Nam June Paik, Pioneer of Video Art, 73, Dies...

 

Nam June Paik, 73, Dies;

Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers

 

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 31, 2006

 

 

Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer, performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art, died Sunday at his winter home in Miami Beach. He was 73 and also lived in Manhattan.

 

 

 

Nam June Paik in 2004 with one of his installations

at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.

 

Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

 

 

 

Mr. Paik suffered a stroke in 1996 and had been in declining health for some time, said his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, who manages his uncle's studio in New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above: Family of Robot:

Mother (left) and Family of Robot: Father (right) (1986),

Single channel video sculptures with vintage television and radio castings and monitors; color, silent; mother: 78x61.5x20.75 inches

 

Below: Family of Robot:

Hi tech baby (1986).

Single channel video sculpture with television casing,

thirteen monitors, and aluminum structure, color, silent, 52.5x37.8 inches.

 

 

 

Mr. Paik's career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of ｅxpression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited.

 

 

 

 

HackerNewbie

 

 

Nam June Paik in the 90's:
the Electronic Superhighway

 

A traveling exhibition of Paik Video Sculptures....need we say more??

 

 

 

At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term "electronic superhighway" in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive.

 

 

 

 

Nam June Paik.  My Faust-Channel 5-Nationalism. 1989-1991. 

Twenty-five Quasar 10-inch televisions,

three Sony laser disc players, neogothic wood frame with base:

104 x 50 x 32 inches.

 

 

 

 

Designed by the Korean-American Nam June Paik,

this work of video art is a strong commentary on war and the military

as a form of national religion. 

The structure is based on the form of a Gothic church or cathedral

and resembles a Medieval altarpiece. 

Bombs, jackboots, and helmets are combined with

television screens and laser discs;

by covering the top and sides of the structure with national flags,

Paik suggests that

all modern nations make sacred cults of their military establishments.

 

 

 

In recent years, Mr. Paik's enormous American flags, made from dozens of sleek monitors whose synchronized patterns mixed everything from pinups to apple pie at high, almost subliminal velocity, could be found in museums and corporate lobbies.

 

 

 

Mr. Paik was affiliated in the 1960's with the anti-art movement Fluxus, and also deserves to be seen as an aesthetic innovator on a par with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. Yet in many ways he was simply the most Pop of the Pop artists. His work borrowed directly from the culture at large, reworked its most pervasive medium and gave back something that was both familiar and otherworldly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity. A lifelong Buddhist, Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelming: a writer once compared his New York studio to a television repair shop three months behind schedule.

 

 

Mr. Paik is survived by his wife, the video artist Shigeko Kubota.

 

 

Mr. Paik got to television by way of avant-garde music. He was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, into a wealthy manufacturing family. Growing up, he studied classical piano and musical composition and was drawn to 20th-century music; he once said it took him three years to find an Arnold Schoenberg record in Korea. In 1949, with the Korean War threatening, the family fled to Hong Kong, and then settled in Tokyo. Mr. Paik attended the University of Tokyo, earning a degree in aesthetics and the history of music in 1956 with a thesis on Schoenberg's work.

 

 

He then studied music at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Freiburg and threw himself into the avant-garde music scene swirling around Cologne. He also met John Cage, whose emphasis on chance and randomness dovetailed with Mr. Paik's sensibility.

 

 

 

 

Nam June Paik.  TV Buddha.

TV Buddha (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with

 

TV Buddha (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture

 bronze sculpture

What kinds of social or psycholigacl commentaries can be interpreted

on the basis of this juxtaposition of incongruent elements?

 

 

 

 

Over the next few years, Mr. Paik arrived at an early version of performance art, combining cryptic musical elements — usually spliced audiotapes of music, screams, radio news and sound effects — with startling events. In an unusually Oedipal act during a 1960 performance in Cologne, Mr. Paik jumped from the stage and cut off Cage's necktie, an event that prompted George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, to invite Mr. Paik to join the movement. At the 1962 Fluxus International Festival for Very New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr. Paik performed "Zen for Head," which involved dipping his head, hair and hands in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and dragging them over a scroll-like sheet of paper to create a dark, jagged streak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1963, seeking a visual equivalent for electronic music and inspired by Cage's performances on prepared pianos, Mr. Paik bought 13 used television sets in Cologne and reworked them until their screens jumped with strong optical patterns. In 1963, he exhibited the first art known to involve television sets at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.

In 1965 he made his New York debut at the New School for Social Research: Charlotte Moorman, a cellist who became his longtime collaborator, played his "Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults only," performing bared to the waist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A similar work performed in 1967 at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in Manhattan resulted in the brief arrest of Ms. Moorman and Mr. Paik. Mr. Paik retaliated with his iconic "TV Bra for Living Sculpture," two tiny television screens that covered Ms. Moorman's breasts.

 

 

 

 

Mr. Paik bought one of the first portable video cameras on the market, in 1965, and the same year he exhibited the first installation involving a video recorder, at the Galeria Bonino in New York. Although he continued to perform, his interests shifted increasingly to the sculptural, technological and environmental possibilities of video.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1969, Mr. Paik started showing pieces using multiple monitors. He created bulky wood robotlike figures using old monitors and retrofitted consoles, and constructed archways, spirals and towers,

 

 

 

 

 

A portrait of South Korean-born artist Paik Nam-june

puts for incense burning in front of Paik's work

'The More, the Better'

which composed of 1003 video monitors

at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gacheon,

south of Seoul, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2006.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun on Tuesday

expressed his condolences over the death of Nam June Paik,

known as the inventor of video art.

(AP Photo/ Yonhap/ Sung Yeon-je)

 

 

 

including one 60-feet tall that used 1,003 monitors. By the 1980's he was working with lasers, mixing colors and forms in space, without the silvery cathode-ray screen.

 

 

 

 

 

The pioneering, Korean-born video-artist Nam June Paik,

seen here in front of one of his installations in a 1986 hand out from

the Guggenheim Museum, has died at the age of 73(AFP/GM-HO/File)

 

 

 

For his 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Mr. Paik arranged monitors faceup on the rotunda's floor, creating a pondlike effect of light and images. Overhead, one of the artist's most opulent laser pieces cascaded from the dome in lightninglike zigzags — an apt metaphor for a career that never stopped surging forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/arts/design/31paik.html

 

 

 

 

 

Paik's journey as an artist has been truly global, and his impact on the art of video and television has been profound.To foreground the creative process that is distinctive to Paik's artwork, it is necessary to sort through his mercurial movements, from Asia through Europe to the United States, and examine his shifting interests and the ways that individual artworks changed accordingly. It is my argument that Paik's prolific and complex career can be read as a process grounded in his early interests in composition and performance. These would strongly shape his ideas for mediabased art at a time when the electronic moving image and media technologies were increasingly present in our daily lives. In turn, Paik's work would have a profound and sustained impact on the media culture of the late twentieth century; his remarkable career witnessed and influenced the redefinition of broadcast television and transformation of video into an artist's medium.

 

 

John Hanhardt Guggenheim Museum of Art Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.paikstudios.com/

 

combine with...

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/arts/design/31paik.html

 

http://www.etsu.edu/philos/classes/rk/postmodern/htmdescriptionpages/paik1.htm