Arts Publications

Chance in a lifetime: John G. Hanhardt on Nam June Paik

ArtForum, April, 2006 by John G. Hanhardt

DO YOU KNOW....?
How soon TV-chair will be available in most museums?
How soon artists will have their own TV channels?
How soon wall to wall TV for video art will be installed in most homes?
--Nam June Paik, A New Design for TV Chair, 1973

THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE of Nam June Paik--who died at his home in Miami Beach on January 29--is clear in the expressions commonly used to describe his unique role in transforming the nascent medium of video into a contemporary art form, from the "father of video art" to the "George Washington of video." It is incredible to think that an entire decade before Paik predicted the ubiquity of video technology in A New Design for TV Chair, he was featuring his "prepared," or altered, televisions in solo exhibitions. And as we become the media culture he envisioned in his artwork and writings, we can see how the range of Paik's creative accomplishments and both the prescience and breadth of his thinking--in a practice unlike anything that preceded him--are all the more astonishing. From his early performances to his work in music, television, video, and film, Paik was constantly in action, exploring and expanding the horizons of art.

The story of Paik's life follows a global trajectory. Born into a prominent family in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, he studied musical composition and art at the University of Tokyo. At age twenty-four, after completing a thesis on Arnold Schonberg and graduating with a degree in aesthetics, Paik traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in twentieth-century music--first attending the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where he met composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and then returning two years later to settle in Cologne, where he worked at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk's Studio for Electronic Music. (Stockhausen was based in the city, and it was there that Paik would meet John Cage.) Paik's studies led him to focus on musical composition as sequences of events unfolding over time: His notations mapped actions in addition to tones. One consequence of this technique was that Paik's individual pieces could not be duplicated--leading Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti to suggest that films be made of Paik's concerts as a means to establish scores. That never happened, but their suggestion is an indication of Paik's improvisational approach and commitment to the idea of musical composition as performance.

In his work, Paik removed the classical instrument from its customary sacred position, treating it as a material object to realize both new sounds and shapes. In One for Violin Solo, 1962, for example, the violin is gradually lifted above the head of the performer and then smashed on the podium; in the previous year's Violin with String ("Violin To Be Dragged in the Street"), the instrument is pulled along pavement. Other performances featured Paik's handmade instruments, such as one fabricated out of string and a wooden crate for Urmusik, 1961. It was also around this time that the artist began to incorporate technology into live performances, scratching phonograph records to generate unexpected sounds and playing audiotapes of specially edited mixes of musical styles and sound effects. This resulted in irreverent, cascading series of actions in which chance was a key strategic ingredient: On occasion Paik might, for example, play a piano while covered in shaving cream and flour, eventually overturning the piano and jumping on it. Such transgressive violence released enormous energy into the audience--confronting the protocols of the staged musical performance and seeking to shock viewers into relinquishing any complacent acceptance of compositional formula or tradition-bound belief in performance as a risk-free site.

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News of these events quickly reached New York, where George Maciunas was prompted to invite Paik to join Fluxus after hearing his Etude for Pianoforte, which premiered in 1960 at Cologne's Atelier Mary Baumeister. During the performance Paik jumped into the audience, cut Cage's tie with scissors, and doused him and composer David Tudor with shaving cream. The audience sat in stunned silence as Paik left the room. A short time later the phone rang offstage. It was Paik calling from the street to say the performance was over and everyone could go home. Paik described such performances as attempts to find a way out of the "suffocation of the musical theater as it is," adding that he sought to "complement Dada with music" and believed that "humor was not an aim but a result." The neo-Dadaist impulse in these events was so expanded that Cage himself noted, "You get the feeling very clearly that anything can happen, even physically dangerous things."

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Eventually, Paik's desire to make music visual found expression in a fascination with television--a letter to Cage in 1959 clearly expressed his theoretical and artistic interest in the medium--and, more specifically, with continually changing audiovisuals appearing on televisions that he set as objects into art installations. The relationship of this emerging technology to his sound and performance pieces was signaled in the title of his first solo show. "Exposition of Music--Electronic Television," at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963, was of groundbreaking significance, featuring both "prepared" musical instruments and televisions. For example, Klavier Integral, 1958-63, a piano covered with a bizarre assortment of noisemakers (as well as barbed wire, clocks, eggshells, and a bra), appeared with Random Access, 1963, a reel-to-reel audiotape player disassembled so that audiences could rub the player's magnetic recording head over strips of audiotape stuck to the gallery wall, causing loudspeakers to emit previously recorded sounds. These pieces were displayed alongside Paik's transformations of monitors--the first such works of this kind that he exhibited--which were placed on their side or upside down and scattered about the room. In addition, Paik extended the de-collage technique that characterized his early artworks and writings, as he distorted the broadcast electronic image by breaking or tearing it from within, rather than by adding to it. By disturbing the flow of moving images, Paik seized control of the television set, at once refusing the standardized broadcast image and remaking it as his own. Paik understood that television could be an interactive and artist-empowered instrument rather than simply a one-way conduit of received programming--even before the commercial development of the portable videotape player and recorder. Just as Paik the performer had challenged audiences, so the artist would challenge the construction and treatment of television viewers as passive consumers, whether in his manipulations of entertainment (Variations on Johnny Carson vs. Charlotte Moorman, 1966) or news programming (George Ball on Meet the Press, 1967).