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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Nam June Paik's TV installations paint the Guggenheim Museum with the psychedelic colors of the cathode ray.
Mar 2, 2000 | What happens when high-tech collides with high culture? In the retrospective exhibit "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" at the Guggenheim, what happens is an explosion of light and electrons, lasers and sound, transforming the usual museum experience of hushed reverence into something more akin to the disco distractions of "Saturday Night Fever." The man responsible for juicing up the venerable institution on Fifth Avenue is a 68-year-old Korean-born New Yorker, Nam June Paik, pioneer of video and electronic art, avant-garde collaborationist, mad musician, television wizard.
Many regard Paik as the creator of the video art genre. He earned this distinction when he acquired, in 1965, one of the first portable video cameras to be made available to the public (by Sony), recording his first video, "Button Happening," the same day and displaying it at the Cafi au Go Go that evening. Organized by John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts (who also curated Paik's 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum), with Jon Ippolito, assistant curator, "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" follows the vector of Paik's experiments in performance art, television projects and sculptural video installations to his multichannel video environments and "post-video" laser projects.
Occupying the enormous column of space in the Guggenheim's rotunda is the exhibition's centerpiece, "Modulations in Sync," a four-part installation newly commissioned by the museum and completed by Paik and Norman Ballard, an expert in laser technology. One part, called "Sweet and Sublime," hovers miraculously at the top of the rotunda, where parti-colored lasers spiral on a scrim set in the dome's oculus. "Jacob's Ladder," a seven-story waterfall with green lasers zigzagging through it at oblique angles, spills down from one side of the dome. Then, on the rotunda floor, 100 video monitors, with screens facing up, flash seemingly random images: Lou Reed singing, Merce Cunningham dancing, a computer-generated face, a marathon runner, birds flying across a computer-generated moon. These images are simultaneously projected onto six large screens set vertically into the spaces between the spiral ramp across from the laser waterfall. With the 100 video monitors, Paik has created an astonishing high-tech update of trompe l'oeil: What seems to be an inchoate jumble of rapid-fire images on the ground floor resolves, when viewed from high at the top of the museum's ramp spiral, into a beautifully patterned TV painting.
The museum's central areas -- the rotunda and ramp galleries -- are lighted only by the glow of cathode-ray tubes and beams from laser projections. Music from "Modulations in Sync" pounds through every aural crevice. This is art as dance-hall spectacle, a phenomenon whose roots reach back to the happenings and acid tests of the 1960s. And like a disco, the experience at first feels off-putting, a frontal assault on the primary sense. But when you consider that Paik helped originate some of the first happenings of the early '60s, the disco curatorial style reveals a certain ingenuity.
Paik began his career in Germany in the late 1950s, studying modern classical music. While there, he hooked up with enormously influential neodadaist composer John Cage, as well as with the burgeoning anti-art movement orbiting around George Maciunas' Fluxus group, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. For happenings and performances like the Festum Fluxorum, Paik created pieces such as "One for Violin Solo" (1962), in which the performer raises a violin above his head and smashes it.
Excited by Cage's "prepared piano," Paik built "Klavier Integral" (1958-63) for his first one-man exhibition, "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television," which contained a number of prepared instruments. The "Klavier Integral" was a piano "decorated with barbed wire, dolls, photographs, toys, a bra, smashed eggs, and the various odds and ends that Paik incorporated into his performance." During the opening of "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television," Beuys, in an impromptu action, entered and destroyed one of the pianos with an ax.
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, continuing his work with performance artists while becoming increasingly interested in finding ways "to humanize the technology and the electronic medium" -- that is, he started to make art with TVs and video. Also in New York, Paik formed his most important collaborative relationship, with avant-garde cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whom he worked with until her death in 1994. For Moorman, Paik constructed infamous pieces such as "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" (1969), two Plexiglas-encased televisions taped to Moorman's breasts while she played the cello, and "TV Cello" (1971), an instrument made of three televisions of varying sizes encased in Plexiglas. Moorman, interviewed in Paik's video "Global Groove" (1973), called "TV Cello" the "first advance in the cello since 1600." Trying to address the question "Why is sex a predominant theme in art and literature, prohibited ONLY in music?" Paik staged "Opera Sextronique" (1967), for which Moorman performed a striptease while playing the cello. She was then arrested for public indecency.
