NAM JUNE PAIK ART
CENTER - SEOUL.SK
1 OCTOBER 2009
Written by
TRAVIS LEE STREET
Nam June Paik Art Center, GyeongGi-do South
Korea
The Nam June Paik Art Center is in the middle of one
of the most unassuming little neighborhoods in
GyeongGi-do; a neighboring county of Seoul, South
Korea (think Kent to London.) Across the street from
a ceramics school where the elderly hang out on
benches sipping tea, the NJPAC’s sleek and
ergodynamic design grows with and out of the
landscape as if to call you and tell you that things
are going to become a bit more exciting than you’d
thought.
Nam June Paik, Exposition of
Music-Electronic Television [1963]
For those of you new to Nam June Paik, listen up;
you’re out of the loop. At least, that’s how we at
[^]LAND felt after a few hours exploring the Fluxus
wonders of Korea’s one and only true revolutionary
(although looking around Korea, you wouldn’t think
he’s had much of an impact, but that has to do with
tangled webs of authoritarian hierarchy in Korea’s
art system… and is a story for another time!) Where
to begin? Let’s get this out of the way first, Nam
Jun Paik was the world’s first ‘Video artist’. He
created devices for ‘real-time’ video editing (in
collaboration with Shuya Abe, which looks kind of
like a piano that’s been raped between the palms of
an overzealous giant). He made monstrous pianos out
of found objects and barbed wire (Exposition of
Music--Electronic Television, 1963), electronic rock
operas with topless dancers and hippies (Nam June
Paik's "Electronic Opera #1, 1969),
sculptures out of hundreds of thousands of flashing
TVs, like a TV bed for example (TV Bed, 1972-91), robots that walk the streets looking for
victims to deafen with klaxons (Mother and Family of
Robot: Father, 1986), a television garden (1974),
a television elephant (Elephant Cart), a television television. The
list goes on and on and at a certain point you just
give up and let it wash all over you like a bathing
fluorescent light.
Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer [built
in Boston at WGBH-TV in 1969]
Conceptually, Nam June Paik was also one of the most
important figures in post-modernist thought. He
pioneered many avant-garde notions such as the
interplay of sexuality and music, which had not been
thoroughly explored before. He truly utilized the
video recorder and explored ideas of the [recorded]
self-image and perhaps even paved the way for
reality television’s rise (see Good morning, Mr.
Orwell) although we can’t really blame him for
that.
Nam June Paik
Video Synthesizer with Switcher
Camera [1965]
An outcast from Korean mainstream ‘artistic society’
from early on, Paik had to move to Japan to attend
art school because he couldn’t draw. There is a very
cookie-cutter, jump through the hoops art school
system in Korea still today. He graduated from the
University of Tokyo in 1956 and from there went to
Germany to work on electronic music for the radio.
He met the avant-garde composer and pioneer of
chance music and electronic music John Cage in
Germany (who is best known for his 1952 composition
4’33” – four minutes and thirty-three seconds
in which the performer plays nothing) and became one
of the most influential members of the Fluxus
movement. Fluxism was an amorphous collective with a
fluctuating membership that could not really be
accurately described by any one element of action,
although the core of their varied activities can be
represented by a number of ‘fluxus anthologies’,
‘fluxus yearboxes’, ‘fluxkits’, ‘fluxfilms’, and
most notably, a series of ‘fluxus festivals’ held in
various European cities in the early 1960s.
Definitely worth a look-up.
Nam June Paik, TV Candle, 1975
[1999]
Trying to contextualize Paik seems relatively easy
until you delve into his works and come to the
realization that here was a man who was not bound by
context. Here was a man who tried to break free of a
multitude of cultural boundaries. He inculcated
painting, performance, music, video, writing, the
body, language, shamanism, politics, and absurdity
into a living art form. The most recognizably ‘Paik’
image would be that of the piano which he used to
represent that of the bourgeoisie. He frequently
altered pianos, destroyed them, and once dismantled
a grand piano and sold the pieces as a performance
piece. A great to introduce Paik is to read
about La Monte Young’s performance Composition
#10 which consisted of the instruction, ‘Draw a
straight line and follow it.’ Paik stuck his head in
a bucket of ink and tomato juice and on his hands
and knees retreated along a scroll of paper while
dragging his head behind it. The scroll is now
framed and hanging as a kind of painting on a wall
in the Wiesbaden Stadtisches Museum. Performances
such as that raised important questions of
authorship, like who was the artist; Paik or Young?
Paik had a long artistic relationship with Charlotte
Moorman, an outspoken bulky woman who, seen in any
other social context would remind one of a
bucktoothed high school math teacher. Together, Paik and Moorman really
pushed their art by dealing
with issues regarding the body, sexuality and music.
She became best known for getting arrested in the
middle of the performance of ‘Opera Sextronique’ in
which she undressed in public. The moments that will
really stick in your head concerning Moorman would
have to be her nonchalant attitude concerning the
small working television sets taped to her breasts
in A Tribute to John Cage or the way in which
she played Paik, curled against her chest like a
naked cello.
George Maciunas,
Fluxus Manifesto
The NJPC does an excellent job of focusing not only
on Paik’s work, but on the histories leading up to
his work and the after effects of his influences on
a variety of artists. It acts as a sort of Fluxus
museum, showing a few videos of recorded Fluxus
performance projected on a wall covered with photos,
records and the original Fluxus manifesto by George
Maciunas (see above). A second floor room, solely
dedicated to the Flux movement also houses quite a
few ‘fluxkits’ and ‘yearboxes’ that if not for their
age and originality, could look like something you’d
pickup at an Urban Outfitters for your mate’s
birthday.
Nam June Paik Art Center,
Fluxkits
The entire East wing of the building is dedicated to
Paik’s influences on
contemporary artists, most notably the video artists
Marcus Coates and Honoré D’O. Marcus Coates has been
a [^]LAND favorite ever since first encountering
him at the London Barbican in early 2007. His
modern-day shamanism throws an ancient tradition
into the unready face of modern society like a slush
snowball with a rock in the center. Two of his
videos are on display in the East wing; Radio
Shaman, 2006 and The Plover’s Wing, 2008
in which he performs two separate shamanistic
rituals while wearing a skunk pelt hat and deer pelt
respectively, and adorned with stuffed, moving
rabbits. No, no joke. It is AWE INSPIRING.
Marcus Coates,
The Plover’s Wing
[2008]
Marcus Coates,
Radio
Shaman [2006]
Also with a room to himself is Honoré D’O, who takes
up an expansive wall with a sculpture crafted from
cotton buds and other assorted bathroom
paraphernalia. Not very impressive until you sit in
a large irregular beanbag chair and watch a crooked
television on the floor of his video work, which is
quite simply the epitome of DIY brilliance. By
utilizing himself as the main feature and crafting a
wily stop-motion display of small brightly colored
objects, he truly shows what low-budget, well
planned and executed video art can do.
There are subtle sections in the NJPAC for all forms
of Paik, the Fluxus movement, video art, language
art and their contemporary equivalents. A video
triptych piece by Pedro Diniz Reis which flashes
matrix-like, seizure inducing alphabets of English,
Korean and Japanese while simultaneously pronouncing
them in a mono-tone voice is installed near to the
Joseph Bueys video Provocation: Essence of
Life/Art and Anti-Art, January 27th
1970, where a panel of judges debate on ‘exactly’
what the title presumes.
Pedro Diniz Reis, Alphabet
(English)/ Alphabet (Katakana)
[2005-7]
Note: Joseph Bueys was one of the most influential
artists of the 20th century. His
experiences in WWII influenced him to pursue the
healing effects of art and the power of universal
human creativity. Bueys said that each person could
make a creative contribution and stated that
“Everyone is an artist”. We love Joseph Bueys and
will revisit him at a later date.
A wall in the main hallway outside of a cavernesque
room where Paik’s most famous works are held
showcases Herman Nitsch’s video (The Orgies
Mysteries Theater, 1998) complete with a tiny ‘19
years or older’ age-restriction plaque (which did
nothing to dissuade the hundreds of small Korean
children on fieldtrip watching the nudity and animal
slaughter.) Paik attended the ritual/production of
the video and according to Nitsch, once the blood
had been spilt, Paik enthusiastically joined in the
smattering of it over the walls and even helped
clean up afterwards… which Nitsch said was a great
endorsement of his work.
Nam June Paik, TV Garden [1974]
So if you are ever in Seoul, go to the Nam June Paik
Art Center, if not for anything but the TV Garden.
It smells wonderful.
www.njpartcenter.kr
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