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Fluxus Replayed

Takahiko iimura

1991 00:29:25 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3BetacamSP video

Description

In a radical action like Nam June Paik destroying a violin, and rolling up in bandages the bodies of the players in in a concert by Yoko Ono, the international avant-garde group Fluxus changed not only art, but the concept of it.

Fluxus Replayed is a document of a 1991 performance in New York, which reproduced historical Fluxus performance pieces from the early 1960s.  The S.E.M. Ensemble together with some of the Fluxus artists themselves, perform works by Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emett Williams.

"Taka iimura is a senior figure among contemporary Japanese artists and has been working with film, sound and video since the 1960s. He was one of several Japanese who, coming from a 20th Century tradition of avant-garde intervention, contributed to the Fluxus group in the 60s... As the cycle of experimentation moves through another generation, glimpses of precursors through archive recordings of this kind help ground artists’ surviving words and artworks."

-- Mike Leggett, Leonardo Digital Review, MIT Press

About Takahiko iimura

A pioneering figure in the New York and Japanese film and video undergounds, Taka iimura has had a tremendous impact upon the development of experimental cinema in both the U.S. and Japan. iimura's work in video has concentrated on deconstructing the language of video, especially video's power to obscure the author of the image, through the audience's immediate acceptance of what is shown on screen as true. iimura establishes a relation between the self-reflexive nature of language and the simultaneous feedback characteristic of video, exploiting this relation to investigate the shifting position of video's subject (who is behind the camera) and object (who is in front of the camera). Through his videos, which read like elaborate semiotic riddles, iimura has educated audiences to the structure of video in a way that has profoundly changed the way the medium is viewed.

He is a widely established international artist, having had numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Musem of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Reina Sofia National Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in addition to artist residencies at the German Academy of Arts and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Study Center.

Recently he has been involved in using computers, publishing more than 20 DVDs/CD-ROMs, and writing several books on film, video, and multimedia, including a book published in English, "The Collected Writings of Takahiko iimura".

"I am concerned with the whole system of video, not just what you see on the screen, but including the camera, monitor, the whole system."
—Takahiko iimura