Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
South Korean, 1932 - 2006
South Korean video artist, performance artist, musician, sculptor, film maker, writer, and teacher, active in Germany and the USA (see fig.). From 1952 to 1956 he studied music and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. In 1956 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany: he studied music at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich, and worked with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt, before joining FLUXUS, with whom he made performance art, experimental music, and ‘anti-films’ (e.g. the imageless Zen for Film, 1962). His Neo-Dada performances in Cologne during this period included a celebrated encounter with John Cage, during which he formed a lasting friendship with the avant-garde composer by cutting off his tie. Inspired by Cage’s ‘prepared piano’, in which the timbre of each note was altered by inserting various objects between the strings, Paik’s experiments from 1959 with television sets, in which the broadcast image was modified by magnets, culminated in his seminal exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (1963) at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. He is generally regarded as the first artist to have comprehensively realized the potential of television and video as an artist’s medium (see VIDEO ART).
In 1964 Paik moved to New York and began a long, performing partnership with the cellist CHARLOTTE MOORMAN. In October 1965 he is supposed to have acquired the first of the new Sony portable video recorders to be shipped to the USA, made his first recording in the taxi going home and showed it that evening at the Café-a-Go-Go, an artists’ club. The announcement for the screening declared prophetically: ‘Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.’ Paik worked with all of these materials. Extraordinarily prolific, he produced videotapes, paintings, prints, sculptures, musical and other performances, laser projections, functioning robots, and publications. With the engineer Shuya Abe, he designed and developed the first colour video synthesizer to be used by broadcast television. He became best known, however, for his video installations, for which he accumulated old television sets, sometimes emptying the interiors to accommodate live goldfish, candles, or junk assemblages. Alternatively, he modified the circuitry to display lines, circles, or wildly reconstituted versions of broadcast signals, or fitted vintage television cabinets with new components to display rapid, dazzling sequences of electronic effects in brash colours. These modified televisions were exhibited individually or in sets, as with Moon is the Oldest TV (1965, reworked 1976 and 1985; Paris, Pompidou). Alternatively, they were scattered through artificial landscapes, arrayed in massive configurations of up to a thousand sets, as in the installation Tricolor Video at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1982; or as anthropomorphic figures, as in Family of Robot (1986; Munich, priv. col.; see exh. cat., 1988; p. 26), shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1988. On a smaller scale, he incorporated miniature television screens into everything from brassières to cellos or made unexpectedly powerful works in which a statue of Buddha appears to contemplate its own video image.
Paik’s achievement was marked by a large retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982. While forging a reputation as visionary, jester, and chat-show celebrity, he embarked from 1977 on an increasingly ambitious series of international satellite broadcast projects, logistically impressive but often banal in content. Some critics felt that the minimal, ‘day-glo’ qualities of the early work, partly inspired by Zen Buddhism, were obscured by the complexity of his later activities, but Paik was apparently not concerned with pleasing critics: ‘I am a poor man from a poor country,’ he said, ‘so I have to be entertaining all the time.’ Paik was also made a professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Hochschule für Bildende Künste. [Mick Hartney. "Paik, Nam June." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T064616.]
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