ART-PRESENTATION: Nam June Paik, Point-Line-Plain-TV
Nam June Paik needs no introduction, he transformed video into an artist’s medium with his media-based art that challenged and changed our understanding of visual culture. As Paik wrote in 1969, he wanted “To shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Nam June Paik Art Center Archive
The Avant-Garde television and video works of Nam June Paik, are displayed at the Nam June Paik Art Center. The exhibition “Point–Line–Plain–TV” spotlights the Korean-born artist’s achievements from the end of the 20th Century to the early 21st Century. It explores how Paik shook the visual art world, challenging viewers’ understanding of art by going beyond the traditional canvas. The exhibition takes its title from Wassily Kandinsky’s essay “Point and Line to Plain-Contribution to the analysis of the pictorial elements” and aims to demonstrate and interpret how Paik established his basic and unconventional mediums to create art. Compared with paintings by Kandinsky, if point, line, and plain would be the basic elements in his work, Nam June Paik’s canvas (television) introduced time, space, audience participation, indeterminacy, and contingency. Therefore, when the audiences watch Nam June Paik’s canvas (television), which presents synthesized images using “Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer”, they experience completely different thinking processes from when they look at the real canvas. The exhibition features two television works by Paik. The first, “Real Fish/Live Fish, 1982” (1999), is comprised of two television screens. One TV reveals a real-time image of a fish, while the other possesses the actual real fish swimming inside. Viewers are invited to reflect on the significance of experiencing conceptualized time. The second work is titled “Yule Gok” (2001), part of Paik’s “Family of Robot” series which portrays Yule Gok, the Confucian and politician from the 16th Century, in the form of a robot. It is made up of 17 monitors showing various videos including a fan dance performance. To edit and transmit television images real-time, Nam June Paik produced a machine called “Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer” in 1969 in collaboration with the engineer Shuya Abe. The synthesizer is unique in that it does not experiment with videos according to predetermined criteria, but instead produces unforeseeable combinations through various manipulations. After being in contact with artists from the Fluxus movement, Paik further explored the idea of “time, space, audience participation, indeterminacy, and contingency” in his work. His performances and installations thus present the core elements of Fluxus. Exhibited in the show is one of Paik’s works with Mary Bauermeister, a close colleague and Fluxus artist, titled “Piano and Letters”. It consists of a multitude of letters communicated between the two artists suspended from the ceiling, as well as scenes from a concert that took place in Bauermeister’s studio in early 1960. Underneath the dangling epistles lies a piano which was actually used during the concert all those years ago. Nam June Paik produced “Key to the Highway (Rosetta Stone)” (1995), encrypting the changes in his works and the paths he took to arrive at those transformations. The upper portion of this work, modeled after the Rosetta Stone discovered by Napoleon’s troops they marched into Egypt, consists of video drawings. The mid-body part shows his artistic profile, and the lower portion houses images taken from Paik’s videos. The mid-body portion also explains why Paik began with music and moved to video media, how he joined Fluxus and his relationship with other artists with whom he exchanged influences and inspirations.
Info: Curator: Hyunjeung Kim & Sun Young Kim, Nam June Paik Art Center, 10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Duration: 5/7/16-5/2/17, Days & Hours: July-August Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, September-June 10:00-18:00, http://njpac-en.ggcf.kr
