2009-05-30

Hannah Higgins, Suki Kim, Seongho Haam, Midori Yamamura, Mary Bauermeister, Youngchul Lee, Jinsok Kim, Bazon Brock, Jinkyung Yi,

Nam June Paik Art Center

The Gift of Nam June Paik 1, Shifting Perspectives
and The Notion of Time – Youngchul Lee (Nam June Paik Art Center Director)

Youngchul Lee is Director of Nam June Paik Art Center and artistic director of its inaugural festival Now Jump. He was artistic director of 1997 Gwangju Biennial, and 2005 Anyang Public Art Project, as well as Professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design.

According to The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss, the cycle of A giving B a present, B giving C a present, and C giving A a present, loses its meaning when it is reduced to the conceptual frame of ‘exchange’, the result of modern capitalism. Giving a present is a mechanism where the return of a salute to an invisible value and mind is given. To Nam June Paik art exists beyond the narrow logic of institutions and was a medium that connected mind to mind, satellite to satellite, just like the giving and receiving of presents in a future cybernated society. This is the reason why the title for the seminar series at Nam June Paik Art Center was inspired by Marcel Mauss’ notion of ‘The Gift.’

Nam June Paik Art Center opened on October 9, 2008. The contract with Gyeonggi province was realized eight years after Nam June Paik signed it with the naive signature: ‘the house where Nam June Paik’s spirit lives for a long time.’ Three large flags were hung for the opening ceremony. The first flag was composed of stripes deriving from a de-construction of the Korean national flag. The second flag carried the image of Fluxus Island drawn by the artist when he was thirty. The last flag carried the title of the Nam June Paik Festival, ‘NOW JUMP.’ These flags represent the basic motto of the Nam June Paik Art Center. All during his life Nam June Paik thought in terms of satellite, an ecological point of view, while trying to connect distant pasts and futures beyond the conflictual structure of modern nation states. What he dreamt of in his thinking was ‘liberation.’ This liberation should start in the here and now, as in the famous phrase from Aesop’s Fables: “Here is Rhodes, now jump!”

The young Nam June Paik completed a thesis on Schonberg at Tokyo University in 1957 and went to Germany to further his studies. The feverish magma that rose up from the heart of this young man was the beginning of a complex intellectual revolution that summons together all the sensations of human beings in order to allow new dimensions of the intellectual to emerge beyond the Euro-centric nation system. Paik’s struggle to liberate technology from its status as a mere tool for message transmission, encouraging the audience’s active intervention by proposing new discoveries in aural and tactile senses, presented post war Germany with an opportunity for emancipation from the guilt and the defeat of the war. Paik offered post war Europe bitter laughter towards their awareness of being both victims and victimizers. As the Japanese anthropologist, Nakagawa Shinichi, has remarked, the young Nam June Paik tried to present art as a form of intellect that became an expression capable of waking up the wildness of sensation and the reasoning latent in our subconscious.

October 4 (1965) should be a memorable day because it was the day Paik purchased the first portable video camcorder. On that day, the Pope John Paul VI happened to visit New York City and Paik took this opportunity to video his visit. This was shown along with Charlotte Moorman’s performance at the cafe A GoGo, a performance place for artists in Greenwich Village. However, Paik had already begun to experiment with the use of televisions as art when he worked at the WDR electronic studio in Cologne from 1959. His first solo exhibition in 1963 was held in Wuppertal, the hometown of Friedrich Engels, and was titled Exposition of Music-Electronic Television. This was the realization of the research he had been conducting. This exhibition breaks the taboo against ‘theatricality’ and the ways of thinking associated to East Asian shamanism and zen, associated to the high modernist tradition of Music and Art being developed separately. This is accomplished by converging all the senses into a plateau. His later works can be seen as variations of this crucial operational mechanism present in his first 1963 exhibition. In addition the element of audience participation, not only accompanies Paik’s practice but is also a premonition of a fulcral issue in contemporary art exhibitions. This exhibition marks Paik’s shift from the movement image of machine aesthetics influential to the avant garde artists until the mid twentieth century to the time image of electronic technology.

Research on Paik’s practice and life is meager both abroad and in Korea, when considering his ‘unbelievable’ achievements, documents, works, the enthusiastic support and world-wide friendships he maintained. Compared to the studies about Beuys and Cage, research on Paik is superficial and theoretically shallow. For example, even though Paik lived as a US citizen for more than forty years, the diachronic book on the theory of art history recently published in New York, Art Since 1900(eds. Rosalind Kraus, Hal Foster, et al) deals with Nam June Paik poorly and even distorts his achievement. Due to a limited intellectual capacity that is unable to accompany Paik’s proficiency and ability to cross freely between media, anthropology and religion, a great part of his practice and thought has either been omitted or addressed only superficially. The study of Nam June Paik has been unable to find its ground and has been stuck in a rut caused by an excessive mythologization in the media, sarcasm directed at him by certain Korean scholars and possible nationalist/racist prejudice. In this battleground, lies the reason for the existence of Nam June Paik Art Center.

There are several reasons for misunderstanding Nam June Paik. Paik once said, while Dada was the DNA of twentieth century art and Duchamp was at its center, video art opens an exit from it. Video art becomes a nomadic war machine that mutates visual elements into whirling molecules within the collage that is time. This machine is nomadic not because it is easy to carry but because destruction of an image and perpetual transformation are its main traits. Thus the nomadic disposition and the art of Nam June Paik, ‘the Pope of video art’ and ‘a zen monk’, are not easily interpreted within the logic of settlers. His art, a complex combination of sound, performance, electronics, zen and shamanism, is unfamiliar to Westerners (and those of the twentieth century). The paradigm generated within the institution of modern art is too oblique to accommodate the art of Nam June Paik given his experiments in a new philosophical concept of time. As a result Paik has been understood too simply as the founder of video art within the modern knowledge system and patriarchical tradition. This is the reason why we set the sub-theme of the first international seminar of the Nam June Paik Art Center as ‘Shifting Perspectives.’

Paik’s realm of artistic practice and intellectual inquiry exhibited good command of instinctual, synthetical and probabilistic thinking. Therefore, the temporal frame of thinking in Nam June Paik’s art is unfolded by relentlessly destroying the two poles of beginning and ending within the time concept of Aeon rather than Kronos.

Nam June Paik said, “the role of the artist is to think the future…world history teaches us that even if we can’t win the game we can change the rules.” Nam June Paik headed out into the open world to confront the battleground of twentieth century Avant-garde art and managed to change the rules through his tenacity and expanded scope of thought. We are running after him in order to enter the gate of this secret. This is the beginning of an intellectual journey that looks back onto the narrow exit of twentieth century art that Paik exited.

· The World’s Oldest TV : Time and spacetime in the early work of Nam June Paik
Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, Hannah Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) the The Grid Book (MIT Press, March, 2009). Higgins is the daughter of Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins.

· The intellectual and cultural field during the adolescence of Nam June Paik
Suki Kim is the director of Hyunsil Munwha Publishers and lecturer at the Korea National University of Arts. Kim’s fields of research include art criticism, cultural studies, and post colonial modernization. His views on these subjects inform his activity as a cultural mediator.

· The colonial period, the war, and the twentieth century : the wound of Nam June Paik
Seongho Haam, poet/architect, is the author of the poetry anthologies Very Beautiful Illness and Taj Mahal. Haam has also published a travelogue of Tibet titled Document of Nothingness. Currently he is focusing on his architectural practice.

· Nam June Paik in a Global Context : The whole human being is ontology
A lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and an art history PhD candidate, Midori Yamamura is currently a 2008-2009 resident fellow at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Center for the Place, Culture, and Politics. She has curated exhibitions and written critical essays in both Japanese and English.

· January 9, 2009
Mary Bauermeister is an artist renowned for her Atelier Mary Bauermeister. Between 1960 and 1962, she hosted many performances by artists and composers associated later with Fluxus and experimental music, from John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lamonte Young, George Brecht and David Tudor to Nam June Paik.

· Pierrot Lunaire and Wal In Chong Gang
Youngchul Lee is Director of the Nam June Paik Art Center and the artistic director of its inaugural festival NOW JUMP. He has been curator or artistic director of the 1997 Gwangju Biennial, 2000 Busan Biennial, and 2005 Anyang Public Art Project, as well as Professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design.

· Practical flight, and from there, aesthetical flight : On the ‘stationary nomadism’ of Nam June Paik
Jinsok Kim is professor of Humanities at Inha University. Kim’s critical writings span from the political to the literary. Kim is the editor of the academic journals Literature and Society, People and Philosophy, and Social Criticism and is also the author of several books.

· The Triumphal Arch
Professor of Aesthetics and Communication Design at Wuppertal University, Bazon Brock is widely known as a leading German theoretician of art. Brock participated alongside Josef Beuys, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik in many happenings, action teachings, and performances.

· Nam June Paik : Politics of performance and machinistic ontology
Jinkyung Yi is humanities professor at Seoul National University of Technology. His field of research includes nomadism and communism with an emphasis on the practicalities and ethics of revolutionary lives. Jinkyung Yi is the author of Nomadism, The capital beyond capital, and The Future of Marxism.