Usco performance
By: Travis Miles, Anthology Film Archives (Dec 16, 2004)
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 SECOND AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003; (212) 505-5181 fax (212) 477-2714
For Immediate Release December 16, 2004
Contact: Travis Miles at (212) 505-5181 x20, or at afatravis@mac.com
MULTIMEDIA GROUP
USCO
TO RESURRECT SIX 1960s WORKS
AT ANTHOLOGY MARCH 25-27
GALLERY SHOW MARCH 19-27
Pioneering 1960s multimedia collective USCO are reuniting to present “From Hubbub to We Are All One” – a program featuring six of their most celebrated light, film and performance pieces – at Anthology Film Archives for 4 ultra-rare shows from Friday, March 25 through Sunday, March 27. An accompanying exhibition of USCO kinetic and collage pieces and related works will be on display in Anthology’s Courthouse Gallery from March 19-27. To top it off, there will also be a silent auction of works by a number of artists to benefit the Intermedia Foundation. USCO founders Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan will be on hand to orchestrate these technically and aesthetically challenging events in Anthology’s Courthouse Theater.
According to Jonas Mekas, Anthology’s founder and Director, “Some forty years ago I presented USCO’s work at the Expanded Cinema Festival, never thinking that we could do it again. In an era where happenings, performances and expanded cinema were dominating the arts, USCO was among the very best of the bunch. I’m elated to reintroduce their work in 2005 because I think we might have finally caught up to what they were onto back then.”
Working out of their studio in an old church building in New York State’s Rockland County, USCO, a communal group of artists, poets and engineers, toured museums and universities in the United States and abroad during the 60s with their media productions and kinetic installations. Their work helped to define the burgeoning psychedelic scene of that era and was twice featured on the cover of LIFE magazine. Their “Down By The Riverside” exhibition and performances at the first media Discotheque, “The World”, were well-documented on television, radio, in articles and in such books as Douglas Davis’ Art and The Future and Richard Kostelanetz’s The Theatre of Mixed Means.
These March performances will present six expanded pieces that shed a light on what it must have been like during the experimental mixed-media climate of the era. Each show will begin with the three-screen “Verbal American Landscape” and will climax with a twenty audio-visual channel recreation of “We Are All One”. Engineer and electronic whiz Michael Callahan, who today heads Museum Technology Inc., and poet/collagist Gerd Stern, promise that these performances will be both faithful to their original productions and, at the same time, brought up to date by mixing the antiquated analog technologies of yesteryear with the digital advances of today.
Recent attention to USCO has found the re-staging of one of their projection environments, featuring films by Jud Yalkut, as part of the “X Screen” exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna last year. In May USCO plans to have two installation works from the 60s, including paintings by Stephen Durkee, as part of the Tate Liverpool’s “Summer of Love” exhibition.
These programs are benefits for Intermedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization founded by USCO in 1968. with proceeds to go towards the necessary roof repair and preservation costs of USCO’s Rockland County old church studio. That building houses USCO’s artifacts as well as providing studio, gallery and public access activities.
A contributor’s luncheon and showing of the same six pieces will take place from 1:00 on Sunday March 27. More information about that event will be available soon.
Performances are at 8:00pm, Friday, March 25 through Sunday, March 27.
Tickets are $10 for each performance.
USCO co-founders Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan are available for interviews. Stern’
oral history published by the University of California is available on line ati: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt409nb28g/
For more information or to request an interview, please contact Travis Miles at (212) 505-5181 x 20 or at afatravis@mac.com
Anthology Film Archives is located at 32 Second Ave. at Second Street and can be reached by the Second Avenue F and V train or the #6, Bleecker Street stop.
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