Intermedia Festival

INTERMEDIA IS Elaine Summers' Crow's Nest ELAINE SUMMERS One of the important things that happened with! intermedia, because of women's liberation and the sociological-economic relationship of women now to our culture and society , is that it is the first time women have been able to have a pioneering role to play In the development of a new art form. This has not been acknowledged. In fact, if you read histories of intermedia the work of women has been ignored. I'm saying this partially as the first artist in New York City to combine multiple film images with dance, music, and sculpture in an evening-long concert-Fantastic Gardens in 1964 at Judson Church. Women j have not received the recognition that men have received for being part of that field. A wonderful thing happened that contributed to women's liberation and that was technology . You know that vicious cycle of being brought up to be dependent on the masculine Z strengths which were supposedly in science. When women from my generation approachC ed technological things we were often intimo3 idated at the beginning, then we discovered that technological tools are very easy for us to use; they don't require brute strength, they 12 simply need co-ordination, ability to synthesize , and this sythesizing quality of intermedia is very important. Women suddenly began to see that they could edit film, do camera work, and that all of these things were easy. The wonderful thing about art is that it humanizes technology. ALLAN KAPROW The recent conference on intermedia at the Guggenheim Museum raised an old problem: the officialization of this or that phase of modern art. "Intermedia" is a nostalgic term of the sixties, evoking lots of hardware and mass media. The disco was (and is) its popular image. it has little relevance for experimental work today. (This is principally because the notion of a medium to be formed into some whole-like paint into a picture or words into a news article-is very ancient anJ doesn't adequaely serve a modern continuous and changing reality, which has no clear wholes or part-to-whole relations.) The issue today is firstly to bypass the conventional transmitting frames of the arts: galleries , museums, poetry books, concert halls, arenas, etc. Secondly, it is to eliminate the concept of the single aFt audience, and substitute a careful notion of the variable users (they are not uniform at all). Thirdly, it is to consider the different goals of such new arts (i.e., self-revelatory, decorative, political, theoretical, ritualistic, etc.) Fourthly, it is to reduce to a minimum the principle dialogue between today's arts and other art of the present and past, and to increase the dialogue with social, intellectual and spiritual currents of this time. Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman in performance 13 DICK HIGGINS My current definition for "intermedia" is metaphorical-after a seance two mediums meet and make love. In due course an intermedium is born. "Intermedium" in the sense that Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term in 1812, and in the sense in which I revived the word in 1962, is a formal concept-a category for subsumption . Confronted by a strange work, one can obtain a little understanding of it by asking oneself, "Between what two media does this work lie?" For making such explanations , twenty years ago, intermedia such as "sound poetry," "concrete" and "visual poetry," "happenings" and "fluxus" were difficult to explain on the theoretical level without the concept of intermedia in general. Because so many hybrid forms of intermedia did, in fact, appear in the early 1960s, intermedia gave the appearance of being a trend or even a movement. But the intermedia have little in common with each other besides a basic fusion of concept or sensibility. One can no more speak in terms of an "intermedium movement" than one can of, say, a "collage movement." Rather, the intermedia are new forms available to all of us from many schools and generations . Of course the mis-Information Media did try to pick up and to blunt the concept -it sounded fashionable to blend fashion and high technology with the...