Nam June Paik RetrospectiveAuthor(s): Hermine FreedSource: Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, Earthworks: Past and Present (Autumn, 1982), pp. 249-251Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776590 .Accessed: 30/09/2011 13:26

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NamJune Paik Retrospective

John Cage recently stated that Nam June Paik was never a composer, but a performance artist and sculptor. To that I add that Paik was never a video artist, but a television artist. The distinction may seem narrow, but it serves to clarify the difference between the work of Paik and that of so many other video artists.

Throughout his career, particularly in this country, Paik's involvement has been more with the alteration of television than with the use of television to alter perception. In addition, although Paik is clearly aware of and concerned with the all-pervasive socially and politically controlling quality of television, he seems more fascinated with the manipulation of the form than of the content of television.

Let us recall that Paik began his career as a composer (sorry, Mr. Cage; student of music) who was more interested in the alteration of musical instruments than in the making of music. Cage notwithstanding, Paik did devote his student life to music-in Korea, Hong Kong, and Tokyo-and later went to Germany to study music. Perhaps he might have followed a more conventional path towards that goal had he not met both John Cage and George Maciunas. The latter introduced Paik to Fluxus, which must have turned him to more anarchic activities. Paik not only performed music, but also performed with and displayed altered pianos, following the example of Cage. Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell did a joint exhibition in which they attacked TV sets by covering them with felt, turning them to the wall, and physically damaging them. In another exhibition, Paik showed altered pianos and noisemakers and thirteen altered TV monitors. Wolf Von Herzongenroth says that although the alteration of the pianos outraged the critics they never mentioned the television sets. At that time, the piano was the most important object in a German household, but the TV set was relegated to the maid's room.

Fig. I Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1973.

After returning to Japan, where he met Shuya Abe, an electronics engineer with whom he collaborated on the alteration of the mechanism of television, Paik came to New York. His aware- ness that America was the place for television must have been an incentive. Paik immediately reconnected with his Fluxus friends and soon met Charlotte Moorman, with whom he began a lifelong collaboration in performance.

Within a few years, Paik was invited to the Experimental Workshop at WGBH-TV in Boston to do a segment for the show The Medium Is The Medium. This initiated Paik's long associ- ation with Public Television, first as artist-in- residence at the WGBH Workshop and then at the TV Lab at WNET-TV in New York. At WGBH, Paik collaborated with Shuya Abe on a video synthesizer which he reproduced for WNET and which became a model for all the sophisti- cated, complex video equipment which is used by broadcast television today.

If a great deal of the Nam June Paik retro- spective at the Whitney Museum (April 30- June 27, 1982) looked like a video fair, that is because Paik was responsible for so much contemporary television technology. There are two magnet TV works in the show, one black and white, one in color. Paik discovered, early on, that a magnet distorts the TV image. He used this image-scrambling device in several of his early tapes, and it forms the basis of the synthesizer. Paik placed a magnet on the tele- vision monitor and moved it so as to cause the image to twist and distort. The most renowned of these images is the face of Richard Nixon contorted and scrambled to the point of black humor (Fig. 1). The magnet works at the Whitney were content-free, showing only the

abstract patterns that are made by the magnet, acting on the cathode ray tube.

The Whitney exhibition focused largely on Paik's TV installations, relegating the video tapes to raw material for those installations. No single-channel video was shown at the museum, although tapes were broadcast on WNET-TV during the course of the exhibition. This worked to Paik's advantage, both because the temporality of video was therefore bypassed and because the video tapes are actually the weakest element in Paik's work. Admitting the brilliance of the invention of synthetic video, I must confess a dislike, in general, for its product. Too many Paik followers have pro- duced video tapes that are made by turning knobs and pushing levers or turning the camera to the monitor to get feedback effects, all of which produces foolproof, artlike images, mindlessly conceived. For Paik, there is mean- ing in such activity: it lies in the fact that he is literally altering the TV image. His tapes are non-narrative collages of generally loosely linked images: some synthesized, some color- ized, some multiple; some drawn video lines, some straight camera images. His content is essentially pictorial and documentary. There may be scenes from a concert by Charlotte Moorman or John Cage or Merce Cunningham. There may be cityscapes or distant landscapes. These are so altered and pictorialized as to render them more as images than as events.

One reason I consider Paik a television artist, in distinction from the video artists, is this externalizing of images. Most of the artists who experimented with video in the late sixties and early seventies used it either to extend the meaning of their work in other mediums or to

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explore the inner language and perceptual effects of video. While Paik was using video to alter TV, they were using video to alter percep- tion and were turning the camera on themselves to alter consciousness. This was, let us recall, a period when we believed that the subjective idea was a truer model of reality then objective matter. Video was, a priori, non-material, non- object, and dealt with process rather than product, event rather than image, experiences rather than things. Working with the internal- izing, subjective aspects of video, most of the video artists of the sixties and seventies made work that did not look like art in any conven- tional sense. The reason Paik emerges, in 1982, as the leader in video is not merely that he was the first, or that he has stuck with video longer than almost anybody. These two facts are of prime importance. But if we look at Paik's work in relationship to other art being produced now, we see that he is one of the few video artists who deal successfully with video as a material object, as a thing in the world. His work has the same objective image quality as that of so many artists working today.

Furthermore, the structure of Paik's tapes makes them more accessible than other types of video works in an exhibition situation. Since they lack duration, neither is it of consequence whether or not the viewer sees the entire sequence, nor does it matter when he enters the work. What Paik did understand-which was understood by few early video artists-is video time. Many other artists presented video as a moving canvas. The camera was placed on a tripod looking at a scene, and the action evolved within that single frame. Perhaps it was his non-Western, non-linear sense of time. Perhaps it was his experience in TV studios where time is seen simultaneously, sequentially, and disjointedly at once. Imagine the control room for a contemporary news broadcast, filled with monitors. There is a monitor showing the images seen by each of the three or four studio cameras. There are monitors showing images from other cities which will appear in the broadcast. There are monitors showing scenes from the street where reporters are waiting. There are monitors ready to show tape that was shot earlier in the day or week. There may be monitors ready to show tape or film shot years ago, as part of the historic background to the story. There are monitors showing whatever is playing on the other major networks and monitors ready to roll commer- cials. In other words, we see a collage of time and place. It is that aspect of television which feeds into Paik's tapes: the rapid-fire editing and apparently disjointed imagery which have become the staple fare of television. In this respect, we can understand Paik as the foreigner who sees a culture anew, from the outside. While other video artists were trying to use television to show the world the way it ought to be, Paik was, even if inadvertently, throwing our culture back to us the way it is. Paik does

rig. z ivam une rat, v-yramla, lyz.

Fig. 3 Nam June Paik, TV Clock, 1963-81. Collection: The artist

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not often use the content of television and he certainly alters its form. What he does give us is the essence of television. His mindless images must be seen in relation to that medium. He is, remember, a television artist.

Yet Paik is highly aware of the autocratic quality of television; aware that the box feeds information and misinformation, role models and attitudes, into millions of homes. He is aware of the one-way communication of televi- sion and of its place in the home as a window of the world, and he tries his best to subvert all that. Paik's unorthodox arrangements of tele- vision sets-facing up from the floor, looking down from the ceiling, rearranged into beds, cellos, and bras-is his way of restructuring the relationship between TV and the viewer. When he puts a living TV Bra on Charlotte Moorman, or places her on a TV Bed, or makes a TV Cello for her, and when he plays real time images (events being shown as they happen), he is putting TV in a live, active relationship to the audience and the performer. When he points a TV camera out the window and shows the result in front of the window, when he makes a TV Chair that shows the underside image of whatever is sitting on it, he is punning on the live, real time, real place aspect of television.

Ironically, the works that make use of video tapes seem to emphasize their throw-away quality through reuse. Paik is forever recycling video images, and several of the pieces in the exhibition make use of similar material, a great deal of which bears no relationship to the work at hand. One exception is TV Fish, which consists of a row of fifteen fish tanks, each backed by a television monitor. The tapes playing in the monitors are in Paik's collage style, alternating fish images with cityscapes and other Paikaphernalia. The relationship between the monitors and aquaria is self- evident. Not only are they the same size and shape, but both are containers for moving objects. I would have liked the piece better if it had been purer and simpler, with either only fish or only a background for the fish on each screen or with monitors alternating with aquaria For that reason, I find Real Fish-Live Fish more successful, which is ironic, since Paik does not use an aquarium-shaped monitor in this piece. There are two old Philco TV sets, each of which has a base with an oval tube projecting up from it, somewhat like an old Victrola. The first set has a real fish tank inside the tube, a camera looking at it. The second shows a live video image of the same fish tank. A third fish piece, Fish Fly in Sky, shows essentially the same video tape as the first piece, but now the monitors-in various sizes and degrees of color saturation-are randomly strewn over the ceiling.

Similarly in TV Garden the monitors, which are interspersed among plants, are randomly placed face up from the floor. In both works, all of the scattered monitors play the same

tape; the only differences among them are the differences in the monitors thepselves. As in Fish Fly in Sky, the content of the video tape is essentially irrelevant. I find this the greatest weakness in Paik's work. The tapes that play in TV Garden are music and dance images, Char- lotte Moorman at the cello, A Japanese musi- cian, Merce Cunningham, etc., all heavily syn- thesized with drawn video lines, solid colors, multiple images, etc. This is not to say that Paik ought to have had flowers growing in the garden, but that perhaps the video "flowers" ought to have been more related to a garden.

Although Paik uses so much music in his tapes, it is never his own work, nor does he choose to have works commissioned for his tapes. Rather, his audio, like his video, is a collage of ready-made images.

The most successful piece making use of video tape in this exhibition was V-yramid (Fig. 2), a pyramid of monitors arranged in spiralling groups of four. The arrangement of the four monitors creates a kaleidoscopic image. This scheme allows Paik to make greater use of rhythm and scale. The choreography and orchestration of the interweaving image is the strong point of this piece. The raw material is the tape that Paik made for the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, lively with skiers and skaters, again, among other recycled images, allowing inherent motion to be mixed with camera motion and edited time to create a configura- tion which affects the image. It is not the content so much as the rhythm that is relevant to the form of this piece.

The best installation works in the show were the ones that do not rely on video tape but whose images come from alteration of the cathode ray tube. Moon Is the Oldest TV is a row of twelve black-and-white television mon- itors, each of which shows an image that looks like a phase of the moon during a lunar eclipse. Each monitor shows a different phase of the moon. TV, a temporal medium, is used in this piece to show still-frame, unchanging images relating to a sequence in time. It is television sculpture, not video tape. Paik claims that the moon had the same role for the ancients as TV has for us; it is the oldest form of entertainment.

Another altered TV installation is TV Clock (Fig. 3), a row of twenty-four television sets, each with its image compressed into a thin line. The lines are sequentially placed like the hour hand of the clock. The images on the left are black and white, a white line on a gray ground; the images on the right are in color, some with a single color, some multi-hued, some with a single line, some with two or more lines close together. Like the lunar work, TV Clock is a timeless time piece-a moving and changing sequence in a moving and changing medium that neither moves nor changes but presents the entire implied sequence of time simultaneously.

The newest work in the exhibition was a

laser TV. A green laser beam projected a videotape through a diffraction screen, spilling multiple versions of the same image all over the walls. Each image was the same size, I would say about eight inches wide. Technolog- ically, it was a tour deforce. The particular tapes being played are of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Once again, the fault I find in the work is the lack of a particular relationship, or significance, between content and form. It really was of no consequence whether the Cunningham tapes or any other bits of footage Paik has made were played.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the cura- torial choice of presenting Paik the sculptor seems so wise. Because a great deal of Paik's work relies on electricity in a quantity that simply does not exist outside an exhibition situation, and because it is essentially unpho- tographable, there were elements in the exhi- bition which were surprising to the most avid Paik fan. John Hanhardt, Curator of Film and Video at the Whitney, selected the exhibition to show Paik at his most minimal. For those who had seen only his tapes-which are maximal -the exhibition was, to say the least, a wel- come surprise. Despite the fact that a few of the minimal pieces are as throw-away as Paik's images, the exhibition was of value in that it presented a cohesive examination of Paik's career, from Fluxus neo-Dadist, to wacky in- ventor, to showman and performer, to serene Buddha, to multiple-time video-maker.

Hermine Freed is an artist and critic working in New York.

Exhibition Schedule: April 30-June 27, 1982, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; September 10-October 24, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Catalogue: John G. Harnhardt, Nam June Paik, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (in assoc. with W.W. Norton & Co.), 1982. Pp. 144; 225+ ills. Paper, $15.

Photographic Credits John W. Dixon, p. 198; William Isbell, p. 202 (fig. 6); Cheryl Nickel, p. 202 (fig. 7); Marli Shamir, p. 205 (figs. 2 and 3), p. 207; John Cliett, copyright Dia Art Foundation, p. 227; Nancy Holt, p. 231 (figs. 9 and 10); Virginia Dwan, p. 233; by permission of the Metro- politan Museum of Art, p. 237 (fig. 1); George E. Landis, p. 238 (fig. 3); courtesy of TheArt Institute of Chicago, p. 238 (fig. 4); Eric Pollitzer, p. 247 (fig. 1); PeterMoore, p. 250 (figs. 2 and3).

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