Nam June Paik: video's body

Art in America, Nov, 1993 by Kenneth E. Silver

With Paik's idiosyneratic video sculptures and installations on view in several recent exhibitions, the author traces the esthetic concerns that weave through three decades of the artist's work.

Nam June Paik is an artist of extraordinary refinement, though he's rarely thought of that way. As exemplars of visual taste, it's artists like Agnes Martin, Richard Diebenkorn and Brice Marden who come to mind, not the wacky Mr. Paik. For many he is still the '60s Fluxus artist who devised the TV Bra for Living Sculpture for topless cellist Charlotte Moorman; who fellated a phonograph tone arm in Listening to Music through the Mouth; and who composed a Young Penis Symphony, in which "the length of penises stuck through holes in a roll of paper might determine whether whole or quarter notes are denoted."(1) But even if it is his various succes de scandale that have kept him in the public eye, Paik has set a remarkably high standard in his sculpture over the last 30 years. That's not to say that his visual acumen is somehow more essential than his inventiveness, or that his ability to surprise and even shock is superficial. Indeed, Paik's art has consistently intertwined the seemingly contradictory strategies of esthetic disruption and affirmation.

This last spring and summer provided a particularly good opportunity to assess Paik's work. His recent video sculpture was featured in simultaneous shows at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York and at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California. With Paik's early work also shown to advantage in the current traveling exhibition "In the Spirit of Fluxus" [to be covered in a forthcoming issue], and with an imposing 429-monitor installation, Chase Information Wall, now on view at the Chase Metrotech Center in Brooklyn, it's become possible to discern the surprising nuances and subtleties of his art more clearly than ever.

As the "Fluxus" exhibition plainly reveals, the elegance of many of Paik's esthetic gambits does not run counter to his antiart background, as one might imagine, but is deeply indebted to it. Its iconoclastic attitude notwithstanding, Fluxus owed much of its visual program to Dada, and especially to the precedents of Duchamp, Schwitters and Cornell. Although it is seldom commented upon, the flip side of these artists' Dada irreverence is estheticism: the recuperation of ordinary and disdained materials is nothing if not a demonstration of art's transformative power.(2) One need only think of Duchamp's arcane iconography, his finely wrought objects, his miniaturization and packaging (The Green Box and the Boite en Valise); Schwitters's impeccably constructed collages and the great care with which he treated ephemera; or Cornell's reliance on the grid and on supremely subtle tonal palettes. These are the key visual sources for the endless grids, boxes, bottles and packages of Fluxus artists like George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Ken Friedman, George Brecht, Benjamin Patterson, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks, Wolf Vostell, Mieko Shiomi - and Nam June Paik.

Paik's art is heteroclite in the extreme. In both his manipulation of formal elements and his constant reconceptualization of the ends that video sculpture can attain, he is very much the artist as jack-of-all-trades (a stance which, again, derives from Duchamp). In the two exhibitions last spring, one found works that were variously sexual in orientation, elegiac in mood, Minimal/Conceptual or baroque in style, anthropomorphic in reference, and Buddhist in subject matter, with a good deal of crossover between these assorted modes and themes.

For instance, in a pair of recent works in the Holly Solomon show, Positive Egg and Negative Egg (both 1993), the Minimalist sculpture of the mid-'60s that was so important at the time of Paik's arrival on the American scene finds a video equivalent. The theme of origin and growth is explored here on both a formal and iconographic plane. In the Positive Egg, we see a video camera aimed at an ordinary white egg on a black cloth atop a pedestal. Pristine in its form and evocative in its metaphorical associations, the egg's ovoid image is successively magnified in a series of larger and larger monitors, until what had begun as a small, real thing before our eyes in the gallery ends as an enormous abstract shape. Aside from the sheer beauty of the rhythmic sequence, the gigantism and the ineffable quality of the virtual TV egg contrasts strikingly with the fragile, three-dimensional Ding an sich. Unexpectedly, given Paik's enthrallment with video, one begins to sense here a critique of the medium's ability to offer itself as a substitute for the real.

These new "egg pieces" are closely related to Paik's well-known video sculpture TV Clock (1963-81), which has appeared in several forms over a nearly 20-year period. In its incarnation in Newport Harbor, 24 video monitors were mounted on high pedestals arranged in a semicircle; on each monitor, the video image was compressed down to a single, Zen-inspired band extending across the screen (one could just barely discern image movement within the band). Each band extended across the screen at a slightly different angle, so that, as one scanned the group of monitors, the bands appeared to rotate around the 360 degrees of what might be thought of as a clock's face. Like a related work, Moon is the Oldest TV (1965-76), in which an illuminated sphere is shown in numerous moonlike phases, TV Clock is not only a study in serial imagery (like the Minimal sculpture of Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd) and a study in time and duration (like the Conceptual work of Jan Dibbets, Billy Apple and Bruce McLean); it is also a work that seems distinctly Asian in its mix of the meditative and the empirical. In it we are not very far from the custom of cherry-blossom gazing, or from the mechanics of unrolling a scroll painting.