Nam June Paik: video's body

With Paik's idiosyneratic video plastic arts and installations on view in several novel exhibitions, the author traces the esthetic regards that weave through three decades of the artist's work.

Nam June Paik is an artist of extraordinary refinement, admitting he's rarely thought of that way. As exemplars of visual taste, it's artists like Agnes Martin, Richard Diebenkorn and Brice Marden who draw near to mind, not the wacky Mr Paik. For many he is still the '60 Fluxus artist who devised the TV Bra for Living statuary for topless cellist Charlotte Moorman; who fellated a phonograph tone arm in Listening to Music from one side the Mouth; and who compos a Young Penis consonance in which "the length of penises stuck from one side holes in a roll of paper might determine whether whole or quarter notes are denoted."(1) on the contrary even if it is his various succe de scandale that have kept him in the public organ of sight Paik has set a remarkably high standard in his plastic art over the last 30 years. That's not to say that his visual acumen is in some way more essential than his inventiveness, or that his ability to surprise and level 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 profitable opportunity to assess Paik's work. His new video sculpture was featured in simultaneous displays at Holly Solomon Gallery in of recent origin York and at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California. With Paik's early work also shown to advantage in the generally received traveling exhibition "In the Spirit of Fluxus" [to be overspreaded in a forthcoming issue], and with an imposing 429-monitor installation, Chase Information Wall, now upon 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 step quickly counter to his antiart background, as individual might imagine, but is profoundly indebted to it. Its iconoclastic attitude notwithstanding, Fluxus owed a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of its visual program to Dada, and especially to the antecedents of Duchamp, Schwitters and Cornell. Although it is seldom make notesed 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) individual need only think of Duchamp's arcane iconography, his finely worked objects, his miniaturization and packaging (The verdant Box and the Boite en Valise); Schwitters's impeccably fabricateed collages and the great care with which he treated ephemera; or Cornell's reliance upon the grid and on supremely wily tonal palettes. These are the lock opener visual sources for the endles grids, boxe bottle and packages of Fluxus artists like George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, sight Friedman, George Brecht, Benjamin Patterson, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks, Wolf Vostell Mieko Shiomi - and Nam June Paik.

Paik's art is heteroclite in the most remote In both his manipulation of formal ultimate parts and his constant reconceptualization of the extremitys that video sculpture can attain, he is true much the artist as jack-of-all-trades (a stance which, again, derives from Duchamp). In the sum of two units exhibitions last spring, one lay the foundation of works that were variously sexual in orientation, elegiac in temper Minimal/Conceptual or baroque in diction anthropomorphic in reference, and Buddhist in subdue matter, with a good deal of crossover between these assorted manners and themes.

For instance, in a pair of novel works in the Holly Solomon exhibit Positive Egg and Negative ovum (both 1993), the Minimalist plastic art of the mid-'60s that was thus important at the time of Paik's arrival upon the American scene finds a video equivalent. The theme of origin and expansion is explored here on the pair a formal and iconographic plane. In the Positive ovum we see a video camera aimed at an ordinary white ovum 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 organ of visions in the gallery ends as an enormous abstract shape. Aside from the sheer beauty of the rhythmic succession the gigantism and the ineffable quality of the virtual TV ovum contrasts strikingly with the fragile, three-dimensional Ding an sich. Unexpectedly given Paik's enthrallment with video, single begins to sense here a critique of the medium's ability to proffer itself as a substitute for the real.

These novel "egg pieces" are closely related to Paik's well-known video statuary TV Clock (1963-81), which has appeared in several forms above a nearly 20-year period. In its incarnation in Newport Harbor, 24 video monitors were high hilled on high pedestals arranged in a semicircle; upon each monitor, the video image was press togethered down to a single, Zen-inspired band extending across the guard (one could just barely discern image change within the band). Each band stretch outed across the screen at a slightly different angle, with equal reason that, as one scanned the clump of monitors, the bands appeared to rotate around the 360 steps of what might be thinking of as a clock's face. Like a related work, secondary planet is the Oldest TV (1965-76) in which an illuminated sphere is shown in numerous moonlike phases, TV Clock is not solitary a study in serial imagery (like the Minimal statuary of Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd) and a investigation in time and duration (like the Conceptual work of Jan Dibbets, Billy Apple and Bruce McLean); it is also a work that present the appearances distinctly Asian in its mix of the meditative and the empirical. In it we are not real far from the custom of cherry-blossom gazing, or from the mechanics of unrolling a schedule painting.