Legendary Light Shows
Curated and Presented by The Center for Visual Music (www.centerforvisualmusic.org)Flashback to the 1960s with a programme of rarely-seen film and video by legendary light show artists from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and London: light, colour and liquid projections layered with film and handmade slides, from multimedia shows originally performed live at rock concerts with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and others. The imagery ranges from Romero and Martin’s delicate painterly liquids to Jud Yalkut’s ‘torrent of hurtling colours and lights, forms blinking whirling and surging, distorting awareness of time and space’ (from Psychedelic Art).The programme concludes with an excerpt from David Lebrun’s Hog Farm Movie (1970), never screened in Europe, which features ‘a visionary climax as, to the accompaniment of the Grateful Dead, a light show of brilliant Kodachrome colours plays across the masses of participants’. (David James, from The Most Typical Avant-Garde, University of California Press, 2005.)Selections from this programme were featured in the recent US exhibition ‘Visual Music’ at the Hirshhorn Museum. Format note: Many of the original film materials from these performances are lost, though video versions survive. Several pieces are the artists’ recreations using original materials. This programme may over-stimulate your sensory apparatus.
