Viet-Flakes1966

VIET-FLAKES was composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images I collected from foreign magazines and newspapers over a five-year period. Magnifying glasses from the "5 & 10" were taped onto a borrowed 16mm Bolex in order to physically "travel" within the photographs - producing a rough animation. Images in and out of focus, broken rhythms and pans, the abstracted shapes and motions, speeding perceptual contradictions. For instance, a pointillism of falling black specks in focus becomes bombs dropping through the sky; an impressionistic swirl of tones translates as faces of US soldiers leading barefoot villagers from a gas-filled tunnel; a "Rembrandt ink drawing" focuses in as a tank dragging a roped body .... VIET-FLAKES was central in "Snows," the Kinetic Theater work I presented at the Martinique Theater, New York, 1966, in conjunction with Angry Arts Week. "Snows" concretized imagery and the denied ravages of the war and did its part in heightening moral outrage at the endless destruction. James Tenney's sound collage intercuts three-second fragments of Vietnamese religious chants and secular songs with fragments of Bach and 1960s "Top of the Charts."