Nam June Paik: June 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006

[tuvor]

Performance artist and sculptor whose pioneering work with video may be said to have changed the course of modern art

NAM JUNE PAIK was apparently the first anywhere in the world to be labelled “video artist”. But as so often happens with forerunners, his definition as a video artist was by no means what the world eventually decided the term should mean. For all practical purposes, he was, rather, a sculptor and performance artist who used television sets and video machines as his raw material. Of course the screens were generally showing something, as often as not devised by him, but it was never the be-all and end-all of his art.

Paik came towards what was to be the core of his life’s work by indirection. Born in Korea, he began his academic career by studying music, first in Korea, then at Tokyo University, where he wrote his thesis on Schoenberg, fascinated as he was by the mathematical side of the composer’s later works in the twelve-tone system.

This combination of scientific precision and hard-won artistic freedom was to characterise Paik’s own mature work. In 1956, when he turned 24, he travelled to Europe and settled in West Germany, still following his interest in advanced music, and in 1958, while attending the Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, he met two people who were to prove deeply influential on his own art, the avant-garde composer John Cage and George Makiunas, founder of the “post-surrealist” art movement Fluxus.

Both men were interested in the possibilities of artistic performance, as well as the application of mathematics and modern philosophy to the visual arts. It was Paik’s notion to apply all this to the then despised medium of television.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2016970,00.html

[Hissyspit]

1. Oh, hell, I didn't hear about that! VERY important artist, folks.

[tuvor]

2. I recognized the name while surfing, and I regret my ignorance.

Art History was one of my areas of study, too. Oh, I probably looked at a couple of slides during a lecture or something, but that would've been about it.

I'll bet the 20th century artists I know best have/had excellent press agents.

[swag]

3. I'll remember as long as I live

being very moved by his multi-laserdisc piece in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, Video Flag. The description below doesn't do it justice.



Video Flag, 1985-1996

70 video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and metal housing on rubber wheels.
94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in. (239.6 x 354.8 x 119.9 cm.)

In 1950, Nam June Paik and his family left his native Korea during that country's civil war. After studying aesthetics, art, music, and philosophy in Hong Kong and Japan, he moved to Germany. There he trained in music theory, history, and composition, piano, and electronic music. In the early 1960s Paik became associated with the Fluxus group, and moved from avant-garde music to happenings/performance art. He also began making "altered TVs" in which he manipulated television signals with magnets and used video feedback, synthesizers, and other technology to produce kaleidoscopic shapes and luminous colors. Paik housed these images in the bodies of cheap, secondhand TV sets. From TV Bra for Living Sculpture with cellist Charlotte Mooreman (1969) to his collaborative global telecast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Paik has long reigned as the father of video art.

Video Flag is an important example of Paik's more recent work composed of a series of sculptural television constructions or walls of TVs. In 1982 Paik created Tricolor Vidéo for the Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, using television images to form a configuration of the French flag. In 1985-86 he used the American flag as the basis for three sculptures: Video Flag X (Chase Manhattan Bank collection), Video Flag Y (The Detroit Institute of Arts), and Video Flag Z (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

The Hirshhorn's Video Flag incorporates the latest advances in technology, such as laser disks, automatic switchers, thirteen-inch monitors (rather than the ten-inch monitors used in previous versions), and other devices. A flag is instantly recognizable on this 7-by-12-foot bank of 70 monitors, in which stars and stripes share air time with split-second news stills, rotating statues of Liberty, endless runs of ones and zeros (the binary language of computers), and a face that morphs through every U.S. president from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton. Paik's video is his paean to America and the power of learning from a youth oriented culture.

[crispini]

4. Wow. Sorry to hear that.

RIP.

[asthmaticeog]

5. Awwwwww.

Rest In Peace, sir.

[Ally McLesbian]

6. I know the name...

... and it'll be a big loss for the arts community, for sure.

[BikeWriter]

7. fuck'n awesome.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. There's just been way too much dyin' lately

--p!