Using concepts inspired by Dada artists, avant-garde musicians, and communication philosophy, Nam June Paik turned his attention to television and video, creating works that questioned the onesidedness of broadcasting.
On March 11, 1963, Nam June Paik opened his first one-man exhibition, entitled “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television,”
Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea, where he studied piano and composition. He and his family were forced to move to Japan during the Korean War. While in Japan, he enrolled in the University of Tokyo to study twentieth century music, including electronic techniques. He was graduated in 1956 with a degree in aesthetics, having written his thesis on the influential twentieth century German composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal and twelve-tone techniques replaced traditional concepts of harmony and tonality. In the 1950’s, Germany was the center for electronic and avant-garde music, and Paik was drawn to that country to continue his studies at the University of Munich and at the Freiburg Conservatory, where he focused on art history and philosophy in addition to music.
In 1958, Paik enrolled in the International Summer Course for New Music
Cage is credited with many innovations and experiments in modern music. For example, in 1938, early in his career, Cage dared to insert various objects between or on top of the strings of a piano. His “prepared piano” created sounds different from those that could be made by the instrument alone. Cage continued to stretch and explore the possibility of music. In some of his compositions, he included the noises of everyday life. Noting that audiences often were bored during a concert, having little to see and nothing to do, Cage also developed the idea of musical indeterminacy, in which the elements of the musical composition are left undecided by the composer and are chosen instead by the musician who performs it, thus imbuing musical performance with the unexpected quality of theater. He also is credited with having developed the first “happening,” or multimedia audience participatory event, in 1952 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
These ideas inspired George Maciunas to become leader of the Fluxus group
In the fall of 1958, Germany held its first show of Dadaist work since such art had been banned by Adolf Hitler. Paik was able to study work by Marcel Duchamp at first hand. He also was impressed with ideas of artist Kurt Schwitters
After the summer institute, Paik studied at the University of Cologne, where he did experimental work in the Studio for Electronic Music of Radio Cologne
In Hommage à John Cage,
Some of the inspiration for these performances came from ideas of Zen Buddhism, part of the Korean culture and Paik’s heritage even if not his religion. In Zen, it is not uncommon for a master to act in a bizarre manner in order to shock the senses of his students, forcing them to arrive at some awareness. No one could be certain of what Paik would do next—perhaps not even Paik. There was no way of writing notation for his kind of “music,” and he had at one time considered the use of video to record his performances, eventually using these tapes as a musical “score.” He ultimately rejected this plan in fear that his pieces would be reproduced mechanically. The variability and uncertainty was what made the performances intense. Paik had incorporated and made his own the Fluxus idea that the artist’s job was to oppose accepted norms in order to come up with the unexpected.
George Maciunas invited Paik to perform at Fluxus events and to write for Fluxus publications in the early 1960’s. In his piece “One for Violin Solo,” Paik destroyed a violin by smashing it to pieces on a table. This destruction was more violent than original Fluxus philosophy yet fit in with the Fluxus ideas of destroying the boundaries between the artwork and its viewers. In Sonata Quasi una Fantasia,
Paik wrote descriptions of work, or “scores,” for his pieces such as Young Penis Symphony,
While Paik performed his compositions and wrote for Fluxus publications, he also began creating a series of sculptures or assemblages of found objects that would eventually lead to his one-person showing in the Galerie Parnass. Inspired by German painter Karl Otto Goetz
In one case, Paik discovered that the television was broken, so that the only image to appear was a horizontal line. The artist turned this set on its side, making the horizontal line into a vertical one. By this action, he showed total disregard for the sanctity of a machine that, since the 1930’s and especially during the 1950’s, had alarmingly invaded households worldwide. Paik was the first person to recognize the potential of television as an art form and was the first artist actually to transform the electronic mechanisms of the television set to enhance or distort the viewed pictures.
Although his television sets did not make a large impression on art critics at the time, Paik realized the importance of what he had done. Cage also realized that someone would be bound to turn television into art. Paik shared that belief but did not think initially that he would be that person. After the exhibition, however, he wrote that “by no previous work was I so happy working as in these TV experiments.” Soon after this time, he left Germany for Japan so that he could work with color television, which was not then available in Europe. He began a collaboration with Shuya Abe
Paik and his working robot, K-456, visited New York City to participate in Fluxus events. Maciunas had returned from Europe in 1964 and was encouraging artists of the Fluxus group to occupy loft spaces in the SoHo area of Manhattan, making this area an exciting one for the new avant-garde. Maciunas convinced fellow Lithuanian Jonas Mekas
Paik continued his exploration of avant-garde performance, collaborating with cellist and avant-garde interpreter Charlotte Moorman in an effort to add sex, in the form of nudity, to music. In this, they were rebelling against the conservative dress of the classical musician. Paik was an active participant in the New York avant-garde festivals Moorman organized. Her performance of Paik’s Opera Sextronique
Paik increasingly turned to television and video as his means of expression. In 1965, he held his first exhibition in the United States at the New School for Social Research
That same year, Paik bought one of the first commercially available Sony video recording systems, becoming the first artist to exhibit work created on videotape. In a cab on the way home from picking up this equipment, he was stuck in traffic caused by Pope Paul’s visit. Paik taped the traffic jam and exhibited this work that same evening at SoHo’s Cafe à Go Go for the Fluxus-sponsored “Monday Night Letters” series. It was here that he made his bold prediction that “someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins, and junk.”
His career moved quickly from this point in time. Mary Baumeister, an acquaintance from Cologne, introduced him to Fernanda Bonino, who gave him a series of exhibitions in her Galeria Bonino in New York. There he exhibited his “Demagnetizer,” a circular electromagnet that created abstract patterns on the television screen, and what he called his “dancing pattern,” created by feeding audio signals into color television sets. At his second show in the Galeria Bonino, Paik exhibited his video installation, TV Cross,
Paik had a love/hate relationship with the television set reminiscent of his relationship with the piano and the violin. His innovations in the use of the medium set him apart from other underground video artists, who often used the standard video format to explore unconventional themes. Aside from creating videotapes, he uses the television set itself as a sculptural material, making a bra, a pair of glasses, a penis, a bed, a cello, and numerous other images out of television sets. In these works, his videotaped images become a part, but not all, of his total video installation. He has decorated or gutted the television set and replaced the electronic insides with a fish bowl and with a candle. He has placed the machine on the ceiling for his piece Fish Flies on Sky,
Paik also loved the medium, acknowledging that no one once taped could ever truly die. He envisioned his synthesizer, a special-effects generator created with Abe, being adapted for home use, allowing viewers to alter their television images at will, turning a colored television set into an electronic canvas with which viewers could become active creators of art. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village,” Paik dreamed of a “global art” based on television technology. He created his interactive piece Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,
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Hanhardt, John G. Nam June Paik. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Issued in connection with a show at the Whitney Museum. A collection of essays on the artist’s work from the perspective of museum personnel, who must first investigate their own reactions as they confront the Fluxus artist. There is heavy reporting on objects and performances but also some interesting information on what led to the creation of particular works. -
Hayward Gallery. Nam June Paik: Video Works, 1963-1988. London: Author, 1988. Catalog of Paik’s show. Short but concise, giving the history of the artist as leading to the development of his work. Text is accompanied by photographs from videos, of video sculptures, and of video installations as well as of his performances with Charlotte Moorman. -
Kang, Taehi. “Nam June Paik: Early Years, 1958-1973.” Gainesville: Florida State University School of Visual Arts, 1988. This Ph.D. dissertation is the most comprehensive investigation of the artist and his work. -
Nam June Paik: Global Groove. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2004. This catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Guggenheim includes essays by the artist, as well as by John G. Hanhardt, Caitlin Jones and Anja Osswald. Bibliographic references. -
Paik, Nam June. Art for Twenty-five Million People: Bon jour, Monsieur Orwell. Berlin: Daadgalerie, 1984. An anthology of information concerning Paik’s satellite-transmitted piece of the same name. This live, interactive program was produced by WNET in New York and by FR3 in Paris and simultaneously broadcast via satellite on January 1, 1984, to an estimated twenty-five million viewers. Not all the text is in English. -
Rosebush, Judson, ed. Nam June Paik: Video ’n’ Videology, 1959-1973. Syracuse, N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1974. A scrapbook of articles, essays, reviews, letters and other documents describing the artist’s work and ideas, with Paik’s own notes and explanations written in the margins.
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