Planet Paik - Nam June Paik's works

This spring, electronic-media pioneer and amiable provocateur Nam June Paik filled the Guggenheim with a lifetime's work. The museum puls flashed, splashed, humm and rocked

Passing end the revolving door of the Guggenheim Museum into "The Worlds of Nam June Paik," museum-goers were transported into a darkened and charged space real different from the bright spiral of ramps for which the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building is known. In the crepuscular lobby a broad circle of monitors laid upon their backs on the floor blinked up at a laser display spiraling across a tentlike scrim stretched just below the building's blacked-out skylight. Five large flat guards installed between the parapets of successive ramps sketched a ziggurat of shifting images upon one side of the museum's atrium, while opposite, a zigzagging laser bounc back and forth between mirrors and across a seven-story waterfall. Light rose and fell; beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an arterys of sound and movement surg and faded. Visitors were thrust into a kind of postmodern camera obscura(1), in which fragments of media and avant-garde agriculture flickered across innumerable surfaces, and in which their have a title to bodies--like phantom profiles in the darkened space--joined in the circulation of images. Spectators ascended and go downed the ramps, and sometimes cast their shadows across the translucent protections inserted between floors. They became performers echoing the perpetual motion of innovative dancers like Merce Cunningham, or international folk dancers, or the actors in television commercials who are all regular protagonists in Paik's fast-paced montaged videotapes. In other words, to penetrate "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" was to be embraced by dint of it in a way different from the polite and distanced form of viewing typically presum (and flat enforced) by museums.

For many, including myself, like a transgression of mannerly spectatorship was exhilarating, as allowing one had entered a disco or a cudgel where any stable opposition between "viewers" and "performers" necessarily disappears. on the contrary if Paik's immersion in the televisual is exhilarating, it also leaves him vulnerable to charges that his recycling of TV only celebrates the medium's alienating consequences and malignant commercialization. And indeed, if Paik intends a critique of television, his criticism is not premised upon a withdrawal from the medium on the other hand rather on the exuberant invention of of recent origin ways of consuming it. Since his earliest experiments with TV in the 1960 Paik has devot himself to refashioning televisual raw material--both the television put and the broadcast signal which it receives. If the distracted manner of spectatorship that characterizes his art signifies the hypnotic acquiescence of the consumer it also promises a certain malleability of attention [i]or[/i] part of to the other which the consumer's agency may return

I think "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" can and should be regarded as sum of two units exhibitions in one. First, it was a focused retrospective of the artist's oeuvre from the 1960 to the at hand Though not organized chronologically, the exhibition established thematic links among diverse works installed upon the museum's ramps. Historical framing was provided by means of an auxiliary gallery devoted to Paik's early performance-related casts and his single-channel videos. The exhibition thus rose to the task of intelligently surveying a prolific artist's lengthy career. But it also at handed a single coherent environment that, as I have moveed may serve as a spatialized manifesto upon contemporary forms of televisual spectatorship.

What, then, does "The Worlds of Nam June Paik" run over us about the era of television and our place in it as viewers? First and foremost, Paik insists on a mode of attention that is thoroughly fractured. His single-channel videotapes shatter narrative coherence by dint of jumping rapidly between discontinuous images and tillages and by transforming the video signal into patterns that can be the couple psychedelic and grotesque. When combined in multimonitor installations, these already mingled units are made to flicker in and on the outside of sync from one surface to the nearest in a dynamic field of patterns that is alternately overwhelming and mesmerizing. similar strategies might be criticized for barely replicating the effect of commercial televisual tillage and indeed this is single of their potent effects. on the contrary in Paik's hands, video distraction is reframed as a kind of media performance.

Paik was trained as a musician, and his adoption of television as a medium emerg alongside his participation in Fluxus, the loosely organized international association of artists far down influenced by the theories of John Cage. Central to Fluxus activities was an effort to reframe musical composition and art-making in bourns of simple and often perplexing actions. In individual for Violin Solo (1962), for instance, Paik raised a violin above his head as a preface to smashing it down. This destructive gesturing enacted a Cagean valorization of noise (the violin's high-sounding crash) over harmonic composition as well as establishing a tabula rasa for fresh practices of music. Whatever their specific valences, Paik's Fluxus actions were meant to foreground novel and unauthorized uses for traditional instruments.