Nam June Paik: video's body

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

As Amy Taubin pointed out in the Village Voice, "Rehearsal," Paik's show at Holly Solomon, struck an overall elegiac note.(6) In the last two years Paik, for whom time and space are constantly jostling one another on the playing field of video, and for whom the passage of time is often literalized in his sculpture, has seen the death of John Cage, his mentor, and Charlotte Moorman, his collaborator. Sistine Chapel, Paik's dry run for his installation at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, was a kind of homage to the 1960s. Not only were the video projectors and huge speakers mounted willy-nilly on huge scaffolding in the center of the room, recalling the scale of the technology used to create discotheque and rock concert light shows, but the effect of sensory overload seemed to capture the spirit of that remarkable, youth-driven decade. Like the sacred space from which the piece's name derives, the walls and ceiling of Solomon's new downtown gallery teemed with imagery. There were taped segments of figures like Cage, Moorman, Alvin Ailey (also recently deceased), Joseph Beuys and Lou Reed. There were also computer-generated landscapes and American flags, scenes from track and field events, and school upon school of swimming fish - imagery that reaches back at least to Paik's 1975 Video Fish.

The memorial quality continued in Piano Piece (1993), a closed-circuit video sculpture which has just been acquired by MOMA. An upright piano, fitted out with 15 video monitors, is computer-programmed to function as a player piano whose keys spin out Scott Joplin tunes, The work is an almost Borgesian labyrinth of not-forgetting. Trained as a pianist, later a musicologist and composer, Paik has been tampering with pianos from as far back as the sculpture Klavier Integral (1958-63), a work that dates from his first meeting with John Cage at the Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt. In comparison to the wild disorder of that first "prepared" piano, Piano Piece is a study in cool, self-referential pattern-making. What we see on the various monitors are the images produced by many tiny cameras within the piano's own body. Mostly shot in perspective with rapidly receding orthogonals, the images show moving keys and hammers from numerous points of view. One human interloper, John Cage, appears on a large monitor at the top of the sculpture and on a small one at the piano's foot. The linked histories of Cage and Paik, the physical fact of the piano and its myriad representations, and the sweet music emitted by this ensemble - all come together in a remarkably poetic work that has more in common with Matisse's sad and sublime Piano Lesson than with the seemingly absurd jerry-built object that we take in at first glance.

Paik's most touching and most succinct good-bye to his friend and mentor is undoubtedly the sculpture called Cage. In a bit of the flat-footed, Duchampian punning so typical of Paik (and perhaps of anyone who lives on linguistic frontiers), this work takes the form of a real, heart-shaped bird cage. Suspended inside is what must be the tiniest video monitor in the world, looking as precious and astonishing as any netsuke in the Asia Society. On the flickering little screen we see Cage seated outdoors at a piano, repeatedly putting on and taking off his eyeglasses, and occasionally we glimpse Charlotte Moorman with her cello. Like two lovely nightingales, these two heroic figures of the New York avant-garde will continue to serenade us in Paik's sculpture for as long as ... someone remembers to put fresh batteries in the micro-Hitachi power pack.