Experiments of a mad, prophetic professor
‘The creators of a new language are always 50 years ahead of their time,” according to Henri Matisse. Given that he died in 1954, I doubt he had in mind the avant-garde, Korean-born artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006), the subject of an enthralling, hugely enjoyable new retrospective at Tate Modern.
Still, Matisse’s sentiment seems tailor-made for Paik, who spent a lifetime working at the frontier between art and technology, and coined the phrase “electronic superhighway”. Think of Paik less as the “father of video art” (a description that is often applied to him, which may strike dread into even the stoutest art lover’s heart), and more as a sort of John the Baptist for the Information Age: he lived in the analogue past, but prophesied, with startling prescience, the connectedness of our digital future.
Walking through the galleries at Tate Modern is like stumbling across the laboratory of a mad professor. At every turn, we encounter retro, re-engineered machines – record players, radios in wooden cabinets, cathode-ray tube television sets – sprouting knobs, dials and wires, and arranged in strange configurations. A powerful magnetic coil distorts the on-screen face of Richard Nixon delivering a speech. CCTV cameras feed live footage of inanimate objects, including an 18th-century wooden Buddha and a flawless white egg.
Meanwhile, Robot K-456, a deliberately rickety, radio-controlled automaton, welded out of electrical parts and aluminium strips, exudes a winningly wonky charm. Able to walk (and, bizarrely, urinate), he looks like he was knocked together by a geeky teenager wielding a soldering iron in a basement. I’m not sure he’d fare very well on Robot Wars.
Still, there he is, waving clumsily in a black-and-white photograph taken in
1964, behind Charlotte Moorman, the Juilliardtrained classical cellist with whom Paik collaborated extensively for almost three decades.
Thanks to her provocative performances with Paik – who studied classical music in Tokyo, before moving first to Germany, then New York
– Moorman became known internationally as the “topless cellist”. Following her arrest for indecent exposure during a performance in 1967, Paik constructed eccentric costumes for Moorman to wear, including a “TV Bra” and a set of cyborg-like eyeglasses that look like a nixed prototype for Google Glass.
It’s amazing how antediluvian formerly cutting-edge technology appears, as soon as it is beyond its sell-by date: most of the stuff on display here is the antithesis of, say, Apple’s sleek aesthetic. Yet Paik sometimes turned the datedness of obsolete technology to his advantage. For the boxy figures in his so-called Family of Robot, custombuilt using radios and TV sets, he used newer models for the younger generations. Here, we meet his roboaunt and uncle, created in 1986, but “dressed”, seemingly, in Fifties technology – old-fashioned radio and television sets.
If the exhibition missteps, it is in insufficiently acknowledging the whimsical wit and absurdist humour that ran throughout Paik’s work. One of the best rooms, devoted to his often-amusing experiments, is, sadly, hidden away, while a po-faced, academic recreation of a solo exhibition mounted in Germany in 1963 gets too much space.
But Paik was interested in weightier matters, too: the potential intersection between technology and spirituality, for instance, was a career-long obsession. And much of his work, including a meditative installation involving a camera trained on a flickering candle, riffs on the idea of the “ghost in the machine”.
There are moments of arresting, beauty: in Magnet TV (1965), a scuffed, heavy black magnet, on top of a yesteryear set, conjures a ghostly, geometric pattern on screen that feels almost palpable, calling to mind a “construction” by the sculptor Naum Gabo. But it is Paik’s live satellite transmissions, with their surfeit of rapidly cut, trashy imagery, and video walls such as Internet Dream (1993), here presented in a darkened gallery like a piece of stained glass in some futuristic chapel, which feel most relevant today.
Early on, Paik divined that an overload of information would become the defining characteristic of our connected world. His flashing, blinking video art is so frenetic that it threatens to induce a headache. But, because it’s so far-sighted, it’s also brilliant.
Until Feb 9. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk