26 October/27 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 13Arts
I
n 1963 one of the more notorious
mischief-makers to emerge from
the Darmstadt New Music Courses
stuck around 50 strips of audio tape
to a wall of the Galerie Parnass in
Wuppertal, Germany. Visitors could go
up to the wall and rub the playback head
of a dismantled tape recorder along the
strips, back and forth, hunting for
sounds, scratches, white noise.
“I wanted to let the audience...
act and play by itself,” wrote the
Korean-American artist Nam June Paik,
who died in 2006. “So I have resigned
the performance of music... I made
various kinds of musical instru-
ments.. that the congregation may.
play s they please.”a
The work, titled “Random Access”, is
recreated in Tate Modern’s new exhibi-
tion, among more than 200 pieces from
Paik’s five-decade career.The show
reveals how his experimental practice
both predicted and formed the elec-
tronic age, with video works, robots, and
room-sized installations — a witty com-
mentary on humans’ interaction with
thedigital realm.
“You have to be a lot rougher with this
than you think,” a gallery employee
explained, when I made an attempt at
“Random Access”. “Really scrape.”
So I scraped. But I still couldn’t get
much of a sound out of the wall-
mounted speakers, and the gallery wall
is now covered inferrous oxide streaks.
The original apparently wasn’t very
effective, either. The point was that Paik
was giving us permission to play, to
experiment. The Swiss artist Joseph
Beuys took Paik at his word and
destroyed one of the pianos in Paik’s
first solo show with an axe. And Paik
dug it; they became life-long friends.
How do you represent an artist whose
chosen medium is the audience, whoThe joke’s on us
Left: Nam June Paik in 1986; above: ‘Robot K-456’ (1964); above right:
‘Untitled (Charlotte Moorman)’ (1996) —AP / Estate of Nam June Paik / Katherine Du Tielfitted with small but still
bulky televisions. Newcom-
ers would be left hopelessly at
sea were it not thatTate has
also assemble d a huge
amount of documentation,
arranged in a revelatory fash-
ion. It reveals Paik’s career, in
both senses of the word: the
growth of his professional
reputation, and the ener-
getic futility of so many of
his experiments.
Programmes. Posters.
Photographs. Snatches of
8mm. Mostly they record his
ephemeral work — events in
tiny rooms,visitors rammed together,c
everyone laughing, having a good time.
Wall by wall, case by case, we begin to
understand what we missed.
Paik was a collector, a collaborator, an
impresario. He urged others to enact the
strangest dreams. In “Serenade for Ali-
son” (1962), he instructed the artist Ali-
son Knowles to remove 40 pairs of pants
and dispose of them in provocative ways
among the audience, including shoving
them down the throat of “the worst
music critic in the room”. In “Opera Sex-
tronique” (1964), a topless Charlotte
Moorman sawed away at her cello — and
was arrested for her troubles.
Paik had other dreams, too, which for
years he kept to himself. As early as 1961
he had given up studying art and was
avidly reading Popular Mechanics mag-
azine. In Tokyo, with the engineer
Shuya Abe, he co-invented the Paik-Abe
Video Synthesizer. This added single-
colour channels to broadcast images in
real time, distorted, colourised and
superimposed multiple images. It was,
in essence, the technology that would
soon giveTop of the PopsandMTVtheir
visual signatures.
Paik’s use of TV as a medium is now
his most memorable work, thanksto his
monumental “matrices”: sculptural
video collages assembled using steel
gantries, neon tubing and multiple cath-
ode-ray televisions. There’s a late exam-
ple here called “Internet Dream”
(1994), and nearby, a recreation of the
video installation “Sistine Chapel”,
which in 1993 graced the pavilion of a
newly unified Germany at the Venice
Biennale. Thrown across walls and ceil-
ing by TV projectors, disembodied
David Bowies and Janis Joplins, Lou
Reeds and Ryuichi Sakamotos jostle for
space with parties of Gobi desert Mon-
golians. It’s intoxicating. Dated. Kitsch.“Thanks to Paik,” he wrote about him-
self (never a good sign), “we discover
that our entire world can become sound
— or rather that itis ound... he doess
away with structure once and for all.”
And, oh dear, just look where that liq-
uefaction has led. By giving us permis-
sion to create, Paik stripped away the
structures that let us receive nda judge.
His mentor John Cage did much the
same for music. And around Cage, Paik,
Moorman and Beuys swirled a loose
band of brothers and sisters who, under
the banner of the Fluxus movement,
abandoned the commodified single artobject and sought to create democratic
art; an art of the everyday.
The idea that audiences also knew
something about art filled these self-
appointed shamans with impatience.
The audience’s ideas werebourgeois
prisons from which they might yet be
liberated. Liberated into what, though?
Into boredom? Into consumption? All
you can do with this work is participate
in it. Swallow it.
As I left the exhibition, I paused by a
wall-mounted TV, where pianist
Manon-Liu Winter plays her own com-
position on Paik’s prepared piano (now
too fragile to travel): draped in barbed
wire, its keyboard once triggered sirens,
heaters, ventilators and tape recorders.
This is indeed a revelatory show — but
you might come away liking Paik less.To February 9, tate.org.ukPaik was a collector, a
collaborator, an impresario
who urged others to enactthe strangest dreams
spends his time chivvying us into life by
gestures,shocks, pornography? How do
you preserve “Zen of Head” (1962), in
which Paik dipped his head in black ink
and used it to draw a line on a length of
paper? How do you honour his nearly
30-year collaboration with the cellist
and performance artist Charlotte Moor-
man, when “Variations on a Theme by
Saint-Saens” (1969) involves her climb-
ing up a ladder and vanishing into a
water-filled oil drum?
Theworks gathered by Tate Modern
can only go so far to represent Paik’s
practice. “TV Buddha” (1974) is a statu-
ette of a seated Buddha, gazing at its
own televised image. “Three Eggs”
(1975-82) — one real, one nested in an
empty television, and the third a tele-
vised image of the first egg — goes
beyond mere solipsism to suggest some-
thing more complex. There are robots
made from TV sets here, lines of code
from early experiments at Bell Labs in
New Jersey, and bras and spectaclesNam June Paik The artist’s visionary multimedia|
work is on show at Tate Modern. BySimon Ings
OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201924/ - 17:29 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD13, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 13, 1