FESTIVAL FEATURES | Nam June Paik
LIVE
TRANSMISSION
Nam June Paik’s achievements in bringing technology into art outshine those of any other artist. He was also the fi rst to use television in an artwork, an event whose 50th anniversary the EIF celebrates in a major show. Paul Dale assesses Paik’s legacy
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L ike so many radical Asian artists of original video freak, composer and cultural terrorist / spiritualist Nam June Paik was born into wealth. As Korea was being dei led by Japanese occupation in the 1930s, in preparation for the encroaching war, Paik was being privately educated in Seoul, Hong Kong and i nally the ancient shogunate seat of Kamakura near Tokyo. This town-temple of Zen, this heartland of Buddhism, was to leave a profound mark on Paik and his art. But it was his subsequent studies of humanities at Tokyo University and a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s music r him to study aesthetics, that made it possible for him to study aesthetics, ropean in European specialising music, philosophy and modern music, Munich at the universities of Munich and Cologne.
practices mic in It was as an academic in e late mainland Europe in the late with 1950s that Paik fell in with oring a group of artists exploring in in pioneering o art. performance and video art. John And in 1958, Paik met John ucial Cage in Germany, a crucial nced that convinced encounter ions Paik to combine his passions new for Zen Buddhism and new arde music in an avant garde aper touchpaper context. The Paik lit, and Paik had been ing followed a barnstorming with 1959 performance with ser the legendary composer sen Karlheinz Stockhausen on. with his i rst exhibition. nal Later, his confrontational ch performances − which no included smashing a piano e’s and cutting off Cage’s his tie − only added to his is attacks on the bourgeois He culture of the time. He h began to collaborate with as Fluxus members such as d George Maciunas, and e alongside performed y the early them l 1960s onwards, as well s as with Joseph Beuys d and other like-minded artists.
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20 THE LIST FESTIVAL 15–26 Aug 2013 5–26 Aug 2013
Around that same time, Paik came up with what was to be a recurring motif in his work − the customised television. In 1963, he customised and exhibited 13 televisions along with a dead bull’s head at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal, Germany. Unhappy with contradictions in the work, Paik collaborated with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to develop ways of manipulating the inner workings of the televisions themselves. On moving to the USA in 1964, Paik met cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, and with her he developed performance ideas that he had been unable to realise in Europe. Through his collaborations with Moorman, and along with his acquisition of some of the i rst along with his acquisition of some of the i rst to be to be portable cameras portable cameras
released on the market by Sony, Paik’s art really came into its own.
In his 1967 performance with Moorman of Opera Sextronique, Paik went head to head with American society’s sex taboos. Police halted the performance: Park was detained, and Moorman arrested for public obscenity. In his subsequent collaborations with Moorman, Paik employed music, electronic media and her body to create video art that was at once familiar and yet totally unique to its creator. His works represent a merging of technology and the human spirit. Zen, playfulness, shamanism and communality are among the many themes that this remarkable artist engaged with right artist engaged with right up to his death in 2006. Paik’s open-mindedness Paik’s open-mindedness and world perspective inspired inspired gatherings and art satirists alike, and his inl uence should not be underrated. individual
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Transmitted Live: Nam J June Paik Resounds is, u unbelievably, the i rst e exhibition in Scotland o of Paik’s work, and i it contains many of h his key sculpture and i i lm works as well as re recordings and archive m material that captures so some of his performance an and music pieces. The op opening weekend of Tr Transmitted Live will be acc accompanied by a series of of performances to to the lasting leg legacy continuing inl inl uence of Paik today. The These include an event feat featuring Paik’s longtime frie friend collaborator Tak Takehisa Kosugi, who will crea create ‘action music’ using an e an electric violin combined with with sound processors and wire wireless transmitters. Paik’s spiri spirit will no doubt be in the ether ether and the cathode rays. illustrate and
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Talbot Rice Gallery, Talbo 650 2 650 2210, until Sat 19 O 19 Oct, free.