(this from poet & critic Walter Lew. you gotta wonder how crazy
stories Paik left behind...)
From: "Walter K. Lew" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: February 6, 2006 7:19:05 AM CST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Paik Wake
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
There is a short video of Yoko Ono speaking at the wake at <http://
www.dvblog.org/movies/02_2006/yoko_nam_june_paik.mov>.
I wanted desperately to be there but no flight from L.A. wd get me to
New York in time without disrupting my finances and schedule of
"important" appointments and deadlines out here. Now I'm thinking:
How could I not have gone? The more I remember Nam June Paik (his
Korean name wd be pronounced Paeng Nam-june), his work, and his
dilemmas, the more I realize how deeply influenced I was by him. Some
transitions one must attend no matter what.
I think anyone who spent more than a few minutes with Nam June must
have a great anecdote to tell.
Once at a dinner at his loft (I think he was still a squatter there
at the time), he impishly disappeared again and again throughout the
evening while his partner, the video artist Shigeko Kubota, valiantly
played hostess to the curators I had tagged along with. Sometimes
we'd find him sitting cross-kneed under the dining table, other times
reclining behind a pile of large storage boxes. He had a cold. At the
end of the evening, he took a large bowl of wasabi with him into his
makeshift editing booth; apparently he was going to pinch wads of it
in his nose to clear his sinuses and stay awake all night.
I loved his impromptu lectures on street corners in the East Village
and Soho, standing in 2 am shadows. He had been in voluntary exile
from S. Korea and nearly cut off by his family, who were ashamed of
his antics, but by the mid-80s, Seoul wanted to be forgiven by him
and enticed him back as it entered the international cultural stage
big-time with its hosting of the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympics.
He obliged with nationally broadcast pieces that mystified, even
angered most of the Korean audiences of the time. (They had been
expecting something along the lines of a good TV movie that showed
Korean values to the world.) He became famous for showing up on
evening talk shows and doing nothing but laughing, pulling strange
faces, or providing incoherent answers to his hosts' clueless
questions. It reminded me of some of Harpo Marx's best scenes. I
would watch gleefully with my aunt's family, who always concluded
that he was insane. And that I was an idiot (pabo) for trying to
shoot his every appearance (and that of my favorite pop singers)
directly from the TV screen with an antiquated super-8 camera.
In the middle of winter, in the early 1980s, he wd regularly show up
near midnight at a Korean Japanese restaurant on Bleecker St. near
NYU to pick up 4 or 5 orders of hot beef soup (komt'ang). He
sometimes had a suggestion for a book topic that might make me rich.
I think the last one was to write about the life and death of a
kamikaze pilot. He didn't think one had been written yet. I was lazy
and never wrote such a book.
My father attended the same high school as Nam June and his older
brother did, who was my father's classmate. The Japanese Imperial
Army was hurting for money and there was a box for contributions in
the classroom. Everytime my father spoke Korean instead of Japanese
by mistake, he had to go up and deposit a coin as punishment. One day
there was a special ceremony because the Paik family had contributed
enough money to build an entire Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane. Nam
June never hid the fact that his family had been very prosperous
merchants for many generations, originally (he said) selling Korean
ginseng at a great profit in China. But until about the age of 50, he
was always on the edge of destitution and was frequently in poor
health (he seemed to suffer from gastrointestinal problems all the
time and so wore a thick scarf around his belly to keep it warm).
When my father visited his brother in Japan, or other people w whom
he had grown up and were now financially well-off, they would always
shake their heads over how much they had tried to help or advise him
to be proper and successful, how hopeless he was, how the family had
to cut off financial support b/c he was so irresponsible, etc. That
was their attitude even after he became an international art
superstar. Clearly, if Nam June had stayed in Korea he would never
have been allowed to develop as an artist and inventor. Now his
influence there is incalculable.
My first memory of his work was when I was walking to the Whitney Art
Museum to see its first big Paik show. What a great exhibit that was!
But before I got there, I noticed that Madison Ave. was oddly quiet
and empty. The street had been cordoned off. From about two blocks
away I head a gradually increasing racket approaching from the
downtown direction. It was Paik's famous robot slowly whirring,
clanking, and constantly almost collapsing as a madly working crew of
three young men dove in and out, whirled, tinkered, jumped, and ran
all around it at Nam June's frustrated commands to reconnect that
lead, tighten the screws of that appendage, replace that battery, as
he followed behind with what seemed to be a useless remote control
box. A crowd gathered and cheered the robot and its sweating,
dedicated attendants on as it somehow managed to get all the way up
and into the museum entrance.
During that same exhibit Nam June reenacted some of his past
performances with Charlotte Morman. I was about 22 years old then and
in utter awe of Nam June. A mutual friend introduced us, Kyunghee
Jin, the stylish librarian of Brown University's East Asian
collection (whom I had a crush on) and whose late husband had been a
physicist studying in Germany when Nam June was also studying there.
He seemed very nervous before the show. There was a multimonitor,
simulcast piece that wasn't going well. So he just ended up crashing
a tool into the screen of the malfunctioning TV set and declared that
the piece was over. There was a large shimmering glass tank of water
that Charlotte jumped into (my memory of it is vague, maybe Nam June
was the one who went in, who knows maybe I have it all wrong). There
was a piece where he started at one end of the performance space and,
holding his right arm out, began to describe an arc through the air
with his finger as he walked slowly to the other end, which is also
where Mrs. Jin and I were sitting. His finger came slowly down toward
us and he touched my forehead. He held his finger there for what
seeme to be a very long time. I felt silly in my navy blue suit and
sweated nervously under his touch. I didn't know how to react and
just sat there silently. I felt that he must be disappointed but now
I'm sure he didn't care. During the many years that have passed since
then I forgot that evening. But since I didn't go to his wake--and I
feel more and more ashamed of it as each minute passes--I have had to
remember one of my artistic heroes on my own. Wonderfully, how he
touched me has returned. Forgive me for saying that I wish to lift my
own hand to hold his so that I will never forget again. A great
person's passing reinspires his mourners. His death is not possible.
