ART-PRESENTATION: Nam June Paik-TV Wave

An estimated 73 million viewers (about 40% of the U.S. population at that time) watched The Ed Sullivan Show, when The Beatlesmade their American TV debut on 9/2/1964. It shows an impact of The Beatles and TV broadcast that gathered a number of people in front of their TV sets. This marked the beginning of the “British Invasion” where British culture became popular in America with mass media and consequently the waves of social and cultural changes including the “counter-culture” were generated in the 1960s.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Nam June Paik Art Center Archive

Nam June Paik played a leading role in bridging the gap between art and technology. Always innovative, his work encompassed a variety of artistic genres, from sculpture and performance to music and live broadcasting. A frequent collaborator, he worked internationally with artists, performers and specialists from different disciplines.  The exhibition “Nam June Paik TV Wave” focuses on Nam June Paik’s experiment and exploration of television, dealing with his works from the 1960s to the 1980s. The exhibition centers around the keyword of Paik’s “broadcast,” a combination of his video art and telecommunication. Paik used TV as an artistic medium, in terms of its affecting our life and society in various ways. He created works of art with TV which could be operated by viewers. He was concerned with what art and broadcast could do for a large number of people in front of TV sets. Without going to a stadium or a concert hall, many people can watch the same things through television. He paid attention to the power of TV broadcast to enable the collective experience of watching the same program and the mediated experience while not being present on the site. In the early 1960s Paik began to experiment with TV sets and other audio-visual equipment. Many of his works demonstrate how TVs could be turned against themselves, using magnets to distort their images and reveal their manipulative power. Paik recognised the importance of the mass media and believed that artists could help steer video and other electronic technologies to become more democratic instruments for cultural transmission. Paik’s visionary projects often required access to expensive technology. He would contact companies with high-tech laboratories, asking them to collaborate on ‘electronic art experiments’. In 1969, as artist-in-residence at the Boston TV station WGBH-TV, Paik built an analogue ‘video synthesizer’ in collaboration with engineer Shuya Abe. It could apply effects such as distorting, colorising and superimposing to video images in real time, using several sources simultaneously. Paik wanted to use telecommunication technologies to distribute art and enable long-distance live collaborations. In the late 1960s, as artist-in-residence at Boston’s public television station WGBH-TV, Paik developed some of the earliest examples of video art made for broadcast TV. “Video Commune (Beatles Beginning to End)” (1970) was an improvised collage of distorted TV imagery. It was composed using the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer and accompanied by the Beatles’ songs. Paik invited passers-by into the studio and let them ‘remix’ video images as they aired. In 1974, Paik coined the phrase ‘Electronic Superhighway’ to refer to a decentralised, world-wide system for exchanging information. “TV Buddha” (1974) directly expresses the contrasts and parallels between East and West and between technology and spirituality. A CCTV camera films a statue of Buddha. Its static, silent image appears live on a round TV set, inspired by popular sci-fi imagery. The Buddha is both the viewer and the viewed image, mirroring our own experience as mass media consumers. At a 1974 exhibition in Cologne, Germany, Paik himself sat in place of the sculpture to become a ‘living Buddha’. Paik saw satellite transmissions as the perfect tool for his art to cross geographical boundaries. Aired on 1 January 1984, “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell” connected live events in New York and Paris. It was also broadcast in Korea, the Netherlands and West Germany. Paik’s next satellite project. “Bye Bye Kipling” (1986) linked New York, Seoul and Tokyo during the Asian Games. “Wrap Around the World” (1988) similarly connected Korea, the USA, Brazil, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Italy, China, the UK and the USSR. Drawing on TV, broadcast, and satellite, Paik attempted to increase the understanding of different cultures, and to depict a world becoming one with dance and music. According to him, television is for the point to space communication while video for the space to space communication. By means of “tele-vision” he envisioned a future where a point to space transmission like fish eggs is invigorated, and furthermore where individuals produce their own broadcasts, and many TV stations, great and small, are established so that non-monopolistic broadcasting systems are available.

Info: Curator: Kim Sun Young, Co-curator: Jo Minhwa, Nam June Paik Art Center, 10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu. Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Duration 12/5/20-7/3/21, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://njpac-en.ggcf.kr