‘NAM JUNE PAIK’

Tate Modern, London

”Television has attacked us for a lifetime. Now we strike back.” 
- Nam June Paik, 1992

The Next Step Towards Inderminacy 

One of the many videos included with this show is a German TV documentary on the Fluxus International Festival of Newest Music in 1962. Inevitably, it takes more interest in reaction shots than the events themselves. And, affecting smug viewer camaraderie as if to say “of course you and I can see through this foolishness”, it informs us: “the audience are not quite sure. Should one keep a straight face or is one allowed to smile?”

Nam June Paik’s history involved video art, music, performance, installations, robots and more - often all at the same time. One constant was the influence of John Cage, who he met in ’58 and thereafter took to referring the years before as BC - Before Cage. In another video Cage plays his infamous silent piece on a Manhattan street. As an audience assembles he sits at the keys with absolute focus, then at the very end opens the lid. Are you allowed to laugh? Was there a serious point to it? Or is it both, impish provocation and Zen statement at the same time? He wasn’t giving anything away. And he could deadpan as well as any comic.

The thing is, Mr. Reporter man, the unanswerability of that question isn’t a failing at all. In fact it’s the very crux of the thing. You haven’t seen through. You haven’t even seen.

And a work like ‘TV Buddha’ (1974, above) works in a similar way. A Buddhist figure sits before a camera and TV screen, as if using his own as like a meditational aid. In fact, as you see yourself and other attendees caught in the screen background, the figure becomes rather like Cage in the video. It would be tempting to see in it a provocative critique, perhaps of rich Westerners with their consumerist appropriation of Buddhism. We must be allowed to smile.

But it’s equally possible no joke is intended. To use TV for this - really, why not? Being able to recognise yourself in the mirror is an early stage in overcoming infant egoism. And to get free of yourself, to see outside of your own subjectivities, is part of meditation’s aim. Cage of course was a Buddhist. And Paik seems at least semi-sympathetic, commenting “I am not a follower of Zen, but I react to Zen in the same way I react to Bach.”

Staying on the TV theme… you’ll get used to this with Paik… is ‘TV Garden’ (1974/7), where TV screen of various screen sizes and angles are made into part, possibly the fruits, of a garden. “Television is part of ecology”, he explained. And much of his work involves dissolving apparent borders - East/West (born in Korea, Paik also lived and worked in Japan, America and Germany), ancient/modern and, here, he commingles culture and nature. The work’s “like nature, which is beautiful”, he commented, “not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes”.

The show goes to some lengths to reconstruct his first solo exhibition, ‘Exposition of Music - Electronic Television’ in Wuppertal in 1963. But the effort is worth it. The gallery was the ground floor of a converted villa, but Paik took over the whole building - including the stairs, the basement, the garden and the private residence upstairs. Even the toilet was not immune.

Several of these works are already AC, in the sense of moving beyond Cage. With his prepared pianos Cage mostly inserted objects inside them, interfering with the hammers. The piano seemed ‘normal’, until you tried to play it. Paik attaches items until it looks like a surrealist object in its own right (above), then connects the keys to external things. One sets off a siren, another switches off the room lights, yet another turns them back on, and so on.

The audience is encouraged not to witness and privately contemplate completed art objects. But neither do they merely observe the results of chance processes, as often the case with Cage. Instead they move through a space at their own choosing, interacting with things as they come across them. Art becomes a conversation, not a recital or set speech. “As the next step towards more indeterminacy”, Paik explained, “I wanted to let the audience act and play by itself”.

When Control Was Remote (The Screen Era)

Paik was able to buy his first portable video recorder in 1965, and indeed the Sixties was the decade television technology became ubiquitous. The issues he dealt with very much of his time. But the way he saw technology… truth to tell he sometimes seemed confused.

When he insisted “the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas”, it was a Futurist statement which could have been made by Marinetti had he lived long enough. Yet at other points he seems to envisage a cultural war, with he and his cohorts as the Viet Cong waging guerrilla combat against the mighty tech giants. Though even here technology seems something like Patty Hearst, born into privilege but always yearning to be liberated by the other side. Even when he worked with the tech sector, such as at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, there’s a sense of him going undercover behind enemy lines.

For example, the video installation ’Nixon’ (1965, above) is almost a literalisation of culture jamming. Two TV images of Nixon are distorted by magnetic coils. Like Burroughs’ writing it suggests that the mass media is less an outright fiction than a distortion of reality. So by scrambling it, by distorting the distortion further, we decode it into telling the truth. As well as the obvious political reading, it seems connected to the sound distortions often used by psychedelic music of this era, when only shortly before the studio had merely tried to imitate a ‘live’ sound.

Yet in this conflict, if not contradiction, he proved a microcosm of his era. In the social upsets of the late Sixties, crowds would chant “the whole world’s watching.” There was a tendency to see the same generational shift in technology as with people. Radio involved a reporter telling you what he saw, while with TV you saw it all yourself. Mass media was inherently liberating, flowing across borders until it corroded them, levelling old hierarchies.

But at the same time one of the famous Parisian agitational posters framed the state broadcaster with the phrase “the enemy speaks to us at 6pm”. The Situationist writer Guy Debord declared “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation”. Even John Lennon, star of the new media, commented how they “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.”

And we’re not done yet with those era-embracing contradictions. After an earlier Tate show, I argued much Sixties art fell into a chalk-and-cheese divide between Conceptualism and Fluxus. Paik was officially a member of Fluxus, participating in their events. During which he’d undress and smear himself with toothpaste while playing the Moonlight Sonata… you know, that sort of thing. 

Fluxus was originally called ‘Neo Dada’, and Paik’s texts and publicity have that Dada roughness, pasted down at irregular angles, sometimes over a seemingly unconnected background, bulletins from the front line. And that extemporisation contrasts creatively with his interest in technology. Which we tend to assume will arrive in our lives all sleek and shiny, like a UFO landing. Technology is seen as just another manifestation of high culture, another mystification to challenge and overthrow. For example ’Robot-K456’ (1964, below) was, in the show’s words, “designed as an intentionally shoddy human figure”, to dispel such sci-fi allure.

Fluxus took up Dada’s desire to shock. For it’s first performance, 'Robot K-456’ played the Kennedy inaugural address while shitting white beans. But it also channelled another element of Dada too often overlooked. In its antipathy to high culture, it sought to bring back play. Audience participation doesn’t come across as a lofty ideal, where people are exhorted not to passively sit there supping up the capitalist system of agglomeration, but imbibed with an infectious sense of involvement. To misquote an old ad - overthrowing commodity culture, let’s pretend it’s fun.

Which relates to another art movement of the era. There’s a vitrine of objects from Paik’s studio, which includes Buddhist figures alongside toy plastic robots. And this eclecticism, this magpie collecting of images and shaking up of signs until the effect is culturally levelling, is very Pop Art.

‘Family of Robots’ (1986, example above) for example, were made from working TVs. The grandparents came from vintage equipment, then down to the children composed out of the latest models. It’s reminiscent of the <i>‘Simpsons’</i> scene where Bart insists of hugging the TV instead of Homer, as “it’s done more to raise me than you have”. We are now effectively made of TV technology, its images imprinted on our brains. It’s a similar theme to the Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, if different in execution. And it’s also similar to Paolozzi in never forgetting, in fact revelling, in the way that robots are considered a suitable toy for children.

Then at other times Paik would come up with something like ’Three Eggs’ (1975), in which an egg is filmed and shown on a monitor. Another nearby monitor then has its screen removed, and a real egg inserted…. you get it? This slightly tiresome formal game seems much closer to Conceptualism.

Conceptual art had a dryness it often used as a means of staging absurd jokes deadpan, the better to get its foot in gallery settings. But counter to Fluxus, it tended to relish that dryness, the difficulty, the withholding of aesthetic appeal. True, Fluxus could venture too far over to the playful side of the dial, and become unfocused and self-indulgent - nothing more than bohemian antics, something to do until you grow out of it. Whereas Conceptualism could be too cool, too cerebral, to get anyone riled up enough to change anything. In an era where Jimi Hendrix was setting light to guitars and protesters were levitating the Pentagon it could clamour for attention. 

Someone needed to mix the two up, to get the porridge just right. There are points Paik manages this, but there’s others where he can’t keep up the balancing act. At times he’s found falling into one camp, at others into the other.

No Failure Like Success 

The Tate partly sells this show through his “profound influence on today’s art and culture”. (And see their video, embedded below.) True enough, back in ’74 he predicted “the electronic superhighway”, and asked “do you know how soon artists will have their own TV channels?”

But if some art has proved prophetic, so what? Were that all there was to it, you wouldn’t need to know about Paik any more than you’d need to know about Ade Lovelace to operate your laptop. We don’t want art to predict the next iPhone feature, in fact we don’t want art that merely predicts at all. We want art to raise challenging questions, to critique seeming certainties, to rub up against culture not contribute to it.

When Paik put on his first show in Germany, the most wealthy country in Europe had two TV channels. Mass media was closer to the ‘his master’s voice model’, where the voices of the few were funnelled to the many. An act as simple as offering interaction then seemed radical. And the very technology which enabled TV technology was slowly but surely subjecting it to challenge. Like the still camera before it, the TV camera slowly became both more portable and more affordable.

However, as you watch attendees photographing and filming what are already video works, that’s clearly not the world we live in. We generate the content we consume, we even do it while consuming. But that doesn’t mean DIY culture has triumphed. It means our behaviour has been factored into the new business mode and monetised.

In the Observer, Bidisha found this “a story about the radical 60s generation segueing into the yuppie era.” And like others of that generation, Paik was so successful he inevitably became a victim of that success. Truth to tell, he became one of those people always telling you how futuristic the future will be, until you learn to spot him coming.

In 1984 he became associated with first world-wide satellite broadcast, titled ‘Good Morning Mister Orwell’, intended to mix high art and “popular entertainment”. (Including, risibly, the Thompson twins.) ’Internet Dreams’ (1993, above) is a video wall. We might want to associate this with reversal of perspective. We’re no longer the object, the viewed, the dot among many other dots stuck on the map. We’re now the subject, the viewer. Perhaps even stroking a white cat.

One of the many recurrences of this image is Moore and Gibbons’ celebrated comic 'Watchmen’, where Ozymandias meta-reads a bank of screens like a scrying glass, and so divines the immediate future. But what do we do when we come across this? Of course we channel-surf. Just like we do at home with one screen and a button.

If there was anything valuable to learn here it would be that no magic transfers from sitting in that exalted position, that there’s no super-sighted elite who hatch mater-plans, that those who place themselves above us are at least as clueless as we are. But that’s not the response we’re being prompted for.

Paik had said in 1969 “the real issue is not to make another scientific toy, but to humanise the technology”. We now know all too well that satellite TV just made broadcasting broader, that more screens was merely a quantitive not a qualitative change. It did nothing to disrupt, reverse or humanise the technology.

But worst of wall was James Fox’s BBC4 series ’The Age of the Image’ which said of his video installation ‘Sistine Chapel’ (1993) “it really does capture what it was like to belong to the MTV generation”. You know what else did that? MTV did. And MTV was shit.

On the other hand, this may be seeing it the wrong way up. In his Standard review, Matthew Collings recounts how he had only known Paik through his later work, which he found soporific, and found this show to transform his understanding. That, not ’Internet Dreams’, is the reversal of perspective to pull. Focus on the good stuff.

Paik was like a cross between Babbage and Dr. Frankenstein, extemporising at the limits of possibility. It’s like the well-known story of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. In their early days they’d spend hours cobbling together unique and entirely unreliable contraptions, that unreliability often being the thing that made them unique. In later years they could just order kit from a catalogue, and they sounded like it. Paik failed by succeeding. He may have been fated to fail, given his time and his interests. But that doesn’t mean the only lessons he has for us are negative ones.