30 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31Exhibition
Nam June Paik
Tate Modern, London
Until 9 February 2020
THE legacy of Nam June Paik is
impressive. He is the man who
predicted the internet, YouTube,
remote education courses and
many other icons of our information
age. He died in 2006, living long
enough to see some of his ideas
start to become the drivers of today.
He was an artist who spent
much time engineering,
dismantling, reusing and swapping
out components. He often replaced
old tech with better tech, delivering
what he could of his vision with the
components available: cathode ray
tube TVs, neon, copper, FORTRAN
punch cards. A video synthesiser he
designed with Tokyo artist-engineer
Shuya Abe in 1969 created the
psychedelic video effects to music
programme Top of the Pops in the
UK and the MTV channel.
A fascinating retrospective at
London’s Tate Modern celebrates
all this – and his involvement with
that loose confederacy of artist-
anarchists known as Fluxus. Paik,
born in what is now Seoul in 1932
during the Japanese occupation of
Korea, was educated in Germany,
where he met Fluxus composer
John Cage and also the legendary
Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. (Yoko
Ono was a patron of Fluxus; David
Bowie and Laurie Anderson were
hangers-on.)
Beneath Paik’s celebrated, and
celebrity-stuffed, concerts, openings
and “happenings”, there is what
amounts, in the absence of Paik’s
controlling intelligence, to a pile of
junk. More than 660 televisions,
some broken. A black box the size
of a double refrigerator, containing
the hardware to drive one of
Paik’s massive “matrices”,
Megatron/Matrix, an eight-channel,
215-screen video wall. It is in pieces
now, a nightmare to catalogue,
never mind reconstruct, stored in
innumerable tea chests at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The trick for Saisha Grayson and
Lynn Putney at the Smithsonian
was to distinguish the raw material
of Paik’s work from the work itself.
Then curators like Sook-Kyung Leeat Tate Modern had to interpret it for
a new generation, using new tech.
This is because what Paik used to
make his art is likely to end up in the
bin. Consumer electronics aren’t like
painters’ pigments, which can be
analysed and copied, or sculptors’
marble, which may be repairable.
“Through Paik’s estate, we are
getting advice and guidance about
what the artist really intended,”
says Lee, “then we are simulatingthose things with new technology.”
Paik’s video walls (the works for
which he is best remembered) are
monstrously heavy and absurdly
delicate. But the Tate has managed
to recreate his Sistine Chapel for
this show. Video projectors fill a
room with a blizzard of cultural
and pop-cultural imagery, a visual
melting pot reflective of Paik’s
vision of a tech utopia, in which
“telecommunication will become
our springboard for new and
surprising human endeavors”. The
projectors are new, but the feel of
this recreated piece isn’t so very
different to that of the original.
To stand here, bombarded by
images of Bowie, President Nixon,
Mongolian throat singers and other
flitting, flickering icons of Paik’s
madcap vision, is to recall
our (mostly broken) dreams for
the information age: “Video-
telephones, fax machines,
interactive two-way television...
and many other variations of this
kind of technology are going to
turn the television set into an
‘expanded-media’ phone system
with thousands of novel uses,”
Paik enthused in 1974, “not only
to serve our daily needs, but to
enrich the quality of life itself.” ❚Internet Dream, one of
Paik’s signature video walls ©^
EST
ATEOFNAM^ JUNE^ PAIK/ANDREWDUNKLE
Y^ ©TA
TEVideotopian dreaming
Recreating the visionary video installations of Nam June Paik
reveals our hopes for the information age, says Simon Ings
“ Paik’s utopia saw
telecommunications
become a springboard
for new and surprising
human endeavours”Don’t miss
Visit
Parasites: Battle for
survival at the National
Museum of Scotland
in Edinburgh explores the
country’s role in the fight
to eliminate five deadly
diseases that together
affect 1 in 18 people.
From 6 December.Read
Nano Comes to Life
(Princeton) draws on
author Sonia Contera’s
adventures in molecular-
scale engineering to
herald the coming of
age of nanotechnology,
and its promise to
re-engineer tissue
and transform lives.Last chance
Antony Gormley
has been twisting our
perceptions of space
and the body for half
a century. A major
show of his art has been
running at London’s
Royal Academy of Arts.
Catch it before it ends
on 3 December.
TOP:^ SINCLA
IR^ STA
MMER
S,REECE^ LAB
;^ BOTT
OM:^ ©
THE^ ARTISTPHOT
O:^
DAVIDPARR
Y/©ROYA
L^ ACADE
MYOFARTS