Please join EAI for Participation, a special three-hour video program that will be screened continuously from noon-6pm on Friday, May 10^th and Saturday, May 11^th. Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ant Farm, Charlotte Moormanand Jud Yalkut, Carolee Schneemann, and Jean Dupuy, Participation looks to a cultural moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s defined by artist-initiated projects, collaborative experimentation, and an inclusive ethos. The screening features rare footage of performances and happenings, pioneering video documents, and experimental participatory works, capturing a community of young artists responding to the countercultural sensibility and cultural transformations of that era. Recent developments in portable video and small-gauge film allowed the artists create these extraordinary improvisational documents, allowing viewers in 2013 to experience something of the ephemeral multi-disciplinary, process-based works they created four decades ago.

Participation borrows its title from Steina and Woody Vasulka’s Participation (1969-1971, 62:30 min), a fascinating and rarely seen portrait of the wildly creative people and  places that made up the New York downtown scene of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. In this free-form time capsule of an era, the Vasulkas documented, among others, Don Cherry performing in Washington Square, Warhol Superstars on stage, and Jimi Hendrix in concert. Multimedia artist Jean Dupuy’s Soup & Tart (1974-75, 55:45 min), another remarkable, freewheeling document, features over 30 downtown artists, musicians, and filmmakers in a marathon performance soiree organized by Dupuy at the Kitchen in 1974. The audience was first served a home-made dinner of soup, bread, apple tarts and wine, followed by a performance "menu" of two-minute performances by artists including Philip Glass, Hannah Wilke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Charles Atlas, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, andYvonne Rainer. The 4^th & 7^th Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York, organized by legendary performance artist/cellist Charlotte Moorman, are recorded in Jud Yalkut’s piece. The 4th Festival in 1966 was held outdoors in Central Park, and featured over 65 events with artists, musicians and performers, including Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Christo, Shigeko Kubota, Joseph Beuys, and Alison Knowles, among many others. The 7th Avant Garde Festival was presented in 1969 on two islands, Wards and Mill Rock, in the East River, where performances took place beneath one of Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic domes.

Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah, NJ) (1966, 11:13 min) presents an early and influential performance byCarolee Schneemann. In this visually lush film, eight performers appear outdoors in an aerial "Kinetic Theatre" in trees and across the surface of a lake. California-based media and architecture collective Ant Farm’s Inflatables Illustrated(1971-2003, 21:20 min) offers a visual primer on Ant Farm’s utopian, experimental inflatable-plastic architecture, combining DIY how-to-video instructions with film documentation of their monumental temporary structures in action. Objects such as "The 50x50 Foot Pillow," "Spare Tire Inflatable" and "Clean Air Pod" are examples of the group's notion of an architectural practice that was less about pneumatic structure than it was about interactivity and ephemerality.

For more information about the artists and works included in this screening, please visit: www.eai.org

External Link »