Nam June Paik — in memory
From the Boston Globe (excerpts) — 1/31/2006
Nam June Paik, a leading figure in the artistic avant-garde for more than four decades, whose pioneering use of electronic imagery earned him the unofficial title "the George Washington of video art," died Sunday [1/29/06] at his Miami apartment. He was 74.
Mr. Paik died of natural causes, according to his Web site, www.paikstudios.com. He had been left partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1996. "He basically invented video art," said George Fifield, curator of new media at the DeCordova Museum, in a telephone interview yesterday. "He did installation. He did abstract video. He just did everything. He was amazing."
A sculpture by Mr. Paik, "Requiem to the 20th Century," which combines a 1936 Chrysler Air Stream sedan and Mozart Requiem, is in the collection of the DeCordova. Another of Mr. Paik's works, "Robert Goddard," a tribute to the pioneering rocket scientist, is on view at the Worcester Art Museum.
The Korean-born Mr. Paik (pronounced PAKE) had been credited with coining the term "information superhighway" and the saying "The future is now." His career encompassed three continents and numerous art forms and helped define the aesthetic intersection of imagination and technology in the second half of the 20th century.
Mr. Paik began as a composer in the late 1950s, then played a prominent role in the artistic-theatrical events known as happenings, which flourished in the early 1960s. His exuberantly outrageous performance pieces included having a female cellist do a strip tease while playing Bach.
A few years later, he was one of the first artists to seize on the importance of television and video as a cultural phenomenon.
Mr. Paik began experimenting with television sets as a vehicle for art in 1963. His "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television" arrayed a dozen television sets in a Wiesbaden, Germany, gallery, juxtaposing the various images each was receiving.
Mr. Paik moved to the United States in 1964, and a year later bought the first portable video camera available in the United States."
I did not consider myself a visual artist," he said in a 1975 New Yorker magazine profile. "But I knew there was something to be done in television and nobody else was doing it, so I said `Why not make it my job?' "
That job led to major exhibitions at such leading institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Kunsthalle Basel and Kunsthalle Zurich in Switzerland.
Mr. Paik exploited video in multiple ways. He used magnets and other devices to transform what appeared on video screens, creating striking and unexpected patterns of imagery.He also employed video screens as sculptural objects, as in his "TV Buddha," from 1974, which consists of a Buddha figure watching itself on a closed-circuit video monitor, or "The more the better," an installation of 1,003 televisions put in place at the Seoul Olympics in 1988."Paik put the video image into a vast array of formal configurations," wrote Guggenheim curator John Hanhardt, in the catalogue to the 2000 Guggenheim show, "The Worlds of Nam June Paik," "and thus added an entirely new dimension to the form of sculpture and the parameters of installation art."
"He transformed the very instrumentality of the video medium through a process that expressed his deep insights into electronic technology and his understanding of how to reconceive television, to turn it `inside out' and render something entirely new."
Such a description may be daunting, yet a spirit of mischief and irreverence flourished in Mr. Paik's art."Paik had a terrific sense of humor," Fred Barzyk said in a telephone interview yesterday. As director of the New Television Workship at WGBH in the late `60s, Barzyk hired Mr. Paik as an artist in residence.
Barzyk recalled that the furnishings in Mr. Paik's Cambridge apartment largely consisted of used televisions. "His bed was a mattress stacked on a couple of old TV sets."
With $10,000 from WGBH, Mr. Paik built the world's first video synthesizer. The device could receive both audio and video input from multiple sources and produce an infinite number of manipulable color images. Mr. Paik used it for his contributions to a four-hour program called "Video Commune" in 1970."
He and his engineer set it up and he broadcast the very first time with the video synthesizer," Barzyk recalled. "It blew up `GBH's antennae. Video art had arrived."
Mr. Paik was born in Seoul on July 20, 1932. With his family, he fled to Japan during the Korean War. He earned a degree in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in 1956, then moved to Germany to study philosophy. A longstanding interest in music led him to take up composition and performing. He associated with such experimental composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, and John Cage. "He took my ideas into areas where I would never have gone," an admiring Cage told The New Yorker in 1975.
Around this time, a German music critic called Mr. Paik "the world's most famous bad pianist." But technical excellence was never Mr. Paik's aim in music or art. He strove to provoke, amuse, and inNOVAte."Art is just fraud," Mr. Paik once said in an interview with a Korean newspaper. "You just have to do something nobody else has done before."Mr. Paik leaves his wife, Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota. A funeral will be held later this week in New York, according to his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta.Material from the Associated Press was used in this obituary.
From Fred Barzyk — 2/2/2006
Nam June Paik and the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer
I always remember Nam June Paik standing in Studio A, in big rubber boots, his hands somewhere inside an old TV set, telling me to stand back since TV sets sometime explode when he does this. I backed off. The TV did not explode but gave forth a dazzling array of colors, buzzed and slowly died, never to live again.
"Don't worry, I got more TV sets," said Paik. And more he did. That day at WGBH Paik burned out more than 12 TV sets. Fortunately, this time their dazzling images were captured on 2 inch videotape. These "visual moments" became part of a six minute video piece which was included in a half hour program called "The Medium is the Medium." This was the first time artists where allowed to control the professional TV cameras, producing their own unique vision for a network show. And quite a show it was.
Paik was one of five artists who created video pieces for this segment of Public Broadcasting Laboratory, (PBL) a weekly two hour show supported by the Ford Foundation. The artists had been selected from a 1969 gallery show TV AS A CREATIVE MEDIUM, at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York. For his video piece I had to deliver Paik a videotape of a Richard Nixon speech and a nearly naked woman dancer wearing a bikini bottom and pasties for her nipples. He did all the rest, to the great delight of the TV crew. This was not the normal PTV show.
This program began my long association with Nam June, along with my partner Olivia Tappan and colleague, David Atwood. The three of us became the supporters, defenders and co conspirators in the creation of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer.
Why did it happen at WGBH? With me? I had been interested in using television in a more "artistic" way for a long time. My background was theater and art and I was longing to find a way of expressing it. I got into an aesthetic argument with BSO producer Jordan Whitelaw about WGBH's coverage of the BSO. Why couldn't the camera paint pictures instead of showing old men blowing horn and bowing violin strings? Not possible, not at WGBH. I finally convinced a group of engineers (Bobby Hall, Larry Messenger) and camera people to stay late a couple of nights to create what the French media critics call the first video art. We called it JAZZ IMAGES. The creators/artists were Mark Stevens - he attached a 50 cent kaleidoscope to the camera and shot images off a stack of aluminum foil on a turntable; Bill Cosel used a Blossom Dearie song and shot himself peeling potatoes, and then we reversed the tape so he in effect creating the potato whole; Bill Aucion who went on to manage the rock band KISS (his production manager was Kenny Anderson) hung instruments in and around the studio and used a Brubeck jazz piece, and finally there was Peter Hoving who took layers of screens, lace and mesh and using moving focus had a candle dance to a gentle Miles Davis piece.
You have to remember that TV was like a closed society. No one had TV cameras except TV stations. The small format TV camera had not yet been invented. We were like a fortress surrounded by a moat, and no outside artist was allowed to cross over. So we, those on the inside, had to put a break in the structure.
This kind of experimentation that we had embarked on continued and finally labeled the three of us (Atwood, Tappan and Barzyk) as "far out." David Atwood was bringing startling new colors and images to a local jazz show. Tappan and I were knee deep in an experimental series called "What's Happening Mr. Silver?" This kind of long term experimentation was what brought Paik and ourselves together.
The producers of PBL asked us to bring some tapes of our work to NYC to show to the artists and Howard Wise. The three of us lugged 6 heavy 2' tapes of our crazy work and screened it for the producers. We were OK'd and so Medium is the Medium was produced in the WGBH studios.
Paik's involvement with WGBH led to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up an artist in residence program. Paik was my choice. We tried several studio experiments but Paik was frustrated because using WGBH studios, crew, etc. was very expensive. He saw his small grant disappearing without any major creations. He looked for ways to make his work "as inexpensive as Xeroxing."
One day he presented me with a most complicated looking diagram. I am not an engineer and sometimes have trouble understanding what Paik is saying, and was totally unsure that day of what he was describing to me. What I was able to fathom, was that he wanted to go to Japan and work with a Japanese engineer (Mr. Abe) to create a low cost video machine. This machine would cost $10,000 and give Nam June the ability to create constantly without worrying about costs. He further explained that the $10,000 would include his travel, the engineers time, all the electronic equipment, and bring[ing] the machine and engineer back from Japan to Boston to set up its operation. Was this possible? He insisted he could do it. And he did.
Paik and I had lunch with the head of WGBH, Michael Rice, to try and sell him on the expenditure of the grant money to create this video machine. Michael sat there and listened as Paik went on and on about the beauty of the synthesizer and the images it would create. We laid out the diagram on the lunch table, and Paik gave his best presentation yet. To his credit, Michael Rice agreed there, on the spot. Nam June would soon be on his way to Japan.
For the next three months, I heard from Nam June every once in a while. Back here in Boston, I had persuaded the station to give over a very small studio (Studio C) to house the synthesizer. Finally, passing through customs, Paik and Abe arrived with boxes and boxes of equipment. Paik had also purchased an old record turntable on which he could construct objects and spin them at either 33 or 78 rpm. This was the focus of the synthesizers black and white industrial cameras ($100 each) as the two men setup their video machine. I knew the day it was working, when Nam June showed me a mound of shaving cream whirling around on the turntable, which was being transformed into a melange of color and images on his color TV sets. The Video Synthesizer lived.
The first broadcast of the synthesizer was a video marathon, broadcast live in August 1970. Paik used images from Japanese commercials, swirling abstract images and played every Beatle song ever recorded. People, friends, local artists showed up at the studio to help. The costs of this three hour television broadcast, including the shaving cream, tin foil, and assorted objects plus supper for Paik and Abe was $100. He had done it. He broke the back of expensive broadcast TV. The only problem with that evening's broadcast was that he blew out the TV transmitter. The chroma level coming out of the synthesizer was much too high and destroyed a component. (Bill Fairweather can give a more detailed description of the damage).
"What's television coming to?" said WGBH's head engineer, Tom Keller.
"I can't believe what's happening on my TV," said a TV viewer.
"Beautiful. Like video wall paper." said Nam June Paik.