Nam June Paik and the electronic super highway
I have been a fan of Paik’s work since I first saw one of his pieces; it was from the later more constructivist phase where video art was incorporated in huge frames, usually big old radio boxes. Then there was a fabulous exhibition in Portugal and I bought one of his works from the “Internet dweller” series. At that time I didn’t spend so much time in the internet as I do now… so maybe this purchase was premonitory! :)
Not even the institution that hosted the show bought any piece, so it was without surprise that soon after I had it home, it was invited to be part of the exhibition “Viagem ao século XX – a walk through the century” at Expo’98.
(use the tag “galeriavantag” to see other posts I have made about the exhibitions in this art gallery)
Below are some links to investigate further about PAIK and texts taken from those sites. I will be making some more posts about Paik in the future.
(J. C.)
PAIK site
http://www.paikstudios.com
Nam June 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.
more on Paik
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.29.96/paik-9609.html
More interesting are the various Internet Dwellers--giant heads that Paik has fashioned out of his trademark materials of vintage TV cabinets and all kinds of technological junk. They are designed to resemble the masks associated with various indigenous cultures; the eyes and mouth, naturally, are filled with fleeting video images. These heads both play on and subvert the instinctive identification we have with a recognizable human face, while making a sly commentary on just what now constitutes "primitive" art.
The individual titles are mock Internet addresses that Paik created using the initials of his friends around the world. Internet Dweller: lwuh.four.hsts, the facial apertures flashing 1960s couture and a no-drinking symbol, shows that for all his playfulness, Paik pays serious attention to aesthetic detail. The elegant curves of the inlaid wood cabinet are reiterated in the rolls of laser-printed canvas set into the speaker wells and the plastic tubes with blinking lights that crown the head.
further Paik
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-18627288.html
Paik's ironic celebration of the electronic superhighway - through his joke about his minibus, and through his installation representing futuristic information institutions such as schools (Warez Academy, 1994), town halls (Cyberforum, 1994), post offices (E-mail vs Snail Mail), and video stores (Video Server) - offers no incisive, compelling examples of how the received form and content of future communications, per se, will be an improvement over the present. What, in fact, is the psychological, social and political content of those futuristic institutions? What will be taught, debated, mailed or watched that we should celebrate and work toward now? That is what avant-garde art needs to be exploring. In spite of the attractiveness and ingeniousness of much of this show, it offers no answers to those questions. Paik's work does not answer the dilemma of postmodernism; it does not suggest a way out of its own current entrapment between the extremes of the inflated critical claims, that encourage continuation of artistic accumulation, and the hard critical questions that would demand lean and mean forays into new territory. That - paradoxically enough, given the anti-museumization argument that has been directed against Paik - is perhaps why this extremely impressive museumization of video art is traveling the interstates between the coasts.(19)
