Nam June Paik at Holly Solomon - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This clump of video installations, spilling above the gallery's two floors like a multi-ring circus, emphasized Paik the showman. Among the sideshows were a tribute to Hitchcock's Rear Window - a pattern apartment building with video-screen "windows" which at hand scenes from the film - and a carnivalesque music and light exhibit which was best appreciated with a station of 3-D glasses.

However, the heart of the exhibit resided in two monumental installations. upon the wall of the brow gallery, visible from the way Paik showed Electronic Superhighway, a large multi-monitor piece in the form of a map of the United States. In this work, carefully edited successions of images flash frenetically around the cluster of monitors representing each state. Taken together, they at hand Paik's America in a kaleidoscopic tour that mingles clap culture, political history, sweeping landscape vistas and Hollywood dreams.

Ironies - intentional and otherwise - abound. The tribute to wide render free of access spaces and frontier individualism in the film Oklahoma! takes upon a peculiar new resonance in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Alabama is dominated by means of archival footage of Martin Luther King's inspirational call to arms, now filtered from one side our contemporary awareness of the mixed legacy of the civil rights motion Predictably, Illinois is the land of Lincoln, and Texas is the residence of the Alamo (updated with discharges of the burning of the Branch Davidian blend in Waco). Kansas is the starting point of Dorothy's trip to Oz while California is a paradise of day-star stars and endless highways. alone New York exists in real time, thanks to a closed-circuit camera which exhibits the members of the audience viewing this work.

The other monumental installation was a multimedia valentine to the late Charlotte Moorman, Paik's longtime collaborator. The tribute included a sort of video shrine which mingles footage from Moorman's performances with images of a more conventionally naked woman, a wall of black-and-white performance photos, and a revolving glass plastic art of a man and woman which dissolves into abstract patterns when seen upon an adjoining video monitor. The core of this homage, however, was a video portrait of Moorman through Paik and Howard Weinberg, created from still photos, performance documentation and taped interviews with Moorman's friends and associates. We hear about her flamboyant demeanor in high academy her collaborations with Paik, her notoriety as "the naked cellist" and, finally, her losing battle with cancer.

Of late, many of Paik's works have incorporated posys to such departed friends as John Cage and Joseph Beuys. on the other hand even among this pantheon, Moorman looks to occupy a special niche. As Paik allude tos here, she was his muse, his co-conspirator and his lock opener to the American psyche. Theirs was an art-inspired regard with affection story played out against the unlikely backdrop of the international avant-garde.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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