit of representation between the dildo, its image, his own body, and the text that describes the processes acting upon him, he is left with no ability to contest his own objectification. Exhausted by his ongoing battle with the black image-which is exemplified in this work and others, as well as in his day-to-day life-Jenkins withdraws fully.

Jenkins moves on to a much larger question, an inquiry that entirely exceeds cultural critique. Now freed from the stalemate between black life and the white gaze through his own withdrawal, he asks: If blackness cannot be in the eyes of civil-white-society, if black people cannot articulate themselves as a black individuals, untethered to blackness, then what is it, in fact, to be black? What is the character of blackness?

As Jenkins approaches Adams Be Doggereal in 1981, he has already parsed out the difference between blackness and the black individual, and understands the ontological impossibility of the latter. He has renounced his desire to just be himself, understanding now that he, as a black man, is always already "All Blacks," as Fanon would say. Or, as Cedric Robinson wrote, Jenkins has renounced actual being for an acceptance of the historical being, the "ontological totality." He has always already "consent[ed] not to be a single being." As Kara Keeling writes, "The Black therefore exists as a collective subject whose governing fiction is not personal but social."

With this distinction in mind, it is difficult to find the exact language to speak of where Jenkins finds himself at this juncture, for his concern appears at once as neither for "the Black" nor for blackness, as well as for both the black and for blackness. This is to say, Jenkins is thinking the gap between the two, or as Fred Moten so eloquently phrased it in "The Case of Blackness": "[T]he wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning-or, perhaps too 'trans-literally,' the (plain[-sung]) sense-of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects."

Moten, too, lingers in the gap, in the mistranslation of Fanon's "lived-experience" as "fact," of the phenomenologically black and the ontologically-voided blackness. Thinking this gap, Jenkins builds upon Fanon and anticipates Moten's similar negotiations, resonances that situate him within some sort of Afro-pessimist/Black Optimist tradition ( if we can even claim there is such a tradition). In this continuum, Afro-pessimism is something like a "[theory] of black positionality" that spreads outward from Fanon's (non)ontology rather than a school of thought. Moten writes that one of the great beauties of Afro-pessimist thought is that it "allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is." This is where we find Jenkins in Adams Be Doggereal.

In the performance, Jenkins's nothing, his approximated black nothingness, takes the form of the glass prism, collectively discovered by the artist and his collaborators in a pile of dirt in his studio. Jenkins recalls the object as symbolizing a "new self." The prism is materially present yet curiously empty, its primary function being to act as a filter for light. A prism can be used, as Sir Isaac Newton discovered long ago, to reflect and refract light-that is to disperse white light into beams of different colors. Prior to Newton, it was believed that white light was colorless; his experimentation with prisms proved that it was quite opposite, that it is comprised of all of the colors of the rainbow.

Jenkins's use of the prism can be theorized in a number of ways, all of which might be said to negotiate the simultaneous plentitude and void that blackness presents. First, we might read the prism as a filter of sorts, where blackness might be a lens through which to view the world. We see a similar position in William Pope.L's Black Factory. On the occasion of that work's first instantiation, Pope.L declared that "blackness is a lever to talk about otherness, ...just a funnel." A prism is a starting point from which to think a multitude of positions-a rather humanist, multiculturalist conclusion. Second, Jenkins might be proposing a radicalized departure from Pope.L's stance, one where the prism-considering its role in proving that white light is not colorless-might speak to the notion that all other positions have been and must be articulated through and against "the Black." This, again, follows in the Afro-pessimist line of thinking, where blackness is the non-communicable body against which white civil society constitutes itself. Third, the prism rests between emptiness and fullness. It is, as noted above, at once materially present and transparent; it also contains the potential for the apparent emptiness of white light and fullness of the rainbow. In this case, it embodies the paradoxical emptiness and fullness, plenitude and nothingness of a black (non)ontology.

Looking back upon his own work from this period, Jenkins says that his goal was always to illustrate the possibility of a new black universalism. It is impossible to say whether this was fully realized-or what that would even look like in practice. However, we can say that, in Adams Be Doggereal, Jenkins does realize some sort of expansion of blackness that begins to repair or move beyond its originary ontological failure. The prism effectively positions blackness as a stance from which all else must be thought, much like François Laruelle's uchromia, wherein we might "think from the point of view of Black as what determines color in the last instance rather than what limits it." From here, blackness, in all of its para-ontological glory, destabilizes not only its own existence but also all other racial ontologies that it exists to constitute. And from here, thinking "blackness as what determines color," blackness as the starting point and not the limit, we might throw into question other artistic and philosophical interests in the color itself-and therefore reassess the position of all those whom it marks as well. Thinking of blackness, "the Black," in this way activates its darkness and allows a consideration of its depth, its ability to reflect and absorb. As Laruelle writes, "a phenomenal blackness entirely fills the essence of man."

Aria Dean is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA.

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Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness

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Ontology -once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside- does not permit us to understand the being of the black...

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Film & Video: Shirley Clarke - Ornette Coleman: Made in America (1985)

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Ornette: Made In America Film & Video: Shirley Clarke - Ornette Coleman: Made in America (1985)

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Ornette: Made In America Film & Video: Shirley Clarke - Ornette Coleman: Made in America (1985)

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Shirley Clarke

Ornette: Made In America captures Ornette Coleman's evolution over three decades. Returning home to Fort Worth, Texas in 1983 as a famed performer and composer, documentary footage, dramatic scenes and some of the first music video-style segments ever made, chronicle his boyhood in segregated Texas and his subsequent emergence as an American cultural pioneer and world-class icon. Among those who contribute to the film include William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Buckminster Fuller, Don Cherry, Yoko Ono, Charlie Haden, Robert Palmer, Jayne Cortez and John Rockwell.

Ornette: Made in America is essential for anyone hoping to understand the history of jazz and the fertile creative exchange that highlighted the 60's and 70's in America. It is a portrayal of the inner life of an artist-innovator.

The innovative techniques that director Shirley Clarke and producer Kathelin Hoffman employed in this film very closely parallel the music of the man who is its subject. Clarke defied traditional documentary formats to reveal Ornette's extraordinary vision through her equally extraordinary filmmaking artistry.

Critically acclaimed when it released in 1985, the film is even more significant today, as Coleman's influence has increased, while Clarke and Hoffman's interpretation of his life and times remain as fresh and exciting as ever.

The film focuses on the struggles and triumphs of Ornette Coleman's life as well as on the inspired intelligence that spawned his creativity and ensured his success. Clarke's footage includes Ornette in conversation with family and friends; excerpts of interviews, riffs and travels, along with footage of his performances-in his hometown of Fort Worth, TX, in New York, in Morocco and beyond-presents the most comprehensive record of his career available.

Ornette: Made in America explores the rhythms, images and myths of America seen through they eyes of an artist's ever-expanding imagination and experience.

Cast:
Ornette Coleman ... Himself
Demon Marshall ... Young Ornette
Eugene Tatum ... Young Ornette
William S. Burroughs ... Himself
Don Cherry ... Himself
Denardo Coleman ... Himself
Jayne Cortez ... Herself
Brion Gysin ... Himself
Charlie Haden ... Himself

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Shirley Clarke - Ornette Coleman: Made in America (1985)

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The Black Body As Archive Of Memory by Holloway 2013

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If any one aphorism can characterise the experience of black people in this country, it might be that the white-authored national narrative deliberately contradicts the histories our bodies know. — Elizabeth Alexander

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Video interview: Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on - Serpentine Galleries

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‘When making a piece I want people to feel like they have space and agency’ –Sondra Perry

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Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on - Serpentine Galleries

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Sondra Perry constructs multifaceted narratives that explore the imagining, or imaging, of blackness throughout history.

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Video: Park Nights 2016: Fred Moten, Eileen Myles and Sondra Perry

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Readings by poets Fred Moten and Eileen Myles in The Royal Geographical Society. Multidisciplinary artist Sondra Perry responded to this context with a moving-image intervention.

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Readings by poets Fred Moten and Eileen Myles in The Royal Geographical Society. Multidisciplinary artist Sondra Perry responded to this context with a moving-image intervention.

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Fred Moten - Author, Eileen Myles - Author, Sondra Perry - Interdisciplinary artist

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Park Nights 2016: Fred Moten, Eileen Myles and Sondra Perry

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The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

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The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

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How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture?

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A Thing Called Art And A Thing Called Communication - Random Access Information

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A Thing Called Art And A Thing Called Communication.

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A Thing Called Art And A Thing Called Communication.

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WE HAVE A THING called art and a thing called communication, and sometimes their curves overlap.

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WE HAVE A THING called art and we have a thing called communication, and sometimes their curves overlap. (A lot of art does not have much to do with communication and a lot of communication has no artistic content.) In the middle there is something like an appleseed, and that is our theme-maybe our dream, too. When we look back at the history of communication, the problem until recently has been how to record information. At first people recorded on clay plates or in stone. Before that "plus" information was memory, "minus" information was forgetting, and if we do not forget, we cannot record. There is a Chinese anecdote which says that there are these things called dreams. In the "plus" reality we have lots of frustrations. In dreams we have the same thing but in negative pictures, where the "minus" is discharged, and becomes zero: a balance of plus and minus. Now there are two problems. First, with electronic memories, we are not allowed to forget. If we remember everything, or much too much, we get an idée fixe and become paranoid. Then we have to go to an analyst (or artist) and be discharged. The thing with videotape is that we now have too many recordings. But the biggest problem is for video curators. When you are a curator of painting or sculpture, you can look at thousands of works a day. But in video, everybody makes 30-minute videotapes, because Sony makes 30-minute video cassettes. So the video curator has to look at thousands and thousands of hours of videotapes.

This problem with video is not in the recording, but in the retrieval. Richard Leakey ¹ had several ideas that impressed me. One is that, for the past 50 million years, human beings have had color perception, but before that, monkeys used to be like owls. They were night people. Monkeys used to sleep during the day and walk around the forest at night. Then about 50 million years ago, monkeys came out of the forest to the edge of the woods and became daytime animals. As soon as monkeys became daytime animals they perceived color pictures, which leads to an interesting conclusion. The reason artists stay up late at night is because artists are more like monkeys-closer to roots. (It makes sense that artists are closer to the monkey than to the businessman.) Another extension of Leakey's ideas is about the honeybee having color perception. The reason flowers have color is to attract the honeybee. If the honeybee did not have color perception, by a chance of God or by mutations, then all the flowers would be black and white. (It is very nice to imagine black-and-white flowers throughout the world, for the shape of flowers would be much more exquisite than now.) The flowers would have to attract the honeybee by shape alone, not color.

Video is a very crude model of life. It is like doing your own anthropology, because through video you learn about life. For instance, before I worked in video, I never thought color was a function of time. People think that when you make a painting you draw upon random access to color. You paint red here, or yellow, or blue, choosing this or that. But when you look at nature, every season has its own colors. Spring has certain colors, like light green. It starts out with light green, then April and May have lots of different flower colors, and summer is very blue. Autumn goes from yellow to red, and then winter is gray. Video colors were made on exactly the same principle. I think it was a genius, an artist, who designed the video color system. In television there are no pictures, just lines. It is like weaving. The difference between weaving and television is that television is constantly weaving and that image can always be rewoven and woven again according to new patterns-that is how I designed a video synthesizer. Television also goes faster. In the '50s a group of RCA engineers produced television with only one line. Because television space does not exist, all spatial information had to be translated into lines and dots with no width, so that the signal could be transmitted, without wires, on a single channel. They also had to put all colors into that line, so they devised a kind of social contract. There is one wave that is called the color sub-carrier wave, which is one second divided by three and a half millions. Although they are already very short, they are again subdivided by many phases: e.g. seven phases representing rainbow color bars. The first one-seventh of this short distance is called blue: the next one-seventh of this wave is called yellow: the next one orange: then magenta, etc. This circuit opens and closes very fast (21 million times a second), passing the colors in sequence. As in nature, in television the succession of very, very fast time makes color. It is a social contract. When you make films, you dye the chemicals with nature, through the lens. But in television, there is no direct relationship between reality and the pictures just code systems. So we got into time.

ACCORDING TO PLATO, THE visual arts are said to imitate nature. Music supposedly imitates the song of a bird, or according to Ambrose ² the rhythm of working. What video imitates is the time component and the actual process of aging. For instance, when you work with video- or audiotape, at the beginning it decreases very slowly, and by the end of the tape it decreases very, very quickly. Everybody has that experience. When you look back at your own life, you see that when you were a child, the days were very very long. At around the age of 30 or 35 the days get faster, and after 40 the days get faster still. Our time consciousness, how we experience the passing of time, is exactly like a tape. It is not new or unnatural that time consciousness imitates tape reels because tape has the same structure as trees. So tape imitates trees, and we imitate tape reels.
It was Shigeko who invented death for video. ³
When you look back to music at the turn of the century before the invention of the record as a multiplication system, only classical musicians, like Beethoven and Schubert, were known beyond their own villages. The vast industry of popular music did not exist. However, in different villages popular music existed as folk songs, which were never heard outside the village boundaries. Today classical music makes up only a small part of the music world, and to most people music means pop music. The quantitative relationship of classical music and popular music got turned upside down by the invention of the "record." Earlier there were a few geniuses, like Scott Joplin, who invented a musical style suited to multiplication. Joplin and other musicians thought about multiplication from the beginning, during the process of composition. (It is rather strange because no painter thinks while painting, about what his painting would look like in a color slide, even though the NEA panels often choose their grantees from color slides.) Scott Joplin was much more influential than Schoenberg and even Mantovani was more important than Schoenberg in terms of social structures. You cannot put Schoenberg's music into an elevator. Who will be the Scott Joplin of the visual arts when the visual arts are made for television in the next century? This will happen because art is the oldest form of communication.

MANY PEOPLE MAKE, BUT only a few get transported, because artists and dealers do not make very much money. The people who make the money are all of the transporters and insurance people. It has been like this since the '50s. Now, with the onset of the energy crisis, sculptors and the big color-field painters have to be very well known to have their work shipped around the world, and even for them it is getting harder and harder. There was a joke going around that the organizers of Documenta were going to drop all Americans, and show only West Europeans in Kassel, in 1982, to save money on freight. It is a concrete problem. Someone like Scott Joplin surpassed Schoenberg because he systemically made the music to be shipped out.

The artist who will make it big in the next century will be the one who is capable of programming big paintings into transportable shapes, because the energy crisis will go on and on until the year 2050. If we succeed in fusion in the year 2050, we can again paint big old paintings and make big sculpture like Rodin. But nobody is sure about it, because we still have not reached the break-even point in fusion research.

The artist's job is to think about the future. Now, future projection is very difficult. Herman Kahn, the best-known futurist, failed in two major areas. In 1967 he published his study of the year 2000. A lot of foundation money was spent to make this book, but when the book came out in 1967, Kahn had not even mentioned ecology or environmental pollution. In 1967 the hippies were making a big thing about ecology. Kahn, the best-known futurist, was not even as good as the hippies in the street. Then in 1971 the same Mr. Kahn published a study of the '70s, and again he did not mention anything about the energy crisis. He is still making a living as a futurist.

When we think about the future, we have to make several different projections, one being whether we succeed in fusion or not. Of course, if we succeed in fusion we are back to 1962 with cheap energy (the only problem being pollution). If we fail at fusion, there is no future, really. Solar power will not take care of our kind of life style. Fusion is the only area where the Americans and Russians are working together, because nobody knows if it will succeed or not. Fusion is basically imitating God. With videotape we imitate God only half-way, in that we record everything. We can rewind videotape, but we cannot rewind our lives. The videotape playback machine has "fast-forward," "rewind," "go," and "stop" buttons, while our lives have only one button-go. Today there is Betamax, a God-defying device, because you can see the nine p.m. Public Television drama before the seven p.m. news. That sort of thing never happens in life. If I had known when I was 25 how I would feel as a poor artist in New York City at 47. I would have planned my life differently. There is no way to know in advance, because life has no "fast-forward" or "rewind" buttons. So, you go step by step, and if you make a mistake, you try to correct it with another mistake. We hire teachers and pay them because a teacher, like a Betamax, can go "fast-forward."

Back to random access. Time-based information and random access information are differentiated by the retrieval process. The "book'' is the oldest form of random access information. The only reason why videotape is so boring and television so bad is that they are time-based information. Human beings have not really learned how to structure time-based information in recording and retrieval very well, because it is new. No one says that the Encyclopedia Britannica is boring, although it has lots of information, because you can go to any page of the encyclopedia, to A or B or C or M or X, whereas when you watch videotapes or television, you have to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G. While the comparison is simple, the difference is very big. That is why the book is alive and will be alive until electronic information conquers the random access problem.

Music and dance, which are time-based, are more successful, because both have, maybe, a half-million years of history (which makes them much older than painting). As Leakey also said, the reason painting suddenly appeared about 20,000 years ago was not because people suddenly became smart but be cause, before there were agricultural communities, everybody moved 2,000 miles every year. So even if you had the best paintings in The Museum of Modern Art, you could not carry them. The only art forms people could carry were music, verbal poetry, and dance art forms without gravity, that could be stored in the brain. So the oil and the energy crises are problems of gravity. The reason we have the oil problem today is that for millions of years, when we moved a 60-kilogram body, we only moved a 60- kilogram body. But over the last 50 years we move a 60-kilogram body by moving a 300-kilogram car. It is the most stupid system ever invented. The only way to conquer the situation and make oil obsolete, is to move our ideas without moving our bodies at all. I coined the phrase "stationary nomad" which we are not yet. You dig up ruin after ruin to understand the past, as if you understood the present. I call it a new phrase, "the archeology of NOW," which is what the Marpets' video documentary is all about. ⁴

JOHN CAGE HAD amazing idea in the '50s. The first electronic art was electronic music, which also was strictly a time-based art until 1958. That year Cage performed at the Darmstadt new music summer course, after which he said "It's as dead as a doornail." He said he wanted to make electronic music that is playable in either three seconds or 30 hours, without a definite retrieval time (similar to the encyclopedia). Cage is an incredible genius to have seen this problem this audio- and videotape problem that there are particular lengths that cannot be changed. There are video junkies who watch whole videotapes, but most people refuse to watch whole videotapes any more. Combining random access with video is a major problem that needs to be solved. Of course, MCA and other video disc manufacturers are trying to solve it, and it seems likely that in video, the tape format will be gotten rid of completely. Now that people are talking about recording everything digitally on a sheet of magnetic paper, without tape, random access becomes immediately more plausible.

Paintings in the next century will most likely be electronic wallpapers which can be programmed to be very complicated or very simple. There will be standardized electronic canvases, so that if you wanted to show your paintings in Iceland or the Republic of the Congo, you would just mail your program card. The card would be inserted and the canvas would light up from behind. This kind of system has to come, otherwise there be no communication among artists at all. There would also be electronic still pictures (which are related to the same energy situation). As film becomes more and more expensive, there is no reason why photographs need exist. When you record a situation electronically, you can make a direct, high-quality paper print, thus skipping the chemical stage completely. The next stage will be electronic still cameras. It will be a low-light camera, so no one will have any secrets at all. Pocket-size video cameras are already really taking off. Combining a videotape recorder and a camera in one, similar to Super-8, these small cameras will record onto one-hour cassettes of quite good quality.

Since 1961, Joseph Buys and I have had a wonderful kind of contact. I found out at one point that he was saved by the Tartars in Russia during World War II, when his plane was shot down. The Tartars and Koreans are very close, even though the Tartar lives in the Russian Crimea, almost half-way around the world from Korea. We compared the customs of the Tartar and the Korean shaman, and found that they are close, which is amazing. This supports Leakey's theory that music and dance are much older, because they were the only systems that could economically be transported. In the future, the only artwork that will survive will have no gravity at all.

There are so many interesting things that are not known. What I am thinking of is a kind of negative case of science fiction. Science fiction is where you figure out from very little knowledge, the future and outer space. But what happened 20,000 years ago before records of any kind were made? It will be very interesting when we research and figure all of this out.
Nam June Paik, originally trained as a musician, is one of the innovators of video art. Park began his artistic activities in conversation with the German Fluxus artists, who in the '50s, were combining elements of music, dance, theater, poetry, painting and sculpture in their performance events. Paik lives in New York and Dusseldorf. where he teaches. "Random Access Information" was originally presented as a lecture given by Nam June Paik at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, on March 25, 1980, as part of the "Video Viewpoints" series, curated by Barbara London.
POSTSCRIPT
There are Yang people and Yin people. Yang people create mass art (like Rock music), and Yin people create aristocratic, elitist and snobbish art. These differences will continue even if the visual arts establish a multiplication system equivalent to todays music industry. The best part of Cage's creation is his LIVE electronic music, which is a whole TIME-SPACE art, which can never be made into either audio or video disc. Higher video art will take the form of video installations, and a kind of notation form will develop to "convey" certain kinds of artwork: the conductor Eugene Ormandy "interprets" Beethoven's Third Symphony from the score. A young video curator in the 21st century will "interpret" a video installation by Peter Campus from notations and photographs.

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NOTES

1. Richard Leakey is an anthropologist who has led numerous expeditions in Africa. He was Administrative Director of the Natural Museums of Kenya from 1970-1974, and has written articles for various scientific journals.

2. August Wilhelm Ambrose (1816-76) was a music historian.

3. Shigeko Kubota, My Father, 1975.

4. Bill and Esti Marpet are documentarians who live in New York City.

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WE HAVE A THING called art and we have a thing called communication, and sometimes their curves overlap. (A lot of art does not have much to do with communication and a lot of communication has no artistic content.) In the middle there is something like an appleseed, and that is our theme-maybe our dream, too.