February 11, 2000
ART REVIEW
Nam June Paik: Vast Wasteland? Fast-Paced
Land
By GRACE GLUECK
NO one has taken the measure of that awesome monster
television with
more audacious ingenuity than Nam June Paik, the
Korean-born
electronics wizard who started his career in Germany as a
renegade
musician. With boundless energy and manic obsession, he has
made
television his own subversive creature, pushing it beyond the
banalities of
network and cable into the realm of art and critique.
From mining the world for global imagery to
creating a "TV bra" for the cellist Charlotte
Moorman, from blasting commercials into
gyrating geometrics to making spectacular
video-generated visual environments, Mr.
Paik has given video his distinctive stamp,
putting it through paces undreamed of by
more conventional tinkerers. From his first
primitive efforts in the early 1960's,
mounting magnets on monitors to warp the
electronic signal, to more recent multichannel
projections of global events, he has tuned into
video's processes and possibilities with keen
insight, inventiveness and a wild sense of
humor.
Now, at 68, has Mr. Paik peaked? Not a bit,
as proved by "The Worlds of Nam June
Paik," his first American retrospective since
1982, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. Organized by John G. Hanhardt,
senior curator of film and media arts at the
museum, with Jon Ippolito, assistant curator
of media arts, the show contains examples of Mr. Paik's major
video
endeavors since the early 60's as well as several new works
that tap the
visual power of laser beams.
In the rotunda the centerpiece of the exhibition is
"Modulation in Sync
(2000)" -- done in collaboration with a laser-installation
expert, Norman
Ballard -- a pulsating multimedia environment that envelops
the viewer in a
wrap of sound and light. Its three components include two
laser projection
pieces that give this incorporeal medium spectacular
visibility. One is a
coruscating "Jacob's Ladder (2000)," whose glittery colored
light zigzags
down a seven-story waterfall cascading from the dome to the
rotunda floor.
The other, "Sweet and Sublime (2000)," shoots bursts of
colored geometrics
in rapid-fire sequence onto the oculus of the Guggenheim's
dome.
The laser pieces share the rotunda with another element, a
gang of 100 video
monitors with upturned faces, whose rapidly changing
multichannel imagery
is repeated on six monitors the size of movie screens. They
are installed
between the walls of the ramp that spirals from the rotunda.
Looked down
on from any point, the monitors evoke a turbulent pond of
swimming
images, while the double-faced screens on the ramp enlarge the
images --
among them Allen Ginsberg, Dick Cavett, Merce Cunningham and a
Japanese rock band -- to cinematic scale.
The High Gallery, which has served as a shrine for many
masterpieces of
great but (by video standards) static modern art, has been
darkened to
display "Three Elements," a trio of "laser sculptures" in
which laser beams
move and cross one another with a kind of abstract
choreography in infinite
space. The eye-boggling spectacle would give an old-line easel
painter like,
say, Kandinsky, a 360-degree turn.
What comes after this, on
the
way up the ramp, is a
display of
Paik icons from the 60's
and
70's, more than a dozen
pieces,
some of which have been
reconfigured for the
ramp's
curves. There are cornball
jokes
like "Candle TV" (1975),
an
empty shell of a monitor
with a
lone candle burning
inside. (Not
for nothing has Mr. Paik
been
affectionately dubbed the
"village vidiot.") And
there are
more ambitious
undertakings,
like the updated version
of "TV
Garden" (1975), a lush, sprawling environment of potted
greenery that
drapes over the edges of the ramp (interestingly, a feature of
Frank Lloyd
Wright's original drawings for the Guggenheim).
Half concealed among the plants are some 30 video monitors
placed in
upright and other positions. They are all tuned to "Global
Groove" (1973), a
sprightly, fast-paced mix of pop performances, other artists'
films and
videotapes, manipulated commercials and appropriated
prime-time television
material. It is perhaps Mr. Paik's most influential broadcast
production.
Taking the candle piece a few steps further is "One Candle
(Candle
Projection)" of 1988, in which a lone candle is videotaped and
its image then
manipulated by a number of monitors to create a discolike
environment of
flickering colored shadows on the walls of three bays. Evoking
Mr. Paik's
Asian origins is "Mongolian Tent" (1993), a full-scale yurt on
whose sanded
floor sit three statuettes of Buddha, watching "Beuys
Projection" (1990), a
performance by Joseph Beuys filmed by Mr. Paik that throws
projections on
the walls and tent poles.
And displaying the Paik skill at mixing live with virtual is
his updated
version of "Video Fish" (1975), a long bank of 52 tanks in
which live fish
swim before monitor screens showing videotapes of mixed
images, among
them other performing fish and Merce Cunningham dancing,
trailed by a
ghostly doppelgnger.
The entire Tower Gallery, on the topmost ramp, is devoted to
Mr. Paik's
early years, recapitulated in photographs, objects, tapes
(video and audio)
and viewer-driven interactive pieces. Photographs show his
early rapport
with the iconoclast composer John Cage, whose random,
chance-inspired
scores suggested new approaches to music, performance and
visual art. Mr.
Paik's audio tapes of mixed sounds and silences and his
"Klavier Integral"
(1958-63), an adjusted piano with many nontraditional musical
items added,
sprang from Cagean notions.
An early member of Fluxus, the loose-knit international group
of artists who
used guerrilla tactics to savage conventional cultural
pieties, Mr. Paik
entered vigorously into the action. A 1964 photograph shows
George
Maciunas, Fluxus's founder, performing the Paik "One for
Violin Solo"
(1962), whose score called for smashing the violin to pieces.
Playing the
piano for his "Mixed Media Opera" (1968) at Town Hall, Mr.
Paik is seen,
stripped to the waist, improvisationally banging on the keys
with his head.
A section of the Tower Gallery is devoted to Mr. Paik's
redoubtable
collaborator, Ms. Moorman, the classical cellist and dedicated
avant-gardist
who died in 1991. Working with him, she followed Paik scores
with relish,
getting arrested at one point for performing topless in his
"Opera
Sextronique" (1967) at the Filmmakers Cinmathque in New York.
Two
years later she heroically donned the Paik-designed device "TV
Bra for
Living Sculpture" (1969), in which a pair of tiny televisions
attached to her
breasts produced images from the act of bowing her cello.
There are special rooms off the gallery for listening to Mr.
Paik's early
audio tapes and watching his single-channel videotapes and
works for
broadcast television. More material displays in this gallery
include the
original Paik-Abe video synthesizer (1969-72), a collaboration
between Mr.
Paik and the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe that enabled the
processing of live
and taped video images to produce a visually distinctive
vocabulary a
distance from the language of commercial television. It was a
giant step
toward forming Mr. Paik's cool signature style.
With a deep grasp of television's ideology, structure and
effect on our lives,
and the artistic means to tackle it with wit and passion, Mr.
Paik is a singular
figure in the art world. Dealing with a recalcitrant medium
that is very short
on tradition, he has little to do with the "who's on first?"
game of
"mainstream" art. But his skills as an artist, a shaper of
ideas and, yes, an
entertainer, qualify him as a national cultural treasure, a
title he already
holds in his native country.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
carol starr
taos, new mexico, usa
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
