In collaboration with Charles ATLAS, Merce Cunningham, and Shigeko KUBOTA
Part One: Blue Studio: Five Segments
1975-76, 15:38 min. By Merce CUNNINGHAM and Charles ATLAS
Part Two: Merce and Marcel
1978, 13:05 min. By Nam June PAIK and Shigeko KUBOTA

“Television obscures art in life and life in art. Can we reverse time?” In “Merce by Merce” by PAIK, a two-part tribute to avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham and 20th-century master Marcel Duchamp, PAIK and his collaborators question art, life, and time through video. Throughout, PAIK’s electronic manipulations cause time and space to be layered and transformed.

Part One: Blue Studio: Five Segments
“Blue Studio: Five Segments” is a groundbreaking work of videodance by postmodern master Merce Cunningham and his then filmmaker-in-residence, Charles Atlas. In a series of short pieces choreographed and performed specifically for video space, Cunningham is multiplied, overlaid, and transported from the studio to a series of unexpected landscapes. Cunningham’s gestural dance is manipulated to the accompaniment of a disjunctive audio collage that includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

Part Two: Merce and Marcel
In “Merce and Marcel”, PAIK and Shigeko Kubota create a densely textured, transcultural collage that pays tribute to the eponymous artists by addressing the relationship between art and life. PAIK and Kubota link art to the movements and gestures of every day: “Is this dance?” reads the text over an aerial view of taxis moving through the streets of New York, and the image of a baby’s tottering first steps. A rare interview with Duchamp by Russell Connor is re-edited by PAIK in a rapid, stutter-step progression. In a witty temporal layering that PAIK terms a “dance of time,” an interview with Cunningham, also by Connor, is intercut and superimposed with the earlier interview of Duchamp: “Time reversible ― Time irreversible.”

“Merce by Merce by PAIK” 1975–76/78