The Daily Slice: Electronic Super Highway – The Work of Nam June Paik

The world is overflowing with beautiful and interesting things competing for our attention, and if you live in the real world, it’s a tall task to include appreciating the hell out of art on a daily basis. Really, who can find the time? That’s why Guy.com offers a “daily slice.” It’s a small taste of what’s going on in the world of art and design–something we find beautiful or inspiring or worthy of a peek. We’re happy to serve it up.

Modern Art History lesson #1: Pablo Picasso is really, really important.

Modern Art History lesson #2: Marcel Duchamp is really, really important.

Modern Art History lesson #3: Nam June Paik invented video art!

Ok, so perhaps modern art history can’t really be summarized into three convenient points, and maybe I’m exaggerating Nam June Paik’s influence here; generally he doesn’t appear in lists alongside the modern giants such as Picasso, Duchamp and Warhol. But despite his general lack of public renown, as an artist, Paik definitely was not lacking in the ‘bat-shit crazy’ attitude typically associated with what is broadly referred to as modern art. Allow me to provide you with some background information.

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1932. Following a stint in Hong Kong due to the Korean War, his family relocated to Japan where classically-trained pianist Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo. However, Paik may have been a skilled and professional classical musician but, as made evident by the career he soon embarked upon, merely playing an instrument is not enough for some. Cue John Cage, whom Paik encountered at music school in Darmstadt, Germany. With a bunch of various creative intellectuals, Paik and Cage determined to make Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) and the Fluxus movement was born.

In order to grasp the ideas driving Fluxus as an artistic faction, one must briefly refer to the Da Da movement (1916-1922 thereabouts). Think: presenting an overturned urinal as a work of art in a museum. Think: dressing up like a make-believe robot and reciting nonsense poetry as a performance. Basically, think of protruding your middle finger and pointing it at what was then considered ‘proper’ art. Then maybe go to the toilet on it. This idea of ‘anti-art’ seemed to be a recurring theme for Fluxus and especially for Paik, who according to Wulf Herzogenrath “[managed] to be both anti-artist and artist in one”.

Take, for instance, an early performance of Paik’s from 1961, entitled Simple. The artist’s to-do list for the piece went something like this:

1. Throw peas into auditorium
2. Smear shaving cream on body
3. Put rice in shaving cream
4. Slowly unwind a roll of paper
5. Go into a pool of water
6. Come back and play some piano with baby’s dummy in mouth.

Considering that these actions were also accompanied by various delightful audio snippets such as the screams of terrified women, it is no wonder Paik swiftly grabbed people’s attention.

So, thus far we know that Paik liked music and he seemed pretty enthusiastic about performance art. He also really, really liked television (but not in the same way you and I like television, in that we spend what is essentially years or lives staring at it), and he was also fond of all that electronic video stuff that was beginning to appear in the sixties and seventies. With the same charming irony that made his artworks ‘anti-art’, Paik loved to employ up-and -coming technologies as a method of critiquing their actual effect on society. He was the first artist to use a Sony Portapak and to utilize visual electronics in addition to already established acoustic technologies.

The artwork that persistently reappears in art textbooks around the globe is TV Buddha from 1974. As with his TV fish tanks, in which televised images of an aquarium were presented in lieu of the genuine article, Paik used an antique Buddha as a means of contemplating the presence of an ever-expanding media; the Buddha sat opposite a TV monitor which relayed its own image from a constantly-filming video camera (kind of like having a staring contest with yourself). The divergent themes of past/present, real/simulated and East/West tapped into concerns that are still hot topics to our generation today.

Despite this apparent desire to critique, rather than appearing overly nostalgic for a simpler time Paik’s artistic endeavor’s displayed great excitement regarding the rise of an electronic world. And what better way to divulge his passion for such matters than by getting a topless woman to play the cello with TV’s strapped to her breasts?

Charlotte Moorman, the gutsy cellist in TV Bra for Living Sculpture was a recurring collaborator of Paik’s and had already garnered the nickname ‘The Topless Cellist’ following her – you guessed it – topless performance of Paik’s Opera Sextronique (1967), for which she was arrested.

Paik’s fascination with electronic media grew fervently throughout his life. He coined the term “electronic super highway” in reference to telecommunications; he went on to make a human sized robot that could walk, and to build a garden consisting mostly of televisions. He made a scale map of the USA out of masses of TV monitors and neon, that according to the Smithsonian exhibition text “proposes that electronic media [provides] us with what we used to leave home to discover”. He established international performances between Korea, Japan and the USA, all of which was viewed live via satellite. Name June Paik was an artist who did not take the rapid technological development of the twentieth century for granted; instead he challenged it and utilized it to its full potential.