‘Archeological’ discovery of Nam June Paik’s avant-garde spirit
In 1977, two weeks before he turned 45, Nam June Paik (1932-2006) declared it was “time for Archeology of Avantgarde” — an unusual phrase he chose to trace the origins of his avant-garde spirit of experimentation that would help set the foundations of his imposing legacy as a video art visionary.
In his “archeological” effort, Paik recalled the moment he first heard about Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had been described to him as “a devil or the most extreme avantgarde.” That description alone moved him at the age of 15, and from that point on, the composer became the driving force of the young artist’s life.
He then went on to launch a string of questions — why was he interested in Schoenberg and the idea of the most extreme? The answer, he stated, lay in his adventurous “Mongolian DNA,” in a figurative sense.
“Mongolian Ural-[Altaic] horseback hunting people moved around the world in [the] prehistoric age from Siberia to Peru to Korea to Nepal to Lappland,” he wrote. “They saw far and when they see a new horizon far away, they had to go and see far more. Tele-vision means in Greek to ‘see far.’”
Hence, he found television screens and the video art genre to be the ideal playground for his boundless creative spirit.
Marking the 90th anniversary of Paik’s birth this year, the Nam June Paik (NJP) Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, has brought two new exhibitions proving once again that the late artist was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word.
The first show, “Archeology of Avantgarde,” named directly from Paik’s own phrase, “flashes back” to 10 significant moments of the artist’s five-decade career in reverse chronological order from 2000 to 1964.
“This exhibition has been organized
with an aim to help the general public understand Paik’s pioneering oeuvre in a more comprehensible and intuitive way,” curator Lee Soo-young said during a press conference last week.
“At the same time, we wanted the artist to be remembered as more than just as a video art visionary, but as someone who never stopped venturing into other diverse mediums including lasers, robots, multi-channel videos, music, satellite broadcasts and collaboration with technicians.”
In addition to his globally acclaimed masterpieces — such as the international satellite installation “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” video sculpture “TV Buddha” and “TV Cello” — there are works speaking directly to the digital future envisioned by Paik that has indeed become a present-day reality.
The robot sculpture “Rehabilitation of Genghis Khan,” which was first displayed at the 1993 Venice Biennale, represents Genghis Khan of the 20th century and a new version of the Silk Road between the East and the West — the non-physical “electronic superhighway,” which foresaw the current era of internet and digital communication.
Another piece indicating the artist’s vision that proved to be ahead of his time is the “Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer,” born in 1969 from Paik’s collaboration with technician Shuya Abe.
The synthesizer is capable of editing and shuffling clips received from video cameras in real time, adding dynamic changes to the colors, shapes, sizes and lighting of the original to give birth to an entirely new, psychedelic collage of images.
“This was the product of Paik’s desire to popularize the making, editing and sharing of videos, transforming them into an everyday activity that could be done at any household — something that was unthinkable in the 1970s,” Lee explained.
After “Archeology of Avantgarde,” viewers are invited to a more abstruse, enigmatic world of Paik as they enter the second exhibition, titled “The Last Consummate Second — Symphony No. 2.”
This is the Korean premiere of the performance of “Symphony for 20 Rooms,” a mysterious text score that was composed by the artist in 1961 but was never brought to life during his lifetime.
The piece is called a “symphony,” although Paik was never a person whose words could be taken literally.
Instead of looking like a typical music score filled with notes and scales designed for an orchestra, Paik’s symphony consists of bizarre text instructions that require a range of objects, devices and even living creatures to create his own whimsical version of cacophony.
He instructed his eccentric score to be recreated in 16 rooms, or sections — despite the title being “Symphony for 20 Rooms” — which can stimulate viewers’ auditory as well as visual, olfactory and tactual senses.
For example, Paik writes that the third room must contain a live hen in a cage, 100-watt light and soft yet mystical incense. While some viewers may attempt to grasp the logic behind the artist’s creative process as they move further down the score, the artist makes that journey all the more baffling — yet intriguing — by presenting rooms like No. 8.
In this section, walls are instructed to be covered with national flags, old clothes and sexy underwear. In the background, an old tape recorder is playing national anthems from Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia, in addition to what he wrote as “Nazi Song (Morgen die Ganze Welt).”
One room, No. 13, remains decidedly empty.
“Many unanswered questions can be raised at this point. Why are there only 16 rooms instead of 20 as presented in the title? Why does an empty room need to exist at all? It’s because for Paik, the number 20 had less to do with the physical number of sections, but more to do with the number of different sound sources and imagined situations that viewers can encounter freely,” curator Han Noo-ri said.
“And perhaps an empty room exists to hint at the possibility that this score can grow and expand further from here on. It’s not literally a void space; rather it is full of unseen yet possible events that can unfold.”
“Archeology of Avantgarde” runs through Sept. 18, while “The Last Consummate Second — Symphony No. 2” will close on June 19 at the NJP Art Center.