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A Video Visionary
To TV or Not TV: A wall-of-videos greets visitors to the San Jose Museum of Art.
Artist Nam June Paik laid the groundwork for the electronic highway with his pioneering video-art pieces
By Ann Elliott Sherman
The new show at the San Jose Museum of Art, Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the '90s, combines a miniretrospective with 40 new works exploring video artist Nam June Paik's view of postmodern life in cyberspace. It's been two years since the show debuted at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, and that may explain why Paik's cutting edge already feels a bit blunted; time and too much media hype about the Internet have caught up with him.
Walk into the main upstairs gallery, and the first impression is that somebody crossed a carnival midway with the world's largest Circuit City--over 500 television monitors in constant flux and lots of neon fill the room. TVs airing nostalgic footage of old Looney Tunes, game shows and CNN broadcasts sit sideways on the floor, video tombstones amidst electronic detritus of old remote controls, antennae and radio dials.
At the back of the room, a huge video billboard, Route 66 BBS, is choreographed to pulse and flow with its accompanying soundtrack. The effect is like that of video walls featured in the teen department of many retail stores, but that's just proof that most of the standard visual techniques seen in rock videos had their genesis with Paik, who's been working with electronic elements since the '60s.
Cybertown is sort of a Main Street U.S.A. where, as Paik has said, "The future is now." City Hall is reduced to a video rostrum with a satellite-dish roof. A robot made of antique books and campaign buttons stands behind a railing encrusted with daubs of paint. The robot's "telegenic" head--an old G.E. TV--and the wall of TVs behind it show American presidents from Truman onward steadily morphing into one another, interspersed with clips from "We Are the World" and Paik's colorful update of test patterns. The point is so obvious that even the middle-school tour group got it without prompting from the docent.
Similarly, through the glass doors of the old-fashioned Post Office boxes, we view another video wall in constant motion, while Paik the postmaster nods off on the central screen, nothing to do once "snail mail" has become obsolete. Three mailboxes topped with computer keyboards have been painted black, their storage compartments unlocked to reveal TVs airing footage of postal workers, a computer-generated snail logo and lovely designs incorporating commemorative stamp art. A fake hand reaches out from the center box, a zombie from beyond the crypt.
The piece is all very entertaining, but from an avant-garde artist prophetic enough to predict and christen the electronic superhighway 20 years ago, one hoped for something a bit more insightful than the fact that we may all end up interacting only via fax and e-mail.
More interesting are the various Internet Dwellers--giant heads that Paik has fashioned out of his trademark materials of vintage TV cabinets and all kinds of technological junk. They are designed to resemble the masks associated with various indigenous cultures; the eyes and mouth, naturally, are filled with fleeting video images. These heads both play on and subvert the instinctive identification we have with a recognizable human face, while making a sly commentary on just what now constitutes "primitive" art.
The individual titles are mock Internet addresses that Paik created using the initials of his friends around the world. Internet Dweller: lwuh.four.hsts, the facial apertures flashing 1960s couture and a no-drinking symbol, shows that for all his playfulness, Paik pays serious attention to aesthetic detail. The elegant curves of the inlaid wood cabinet are reiterated in the rolls of laser-printed canvas set into the speaker wells and the plastic tubes with blinking lights that crown the head.
Photosynthesis II: A video installation by Nam June Paik
The most effective example of video art as a plastic medium offering both implicit and real motion is Paik's vision of the World Wide Web as atomic entity, W3. Mounted on the walls of a darkened room completely covered in glossy black paint, two curving lines of TVs seem to orbit around the nucleus of a viewing bench. Bombarding dollar signs, stock reports, numbers, a '55 Chevy and "water-damaged" Venetian scenes pulsate around the room. The light and colors from the screens are fuzzily reflected on the floor as if on dark water.
The images suggest a realm of privilege and wealth, refuting the much-touted electronic democracy. Although the travel footage could just be one of many autobiographical references that crop up in Paik's laser discs (he had two installations in the last Venice Biennale), the associations with aristocratic decadence and decline at a previous fin de siècle are hard to avoid.
From this darker vision of the information revolution, the viewer enters the retrospective segment of the exhibit. The older pieces include such seminal works as Sonatine for Goldfish, an aquarium set in a TV cabinet, and The Moon Is the Oldest TV, an old Philco set playing footage of lunar phases. These works cleverly raise questions of video's dilution of immediate experience.
Elegiac robot monuments to Paik's mentor, composer and pianist John Cage, and his frequent collaborator, cellist Charlotte Moorman, are built of beautifully matched sets of vintage TVs to embody their respective instruments. Both incorporate video of the deceased artists in performance, but there is no sound. This technique drives home the fact that Cage and Moorman have been silenced, but it would seem a fuller tribute to let the rest of us know what we're missing.
When he's really on, Paik can give us something new to think about. But we have become so inured to the constant bombardment of images on video that our defense mechanisms kick in, and we're more likely to leave with that too-familiar TV haze that any new insights.
In the spirit of interactivity, Metro invites readers to voice their own opinions about the technological future by faxing or e-mailing their thoughts to Nam June Paik's Mr. Couch Potato installation.
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Photo by Christopher Gardner
Photo by Christopher Gardner
Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the '90s runs through May 5 at the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St. (408/271-6840).