Name: Ce Pei
Professor: Helen Taschian
Art 1A
June 5th, 2018
Nam June Paik and His Lasting Influence on Contemporary Visual Arts
Introduction
Nam June Paik was an american visual artist born in Seoul, Korea in July 20th, 1932. He was known as “the father of video art” for his extraordinary artworks during 1960s and 1970s. He created a new form of art that used modern technologies into his artworks and his influence remained till today. He went to Tokyo University in 1951 studying aesthetic, music history and art history. Six years later, with his graduation, he published his thesis about Arnold Schoenberg (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014). In 1956 he went to Munich University to further study music history and composing with composer Thrasybulos Georgiades (Kuan Li, 51). It was his experience both in the east and the west that made his innovation of combining music compositions into artworks.
In the year of his graduation from Munich University, he met Dick Higgins and George Maciunas, who lead him to the actual art world and inspired him the creation of Fluxus. According to Swedish National Encyclopedia, “Fluxus is an international and interdisciplinary group of artists, composers, designers and poets that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s.” (See Endnote 1) Nam June Paik, George Maciunas and Wolf Vostell were among the first few pioneers that founded and developed Fluxus. As a branch of modern visual arts, Fluxus utilizes daily materials such as commodities, photographs, videos and televisions into its artworks, known for its use of different art media.
During around fifty years of art creation, Nam June Paik’s style of combining music technology into his works has greatly shaped modern visual arts. Here, selected artworks, such as TV Bra For Living Sculpture (See Figure 1), TV Buddha (See Figure 2), Family of Robot (See Figure 3), TV Clock (See Figure 4) and In-Flux House (See Figure 5), by Nam June Paik would be presented and analyzed. His remaining influence on contemporary visual arts would also be discussed.
Selected Artworks From Nam June Paik
i). TV Bra For Living Sculpture
One of Nam June Paik’s most famous masterpiece — TV Bra For Living Sculpture — in 1969 is shown (See Figure 1). In this artwork, a primary collaborator of Paik’s, Charlotte Moorman, performed cello with two little televisions replacing her bra, and this was where the name of this artwork came from. This masterpiece, for the first time, combined televisions, electronics and music into an integrated art form. All these three components were necessary, as Paik himself commented the artwork, “The real issue implied in Art and Technology is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium … TV Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is also one sharp example to humanize electronics … and technology. By using TV as bra … the most intimate belonging of (a) human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers, not for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.” (See Endnote 2) Other artworks of similar style include Topless Cellist and TV Clock,.
In short, TV Bra For Living Sculpture has its own significance, as it raised discussion around humanizing electronics and visual arts, also it created a new form of art and inspired many other contemporary artists. Moreover, this artwork encouraged the audience to think more than the work itself. For example, when I first looked at it, I was thinking about what new technologies could do, and maybe a television could do more than we expected. In addition, TV Bra For Living Sculpture made me think of the positions females were at the time when Paik created this work, and whether it would be different if Charlotte Moorman were replaced by a male figure.
ii). TV Buddha
Another well-known work of Nam June Paik’s is TV Buddha (See Figure 2). In this work, a sculpture of Buddha, posing a “tranquil meditation mudra” (See Endnote 3), was sitting in front of a monitor, which showed the video of the Buddha itself. The closed loop, created by the monitor recording the Buddha, corresponds to the idea of “Samsara” in Buddhism. With rapid development of modern technology in the 1960s, there was a debate upon how traditional religions communicated with incoming science and technology. According to Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, “The infinite play of the live electronics indicates that the Buddha is doomed to stay on the surface of reality forever caught in the dance between the mind and object reality.” (See Endnote 4) Indeed, when I first looked at this work, I was wondering how we could distinguish between “past” and “present” in the closed loop in the monitor.
From many other Paik’s works such as Golden Buddha and Techno Buddha, we can tell that Paik used religions to reveal issues caused by new technologies. One important question that Buddhism tries to answer is what reality is. If one defines reality as the Buddhism itself, they assume that the Buddha shown in the monitor is not “real”; however, it’s impossible to distinguish “real” and “fake”, “past” and “present” in the screen, as the Buddha in the screen would consider himself as “reality”. As Marshall McLuhan says, in his book Extensions of Man, “It is the continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves”. TV Buddhism was one of the few artworks that lead the audience to think about infinite loop and the meaning of reality, with the combination of electronics and religions, which is remarkable.
iii). Family of Robot
Another key feature of Nam June Paik was his use of robots. There were many examples from Nam June Paik involving the idea of robots, Family of Robot was one of them (See Figure 3). For a long time, people have been trying to create robots, and till the 1980s robots came closer to reality with rapid development of science and technology. After decades of creating artworks with TV and music, Paik further extended his goal to humanizing modern technology — making robots out of TVs. He created, instead of just one robot, a family of robots, consisting from grandfather and grandmother to children by stacking TVs and radios on top of each other. The first time I looked at the artwork I asked myself how Paik could possibly make those robots distinguishable from different generations. As I looked into it, I found that Paik carefully chose the materials, those robots had different gestures, and their heights were different. As shown in the image, the one on the left is shorter, with the color of televisions brighter than the one on the right, meaning the left one is younger. I was also impressed by the fact that there’s a monitor on each robot’s face, and each monitor displays different images, indicating the robot’s personality.
From the series of artworks, Family of Robot, I think Paik wished to discuss the balance between technology in the past and more advanced technology in the future, and also between technology and nature. On one hand, new technology could be used to do more with less, but on the other hand it could potentially make us “retreat from reality”. This correspond to what we have learnt through this quarter from Neil’s The Judgment of Thamus, in which Neil argued that that new technology brings both positive and negative effects on society, and vigilance is necessary. The Art Institute of Chicago commented on the purpose of Family of Robot, “the purpose of video art is ‘to liberate people from the tyranny of TV,’ he was perhaps reminding us of the capability of technology—or, more specifically, of broadcast television—to consume our lives, and asserting the need for us to see it in a different form” (See Endnote 5).
iv). TV Clock
The artwork TV Clock (See Figure 4) by Nam June Paik is on exhibition at Santa Barbara Museum of Art recently. TV Clock consists of many televisions, placed in an arc, with very little light shining onto them. All of the televisions do not have any videotapes nor any TV shows, instead, they show images of laser-beam-like arcs pointing into various directions . Each laser-like line has different colors, and the transition of colors looks like the spectrum of white light. According to Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “Read in sequence, each static line tumbles into the next to form a dynamic yet elegantly spare rhythm that resembles a universally recognized way to measure time.” Nam June Paik himself commented this artwork as “fixed-image television” (Santa Barbara Museum of Art).
From this artwork, I think Paik wants us to think about how to properly utilize modern technology. The televisions display videotapes or TV shows to entertain us, but often times we waste too much time on it. The twenty-four televisions could represent twenty-four hours in a day, and each television represent an hour. As we read each television in sequence, we could experience how time passes while watching TVs.
v). In-Flux House
As mentioned before, Nam June Paik was an expert of combining televisions into arts, and in In-Flux House (See Figure 5) he mounted fifty-two televisions into an old-fashioned cabinet. Each television was separated by wooden planks. To make it look like a house, Paik decorated the “roof” of the cabinet with compact discs. Each television displayed different videos, representing windows of a real house.
This masterpiece was created in the 1990s, when new form of media had just become available to most of people. The invention of television can replicate arts, and people do not have to see those artworks in person, but the original artwork can express things that its replicas cannot. As Walter Benjamin argued in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the aura of originalities that replicas by modern art forms might not have. Therefore, modern mechanical reproduction of art affected the way people perceive and appreciate things and the public is less likely to contemplate art compared with the past. In addition, in Nam June Paik’s hands, television itself can be a form of art, and when televisions became accessible in people’s daily life, the inherent artistry of televisions could be ignored. Therefore, Paik argued again that we should be cautious about newly arised technologies. Other artworks of similar style by Nam June Paik include Electronic Superhighway (See Figure 6), New Desk (See Figure 7) and Watchdog (See Figure 8).
Conclusion
As a Fluxus artist, Nam June Paik integrated Western and Eastern art forms. He was among the first few artists that combined music, videos and electronics. His well-known masterpieces such as TV Bra For Living Sculpture (See Figure 1), TV Buddha (See Figure 2), Family of Robot (See Figure 3), TV Clock (See Figure 4) and In-Flux House (See Figure 5) lead to discussions beyond the artworks themselves. Like Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, Paik is indeed an extraordinary visual artist, and many contemporary artists are influenced by him, such as Michael Bielický, Christian Marclay, Ryan Trecartin and Haroon Mirza (See Endnote 6).
A Little Reflection on the Class
During this quarter, I was really amazed by many visual artists and their artworks. Although at the beginning, I was a bit worried whether I could do well in the class, as I had very little experience with art. However, in the process of writing these two papers, I did a lot of research online and in the library, during which I learnt a lot and appreciated different forms of art. This Is Not A Pipe by Rene Magritte, Mao Zedong by Andy Warhol, TV Bra For Living Sculpture by Nam June Paik, etc… all those masterpieces broadened my vision and showed me the world outside my major. The museum trip was also impressive, and standing in front of real artworks gave me a sense of being a real artist.
In the end, I want to thank Dr. Helen for teaching me this quarter, and TA Andrew Morrison for helping me and being a friend of mine.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Reading Images, 2001, pp. 62–75.
Nam June Paik. The Wayback Machine. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Archived 2014-03-11.
Sophie Landres. “The First Non-Human Action Artist: Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik in Robot Opera.” 2018, pp. 11–24.
Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, pp. 273.
SBMA. “Nam June Paik: TV Clock.” 5 June 2018.
John Cage, “Nam June Paik: A Diary,” in Nam June Paik: Electronic Art. New York, NY: Galeria Bonino, Ltd. 1965.
Okada, Jun. “Nam June Paik and Laurel Nakadate at the Margins of Asian American Film and Video.” 2017, pp. 136-141,153-154.
Ti Zhuan. “Traverse in Nam June Paik’s World.” 2004, pp. 12-13.
Kuan Li. “How Video Expresses Emotions and Represents in Art”. 2012, pp. 51-55.
Endnotes:
Information retrieved from Swedish National Encyclopedia.
Quote retrieved from TV As A Creative Medium exhibition.
In Buddhism, tranquil meditation mudra is a gesture to show peacefulness.
Quote retrieved from Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Quote retrieved from The Art Institute of Chicago on Family of Robot: Baby, 1986.
Information retrieved from Karen Rosenberg, “He Tickled His Funny Bone, and Ours”, New York Times.