At the crossroad: Paik's electronic superhighway

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by J. Ronald Green

Paik has left an enviable record in the art world. He was welcomed into the elite of the avant garde at an early age, collaborating with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the Fluxus founders in their heyday. He created some of the icons of the '50s and '60s avant garde, with his smashed pianos and his Charlotte Moorman variations. He has generated a long trail of single-channel videos, famous performances, landmark exhibitions, and impressive catalogs, along with an extensive secondary critical literature. He has had the support of giant corporations and has produced giant works, including a piece designed for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul that contains over a thousand video monitors. His dealer, Carl Solway, reports that he may do a bigger piece for the Atlanta Olympics.

Why, then, is this show not playing in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago? One could try to answer that question in a journalistic way by exploring how the show was curated and put together, and by analyzing the relevant relationships within the art world. But there must be a larger reason.

To begin with, Paik's work is stuck at a crossroad defined by two diametrically opposed critical positions within the art world. The positive position is well-stated by two of Paik's earliest and most influential supporters: David Ross, the George Washington of video curators (from the Everson Museum in Syracuse, to the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and currently, as Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art); and John Hanhardt, the George Washington of film and video curators (the Walker Art Center, and for the last two decades, curator of film and video at the Whitney). Hanhardt has written repeatedly about the significance of Paik's work, and his 1982 Paik retrospective at the Whitney is one of the most significant events in Paik's career, as well as a major move for video in the art world. Hanhardt has always valued Paik's playfulness, humanism, inventiveness and positive attitude toward technological change and its potential instrumentality for social and cultural change. Hanhardt has celebrated Paik's global optimism, as well as qualities of generosity and leadership within the video-art movement. Hanhardt's article in a recent catalog lovingly reviews the major metaphors of Paik's vast outpouring, grouping his art objects under categories such as "organisms," which includes TV Garden (1974-78); "architectural arches," which includes Video Arbor (1989), an outdoor arch of monitors that has become overgrown with vines; "the [evolved] individual," which includes his original Robot K-456 (1964); "the [evolved] family," including his Family of Robot (1986); and "the global village," which includes certain installations in the new show being reviewed here, such as SYS Cop (1994), E-Mail vs Snail Mail (1994), Video Server (1994), and Couch Potato (1994), the global village's policeman, postman, video store and typical resident, respectively.(1)

David Ross's early support for Paik's work is evidenced by his retrospective of Paik at the Everson in 1974; in a recent interview Ross conducted with Paik, Ross expressed a deep appreciation of Paik's historical accomplishment.(2) Ross sees Paik as the embodiment of a utopian moment in the 1960s when a generation of new artists and curators believed that technology could help change society; Ross has valued - and has helped establish - Paik as the first and grandest representative of that hope to infiltrate broadcast television stations and prestigious museums.

Paik's severest critics, however, have attacked the viability of, precisely, the utopian moment, the humanist hope for social change through technology. Martha Rosler has pointed out that historically the hope that "[i]n art and architecture, formalist modernism promised a healthier, more efficient and adaptive - and liberatory - way of life, for all classes," and that the "possibly revolutionary intent, to pave the way for democratic participation, could quickly turn into accommodation to new - technocratic - elites."(3) Rosler excoriates Paik's work and his "sanctification" by the art world, referring to Martha Gever's highly critical Afterimage article on Paik's "coronation" by Hanhardt and the Whitney Museum. Rosler points out that Paik's celebrated attacks on the corporate structure of society have in fact been a pulling together of "the two ends of the American cultural spectrum by symbolically incorporating the consciousness industry [corporate media; TV] into the methods and ideas of the cultural apparatus [art world; museums] - always with foundation, government, museum, broadcast, and other institutional support."(4) Acknowledging Gever, Rosler also points out that Paik's attitude toward technology is heroic and masculinist, fetishizing the female body (famously, Moorman's) and paying homage to artist-magicians and seers such as Cage, whose work Rosler terms "quietist." Like Gever, Rosler faults Paik for failing to analyze any specific TV messages or effects, or to provide a rational counterdiscourse to the technology on which he is dependent for his work. In the end, she calls Paik a "holy fool," referring to his role as a gadfly and cynic within the official structure of the court.