SELECTED PRESS
cavalier
"...[I]s John Brockman a movie star? Is John Brockman a threat more deadly to the security of our minds than the Red Menace was in the fifties? You tell me."
By Gail Madonia
February 1969
June 3, 1969
Silkscreen on aluminized mylar version of the poster created for the Monkee's movie, HEAD becomes part of MOMA's permanent collection.
artsmagazine
Conversations With "The Late John Brockman"
By Jud Yalkut
February 1969
"Looking for new ways to reach their sales force, retailers, and consumers, executives of Scott—in many ways—arrived at the same conclusions. They approached John Brockman, 25-year-old graduate of Columbia Business School and organizer of many recent intermedia events. . . . The company men were told that their huge, monied organization was an 'invisible thing,' something whose product you would use briefly and then discard. 'Brockman,' et al, said the company should stress involvement on an experimental level and make themselves more 'visible'."
1968 Commercial for "Head"
By Pauline Kael 11.23.1968
Only fourteen years have elapsed since "It Should Happen to You," in which Judy Holliday, as Gladys Glover, a nobody who wanted to be a somebody, thought the answer would be to have her name on a billboard?a solution that the movie presented satirically. But our notions of celebrity have changed, and John Brockman, a young mixed-media promoter who has put his face in the television and newspaper ads for "Head," has probably made himself a somebody. Brockman has made himself the star of "Head," though he doesn't even appear in the movie. ...
ThePoetryCenter
November 18, 1968
John Brockman has directed experimental projects on intermedia and environments for Lincoln Center, The New York State Council on the Arts, and several corporations, including General Electric and Scott paper. Most recently, he has masterminded the launching for the new movie "Head" (Columbia Pictures). In September he went to Cape Cod and in three days wrote his first book, "By the Late John Brockman," which Macmillan will publish next August. He is twenty seven years old.
By Grace Glueck 2.4.1968
"It's really going to change a lot of the students' heads, experiencing all those people," hip John Brockman said happily the other day. Brockman, a young impresario sometimes known as Intermedia's intermediary was referring to "Intermedia '68," a two-month, touring festival he is producing with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Council on the Arts.
By John Gruen
1967
Amazing—the things that can happen! It seems as if only yesterday the word intermedia was a mystifying, alien word—a word implying the bastardization of the arts. Today, intermedia is one of the most-sought-after forms of entertainment—a concept that is not only attracting the world of entertainment, but the industrial, promotional, and educational worlds as well.
By Grace Glueck 9.16.1967
A new method of communication is developing in our society—the technique of multimedia.
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Intermedia was conceived by John Brockman, a 26-year-old alumnae of the Columbia School of Business Administration who is in close touch with the artists and filmmakers' underground. His one-man company, John Brockman Associates, serves as a liason between artists involved with intermedia and the many worlds that want to make use of it.
By John Gruen 8.1.1967
A far more sophisticated, far more benign entrepreneur of the avant garde is young John Brockman.
Brockman tuned in on the intermedia circuit about two years ago when he organized a series of new cinema events at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque when it began its showings on Lafayette Street in New York. Later, Brockman was hired by Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival to stage a number of special events dealing with expanded cinema.
May 6, 1967
Jewish Museum: Fifth Ave, at 92nd St.—"The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life," a display of photographs, posters, and films, and a group of paintings and drawings (by George Bellows, John Sloan, and Joseph Stella, to name a few), documenting a chapter of American-Jewish cultural and social history from 1870 to 1924; also included is a mixed medium environmental effect by John Brockman Associates and USCO.
By Elenore Lester 9.4.1966
"Hate Happenings. Love Intermedia Kinetic Environments." John Brockman is partly kidding, while conveying the notion that Happenings are Out and Intermedia Kinetic Environments are In in the places where the action is. John Brockman, the New York Film Festival's 25-year-old coordinator of a special events program on independent cinema in the United States, plugging into the switched-on "expanded cinema" world in which a film is not just a movie, but an Experience, an Event, an Environment. This is a humming electronic world, in which multiple films, tapes, amplifiers, kinetic sculpture, lights and live dancers or actors are combined to Involve Audiences in a Total Theater Experience. No Way Out : "You can't escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environments the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language," says Brockman.
Unlike Happenings, which often involve audiences in complicated relationships with plastics, bottles, sacks, ropes and other objects, Intermedia Kinetic Experiences permit audiences simply to sit, stand, walk or lie down and allow their senses to be Saturated by Media.
The New York Times (Tim Kantor)
John Brockman, champion of Intermedia Kinetic Environments
"It can't be told in words—you just have to experience it"
No Way Out : "You can't escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environments the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language," says Brockman.
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"This is primary experience. It takes place in a 360-degree environment." Brockman, who fully accepts Marshall McLuhan's "the medium-is-the-message" thesis, believes that full exposure to I.K.E. is positively "therapeutic." Brockman feels sure that exposure to Intermedia Kinetic Environments like these will change people's perceptions. He finds it difficult to describe exactly from what to what ("You just have to experience it. The whole point is that it cannot be told in words.") In any case, he is sure the change will be for the better. "After all, we're living in the second half of the 20th century, and for all most people know we may as well be in the 16th.
May 27,1966
To enjoy the latest thing in discothèques, you had better wear ear plugs, dark glasses and shin guards. Otherwise, you may be deafened, blinded and bruised in an electronic earthquake that engulfs you completely in an experience called "total recreation."
"Scene forced and jarring, like misplaced italics or frozen smile."
Murray the K's World
By Gerald Jonas and Renata Adler 4.9.1966
"Brockman has already earned a page in cinema history by explaining that the Underground film makers are not, after all, making movies."
By Howard Junker 12.27.1965
"I took this job to bring some sanity to the experimental-film world."
12.4.1965
The Film-Makers' Cinematheque, a society of avant-garde film-makers, with headquarters at the Astor Place Playhouse, devoted last month to something called the New Cinema Festival 1, which was described in a prospectus as "a survey of recent experiments to expand the dimensions of cinema" . . .