Art Videos No.1 & No. 2

20 & 21 Mar, 7.30 pm
The Bui Gallery

The Bui Gallery invites you two consecutive evenings of video art classics. To inaugurate our Art Videos Series, we present Nam June Paik: Lessons from the Video Master, an innovative and comprehensive survey of the artist’s work by video artist Skip Blumberg. The second video will be Hatsu-Yume (First Dream), one of Bill Viola’s earliest masterpieces.

About the videos:

• Nam June Paik: Lessons From The Video Master. 93 minutes.

Media artist Nam June Paik broke all the rules of art and television. Video artist Skip Blumberg’s NAM JUNE PAIK: LESSONS FROM THE VIDEO MASTER reveals not only Paik the artist but also the human being. John Hanhardt of The Guggenheim Museum writes of Paik’s historic significance: “Paik envisioned a different television, a ‘global’ groove of artists’ expressions seen as part of an ‘electronic superhighway’ that would be open and free to everyone. Paik…challenged the idea of television as a medium and domain exclusively controlled by a monopoly of broadcasters.” Paik’s legacy is one we cannot do without.

• Hatsu-Yume (First Dream). 56 minutes.

Film notes from the DVD edition: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) is Bill Viola’s masterpiece, the greatest work by one of the most important video artists in the world. A spiritual allegory equating light and dark with life and death. The title refers to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant. But the tape is not to be taken literally as a dream. For Viola, it’s more like the aboriginal concept of dreamtime, the creation of the world. That’s why, as a whole and in its parts, Hatsu-Yume progresses from darkness to light, stillness to motion, silence to sound, simplicity to complexity, nature to civilization. A work of extravagant pictorial beauty, Hatsu-Yume represents the most painterly use of light in the history of video.