David A. Ross Nam June Paik's Videotapes

Nam June Paik's Videotapes 

David A. Ross 

 "... and TV Guide will be as thick as the Manhattan tele- phone book" (from the introduction to Global Groove, 1973) 

That line is more than prophetic, it is frightening. What would it mean if TV Guide were as thick as the Manhattan telephone book, or to take it one step further, what if TV Guide were the Manhattan telephone book?

In the late sixties, the emergence of new televi- sion technologies such as cable TV and low-cost video recording seemed to promise not only a future of video abundance, but a potentially revo- lutionary decentralization and inversion of the vir- tual monopoly that corporate commercial interests held in relation to the electronic media. Artists were quick to recognize the implications of this potential shift, and while their participation in the "alternate media" movement comprised only a small (though highly visible) part of the overall activism, they did play a significant role in re- forming our impression of what television was and what it could be.

Among the first of the artists who recognized the value and need for this kind of reformation was the Korean-born artist and musician Nam June Paik. Although initially interested in television from the perspective of a composer, he quickly found that the problems of music, performance, and televi- sion were closely linked by a shared set of princi- ples. One key principle is that which links Paik to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: the destruc- tive nature of the one-way, passive delivery systems for electronic media. Much of Paik's TV sculpture and videotape work is directed toward the activa- tion of the TV audience. A related principle under- lying Paik's video art can be observed in his attempts to find solutions to a problem taken from the field of information science — the imbalance between information input and output with all of its physiological, political, and social ramifications.' As Paik saw it, before the rise of video as an art form, TV technology had been developed to make passive consumers of its audience. Paik wanted to humanize the technology by opening the role of producer to whoever had the need and/or desire to activate their relationship to television.

In 1972, Paik expressed a sentiment that seems to contradict the implied producer populism of his "videology." In a letter to the editors of Radical Software he noted: "Currently there is a danger that video becomes like 'poetry,' . . . one guy writes, and only his immediate friends appreciate.... I don't know, how many un-edited dull tapes I had to sit through politely.... We should be more con- scious of the situation that we are in the era of information overload and it means information- retrieval is more tricky than information record- ing." J This realization marks the end of Paik's first period of experimentation with television program production (1965-72), and the beginning of a period in which he produced some of the most amazing single-channel (videotapes for one moni- tor) television programming ever created.

"I am a poor man from a poor country, so I have to be entertaining all the time," said Paik in numer- ous interviews in the mid-1970s, 3 but that is not the only reason that he developed his well-known later style. A brief consideration of Paik's early vid- eotapes may provide insight into this complex body of work, and a broader understanding of the artist's use of television as a creative medium.

Paik's involvement in television came out of his work in electronic music, a field in which the availability of a tape recorder was crucial in com- posing and performing. Paik "played" the televi- sion like a musical instrument. Just as in his prepared piano techniques he physically altered the piano to produce unaccustomed sounds, so in his television "sculpture" he mechanically adjusted the circuitry, tubes, condensers, and so forth, to produce unaccustomed images — to distort the "found" imagery or signals. In a way, Paik's entire video career can be seen as a highly persistent attempt to get deeper and deeper into the core of the apparatus (technically, ideologically, spir- itually). At this point, his work was a clear indicator of the place artists had had in the development of television's internal grammar as well as its public image.

But before 1965 — before the development of the portable video camera and recorder — there was no practical way for Paik to record his television works. His first move into the core of television came in the now mythic exhibition "Electronic TV," held at the Cafe a Go-Go in 1965. In October of that year, Sony had introduced the first of its portable consumer-grade video recorders to the American market. Hearing about the arrival of the first shipment in New York, Paik rushed uptown to the Liberty Music Shop and plunked down the remainder of the grant money that had been just barely supporting him in the U.S. since his arrival from Europe. His cab ride downtown was held up in a traffic jam, and upon investigation Paik learned that the cause of the jam was the motorcade bearing Pope Paul VI on his visit to New York. Paik made a brief tape of the passing parade, and showed it that evening at the cafe amid a flurry of proclamations including the now classic line: "As collage technic replaced oil-paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvass." 4 Attending those first shows were John Cage, Merce Cunningham and a few well-placed foundation people. The word was out, Paik had found a crack in a wall, and was signaling the start of television's first popular revolt. An artist had, quite simply, appro- priated the tools of television production for purely aesthetic ends. Nevertheless, though Paik's video sculpture, performances, and writing of that period were extremely influential, his actual program- matic contribution to media activist causes was minimal — his videotape work was personal, ex- perimental, and rarely exhibited.

Unlike most media activists of the late sixties and early seventies, Paik's own brand of Fluxus ac- tivity — "neo-Dada" (in Beuys' words) — was aimed at the development of a new ontology of music by exploring and expanding music's visual potential. Paik, in a 1972 letter to John Cage, noted: "I always think that my past 14 years is nothing but an extension of one memorable evening at Darmstadt '58.'" What Paik told Cage was that his video work was, in effect, an extension of his notorious Fluxus concert/performance works of the late fifties and early sixties which culminated with his well-known Etude for Pianoforte, where he introduced the notion of physical danger into a piano work: the performance ended in an assault of audience mem- bers John Cage and David Tudor. The assault was not made out of antagonism; rather, it was a gesture designed to involve the otherwise passive au- dience — of which Cage and Tudor were members. But the reference to Darmstadt in Paik's 1972 letter also recalls an earlier work, Poly-hetero-phony, a musical collage in which he introduced into his own work the notions of randomness and indeter- minacy and the intermingling of Eastern and West- ern thought. This form of intellectual and spiritual entanglement, culled from Cage and the lessons of the Dadaists, has provided the matrix for Paik's videotape work. Within this matrix he has been able to address a range of concerns that surface and resurface, including the paradoxes of time per- ceived and time understood from both the linear Western perspective and the non-linear Eastern one, the hegemony of European academicism in art and music, and of course the role of the revolution in communications and control (cybernetics) in the transformation of global consciousness.

Present in Paik's early videotape works are many of the elements that, after 1972, would form his distinc- tive style. But what remains clear is that the early works reflect the same anger and frustrations at audience passivity that surfaced in the Etude for Pianoforte, but now focused upon the technology and ideology of television.

In Variations on johnny Carson vs. Charlotte Moorman (1966), Paik produced his first videotape equivalent to his prepared television sets. The content of the tape, though wonderful and hilarious in its own right as a time-capsule piece in which Johnny does a series of double-takes at the "wacky" avant-garde, is standard Carson fare. Paik taped the show off the monitor screen and then placed a live wire across the reel of recorded material. The live wire acted as an electromagnet, erasing the recording directly beneath the wire, so that what appears when the tape is replayed is the Carson-Moorman interview with a brief erasure at first every four seconds, but with increasing frequency as the tape nears the core of the reel. We are confronted with a work in which the artist literally reached into the program (albeit after the fact and in the privacy of his studio) and marked his presence, forcing a recognition that something had changed, that the order had been tampered with.

A different work from the same period, Variations on George Ball on Meet the Press (1967) can be seen as another exercise of literally inserting the artist's hand into the television process. An off-screen tape of former Under-Secretary of State George Ball (who had recently resigned his Johnson Administra- tion post, ostensibly in moral opposition to the war in Vietnam) is re-recorded in a mechanical-transfer process which allowed Paik to manipulate the take- up reel by hand, at irregular intervals. By controlling the tape speed in this way, Paik produced not only pictorial distortions, but also broke the real-time fidelity of video recording, demonstrating how very illusory the concept of "real time" is on videotape. The work can also be read on a political level: Paik's choice of Ball as the subject of the work underscores the way in which normal media coverage distorts and manipulates its audience and its subject. Paik had learned that the media's emphasis on the moral grounds for Ball's resignation was misdirected — Ball had in fa< t resigned be< ause he felt that the war effort was not cost effective. This was the same year, after all, in which Marshall McLuhan's theories were first reaching the mass audience, creating a climate for the questioning of basic assumptions about mass media. It was also the same year in which Paik created McLuhan Caged, an electromechanical dis- tortion of McLuhan's videotaped face in the landmark Museum of Modern Art exhibition "The Machine."

The next period in this early stage of Paik's video career saw both the development of his instrument, the video synthesizer (a device which mixed distorted live-camera signals with pure electronic signals''), and the building of his productive relationship with public television. In 1968 Fred Barzyk, the pioneering pro- ducer at WGBH-TV, Boston, invited Paik, along with a group of visual artists — among them Alan Kaprow, Aldo Tambellini, and James Seawright — and others, to participate in a project underwritten by the short- lived Public Broadcasting Laboratory. Paik's segment, Electronic Opera No. 1, in The Medium is the Medium was his first broadcast piece. A video collage, it consisted of a series of short bits including (appropriately for the time) Nixon's distorted face juxtaposed with a psychedelic nude go-go dancer, electronically generated Lissajous figures and, finally, Paik's call for interactive two-way television. "This is participation TV," says the voice-over as a particularly beautiful segment proceeds visually; "please follow instructions." Paik's voice then directs the viewer to "close your eyes," and then, after five seconds, to "three-quarter open your eyes," and so on. He ends the piece by instructing his audience to turn off their sets. The piece demands to be viewed by offering a fast-paced mix of nudity, low comedy, and electronic imagery, and then literally "demands" to be viewed partially and finally not viewed at all. The work functions as more than just satire, since it leaves the viewer with the question of who actually is in control: what is the basis of the decision to become a passive receiver of TV — or of art, for that matter?

Paik convinced WGBH to build the first model of his video synthesizer, the concept of which was based upon his experience with electronic music as well as his growing understanding that the kind of time an artist needs to produce work is not available within the extraordinarily costly allotments of studio and engineering time an artist can expect from even the most generous producer.

Paik described the frustration in an article for the second issue of Radical Software: "(I use technology in order to hate it more properly) In the heated atmosphere of the TV-control room, I yearn for the solitude of a Franz Schubert, humming a new song in the unheated attics of Vienna Ironically a huge machine (WGBH, Boston) helped me to create my anti-machine machine." 7

Around the same time, Paik agreed to help develop the Video Department for the newly opened Califor- nia Institute of the Arts (building with his collaborator Shuya Abe a synthesizer for them as well), agreed to build a Paik-Abe synthesizer for WNET-TV in New York, and built one for the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton. With the field well sown with instruments, Paik, and a growing band of students and followers, began to learn to play with the new tool.

Paik, unlike his followers (and fellow inventors), immediately made his instrument available to the public, in exhibitions at the Galeria Bonino and elsewhere. More important, though a strong advo- cate of electronic imagery, Paik never lost sight of the fact that his collage format — the juxtaposition or layering of images, viewpoints, and spaces — was essential to avoid the production of what he termed "vuzak." However, his own production attitudes not- withstanding, Paik described the synthesizer in hy- perbolic yet poetic style: it would enable us to shape the TV screen canvas

as precisely
as freely
as colorfully
as profoundly
as violently
as lyrically
as Leonardo
as Picasso
as Renoire
as Mondrian
as Pollock and
as Jasper Johns. 

Paik even went so far as to say that the synthesizer could create a TV-tranquilizer, which he described as "an avant garde artwork in its own right." 8

In fact, the Paik-Abe synthesizer is by contempo- rary standards a relatively crude analog device, lacking the computers and digital controls most broadcast industry special-effects generators use to- day to produce a far more extraordinary range of optical effects. What Paik's analog synthesizer repre- sented, however, was the fact that artists could take that next step into the core of television by re- inventing the tools of production to fit their own needs. This, and the fact that it made possible the production of non-representational television imag- ery, must rank Paik and Abe's device as one of the most significant works of sculpture of the last twenty years. (As in Paik's earlier television sculpture, the synthesizer is seen in the same space as the images it produces, so that the instrument becomes part of the visual experience of the piece.)

Paik's next WGBH project was a four-hour "live" broadcast, Video Commune (1970), in which he, along with WGBH staff and people from off the street, manipulated the synthesizer to a rock-and-roll soundtrack creating, to quote Paik, not "cybernated art ... but art for cybernated life." 9

Later that year, Paik was asked to participate in a TV program featuring video artists working in collab- oration with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In his prerecorded segment for this special broadcast, Paik illustrated the third movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto by subjecting the score to a full-scale broadside attack, with tongue in cheek, of course. Mixed into a swirling montage of video-synthesizer imagery, electronic distortions and colorized film, we see a bust of Beethoven, as familiar as the Beethoven passage itself, transformed by colorizing, twisted by the synthesizer, and finally slapped back and forth by a hand that enters the frame ostensibly to slap some sense into Beethoven (or perhaps the audience). What is the sound of one hand slapping Beethoven, one wonders, as a (toy) piano burns to the final strains of the piece.

In the sense that it again represents Paik's Fluxus rejection of the hegemony of European art, and his penchant for low comedy with serious overtones, the BSO piece set the tone for most of the videotapes that he would produce in the seventies. With the excep- tion of the Tribute to john Cage, the BSO piece was also Paik's last at WGBH, as he received an invitation to participate in WNET's newly formed TV Lab in New York.

Paik's first tapes produced at WNET were experi- ments in which, among other things, he tried to develop a video equivalent to his profound sculptural innovation, the TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), worn by none other than his indefatigable performer and collaborator, Charlotte Moorman. In these ex- periments, Paik tried to replace the actual televisions in the TV Bra with superimposed, chroma-keyed images. The sculptural notion of the TV Bra, and its video counterpart, both serves as a metaphor about the place of TV in our culture and provides a radically new context in which to consider TV.

These performances (with the working title TV Experiments) were never aired, but they did find their way into many future Paik productions. As a matter of fact, this element of Paik's style must be given proper notice. Paik's collage style, as it evolved, is closer to a video compost, with no old work ever discarded, and nearly every bit or routine resurfacing to give the viewer the comfortable feeling that this seemingly foreign material is somehow familiar. There is also something here that relates again to Paik's preoccupa- tion with time, for as the artist sees it, video not only confers immortality upon its subjects, but is itself the essence of immortality. "Once on videotape," as Paik has been known to say, "you are not allowed to die."

The Selling of New York was a series of short, emblematic segments that Paik produced for insertion into the late-night schedule of WNET-TV This highly entertaining sequence of sketches comprised a veiled critique of the disparity between the marketing of New York as a media center and idea factory and the reality of the lives lived by New Yorkers themselves. The media-hypester, played by Russell Connor, drones on in a monologue, citing New York's relative number of television homes as compared to Mis- soula, Montana, and other thrilling facts and figures. In contrast, "real" people are seen trying to ignore the ubiquitous Connor monologue, which seems to be playing on TV sets everywhere. In one of the high- lights, Connor (representing the unrelenting TV pres- ence) carries on about the statistical reduction in crime while a thief unplugs and steals the set on which the show is playing. Into this group of Ernie Kovacs-inspired blackout routines Paik inserted Jap- anese television commercials for Pepsi and a Tokyo fashion concern, both of which appropriate "Amer- icanisms" into the fabric of their selling style. The point about New York's selling is well made. Paik once remarked that the earliest childhood dream image he could recall was the face of Shirley Temple, which had been widely marketed as the image of America when Paik was growing up in Korea. Cur- rent media critics allied to the UNESCO New World Information Order, for example, note with anger that the flow of information is decidedly one-way — from the industrial world to the media-subjugated develop- ing world. The Selling of New York makes this point in the understated way in which all of Paik's political philosophy is delivered. 10

But for all the pointed humor of The Selling of New York, the fractured nature of the work's presen- tation did not really provide Paik with the forum or form he needed. His first real opportunity came in his production Global Groove (1973).* Not only did Global Groove allow him to create a vehicle for the short bits he had produced, but it also allowed him to expand the public audience for video art while acknowledging the contributions of his friends and colleagues. This work set the benchmark for a gener- ation of aspiring video artists in its state-of-the-art mix of entertainment values with a rigorous adherence to Paik's own aesthetic.

Global Groove is many things. It is, for example, the model program guide for the time when TV Guide will not only be "as thick as the Manhattan telephone book," but — with everyone becoming a TV producer — will be the Manhattan telephone book. Developed from the 1965 essay in which he predicted a twenty-four-hour schedule for his "Uto- pian Laser TV Station," Global Groove features Charlotte Moorman playing the electronic video cello, Allen Ginsberg chanting in glorious syn- thesized color, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels' "Devil with a Blue Dress On," music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage providing anecdotal relief, films by Robert Breer and Jud Yalkut, and an assort- ment of recycled bits from earlier experiments and programs. It is a prime example of Paik's use of three distinct segment-types to achieve a balance, a bal- ance Paik describes as one between three corre- sponding experience levels that constitute stable human life. Normal wakefulness is represented by real time — representational imagery — while sleep and the dream state are represented by less rational constructions often involving compressed or ex- tended temporal rhythms. These two states, which account for the majority of the work/life-cycle, are supplemented by the third state, the heightened levels of consciousness associated with all forms of ecstasy, induced physically, chemically, spiritually or however. These segments are generally the hyper- kinetic, synthesized and colorized bits that seem to emerge from the other two types of segments in seemingly random patterns. This fast-paced, densely edited work was Paik's first use of state-of-the-art editing techniques, and represents a real milestone in the tempering of technology by precise aesthetic purpose. "I make technology look ridiculous," Paik has said, but in this work the artist revels in the spirit of the new technologies in a way which belies his oft- stated belief. In a 1975 interview with New Yorker critic Calvin Tomkins, Paik stated that he "has no scruples," and as such recognizes the need to be entertaining all the time. But Paik's next comment reveals his true am- bivalence about television entertainment: he noted that he would rather make boring programs because television is already so filled with interesting fare; that he would rather corrupt himself than repeat his earlier "sublime" minimal works. 11 It becomes evident that Paik relishes the contradictions inherent in the very idea of the interface of an uncompromised aesthetic and politic within a context of total compromise that is broadcast TV. But it also appears that there exists some level of discomfort in Paik's reconciliation of his videotape work with his fully uncompromised per- formance, installation, and written works.

This conflict and its complementary resolve were never more evident than in his tour-de-force ap- pearance on the now defunct but then highly rated Tom Snyder show Tomorrow in 1975. Paik's segment on the show (a special on video art in typical Snyder style) 12 was a live remote from Paik's Mercer Street loft. In his performance, he demonstrated that the philosophical context of commercial television was no longer a barrier to his control of or his approach to the medium. Though the content of Paik's perform- ance/demonstration was not all that different from a standard TV visit to the home of a celebrity (Jackie Kennedy at the White House comes to mind), Paik managed to turn the event into an outrageous Fluxus performance. Rather than let Snyder obtain or retain control, Paik immediately began asking the questions of Snyder, turning him into an unwitting subject. He asked his "host" whether TV was an entertainment or a communication medium, and after praising Snyder for the sincerity of his response ("information"), he began to read from a book (Don Luce and John Sommer, Vietnam: The Unheard Voices, 1969) in which the preface states that the American failures in Vietnam were essentially the result of failures of communication and understanding. Paik then intro- duced the TV Buddha, and quickly moved to the TV Chair, in which the television screen is given the analogous place of a toilet bowl receptacle. On the set was Snyder's face (prerecorded by Paik off the air). Paik sat down on top of the chair while the "live" Snyder squirmed uncomfortably with slow-dawning recognition of the symbolism of Paik's interactive performance. A flustered Snyder tried to end the segment, but Paik kept control of the conversation by insisting upon introducing Shigeko Kubota and her work, using the network stage for an appropriate plug for her career, not unlike Charo plugging her next Vegas appearance.
Although the Tomorrow show sequence had no distribution as a tape, it has all the features of a Paik work of the period, from Ginsberg chanting to Charlotte Moorman in TV cello space; it is in some ways the most revealing example of the interaction of Paik's style with the world of "real TV," a style that turns the context of television into a self-defeating proposition.

In 1973, Paik had finished his hour-long A Tribute to lohn Cage, an engrossing study of the strongest single influence on Paik and a true homage to Cage's unique genius. Included in the tape is a wonderful monologue about Cage by David Tudor (explaining how Cage taught him to use his stutter as a sound no better or worse than any other), a series of anecdotes by Cage (some of which had been included in Global Groove, of course) taken primarily from Cage's compilation Silence, and a performance of 433" staged for the camera by Cage in Harvard Square.

But the homage to Cage had left a very important influence in Paik's ongoing career unacknowledged. And so he and Shigeko Kubota set out to produce a collaborative work with Merce Cunningham (and his video collaborator Charles Atlas) which would ad- dress both Paik's debt to the great choreographer and their collective debt to Marcel Duchamp. The 1978 work, Merce by Merce by Paik, is probably one of Paik's most underrated, but should be seen as one of his most direct and profound.

The tape consists of two distinct parts, the first being a suite of short dance/video pieces produced by Cunningham and Atlas. What quickly emerges is the notion that time is the subject of this work, time as experienced by the dancer in action, and the relative nature of time as the malleable component of video art. In the ending of the Cunningham-Atlas segment, we hear an off-screen woman's voice ask Cun- ningham, "Can art kill time or occupy it?" "No," answers Cunningham's voice as his image dances in the sky on screen, "it is the other way around."

Paik and Kubota's half of the tape begins at this point. Their work, subtitled Merce and Marcel, maps the territory opened initially for artists by Duchamp's profound philosophical and spiritual insights into the nature of art; insights opened for dance by Cun- ningham's deep understanding of that nature.

Following the essentially unanswered question that ends the first part of the tape, Paik questions the relationship of dance to time, and asks, "Can artists reverse time?" Perhaps more significantly, can the artist, in the documentary process, defeat the im- plications of time's relentless progress? As Paik wrote to Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot, "Paul Valery or so said that there are only two poles in poetry ... (abstract and semantic) Do you think, that we . . . found one more poles . . . and with all new manipula- tive possibility in the time-parameter of video tape . . . did we find a new pole in TIME besides the one way flow of time?'" 3

The work proceeds with a segment of a rare television interview with Duchamp by Russell Con- nor, edited in steps so that a Duchamp statement is repeated in rapid succession with a slight progression in each repeat. Time, in this instance, is not com- pletely reversible, but moves forward in a staggered, talking two-step. Later in the tape, Connor is seen interviewing Cunningham in 1976, and that interview is intercut with and superimposed over the twenty- year-old Duchamp-Connor conversation. Time reversible and made manifest; video editing as the dance of time? These concepts are alluded to both in the content of the discussions used and in the manner in which the segments are combined, producing a synergistic effect, aimed at approaching the unap- proachable: a definition of the role of time in art. The piece, which uses Kubota's well-known videotape homage to the grave of Duchamp, outside of Paris, continues with a sequence in which Duchamp states that repetition is a preparation for accepting the idea of death and that there is no solution because there is no problem. The tape ends with Duchamp recanting, however, giving the work a final ironic twist, stating that he preferred Man Ray's approach to the issue: "There is no problem, there is only solution."

When viewed as pure "solution" rather than as an artist's approach to problem solving, Paik's videotapes emerge in a different light. Prior to the completion of the Cunningham tape, for example, Paik finished his first version of Guadalcanal Requiem (1977), a work which must rank as Paik's most dense and most complexly constructed tape. 14 The tape functioned as a further exploration of time (and memory) as well as an evocative and potent pacifist artwork.

Set on the site of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, this video performance collage once again features the bits from standard Paik-Moorman repertoire: Charlotte Moorman performing a variety of "new cello" works (including the Beuys felt-cello piece, Paik's G.I. -cello-crawl piece, and bomb-cello piece), all looking completely fresh in the context of an eerily preserved battle-scarred landscape. But the performances are set into interviews with a visiting U.S. Marine veteran of Guadalcanal, a Solomon Islander who remembers having rescued John F. Kennedy (he shows the camera his PT 109 tie clip), and various Islanders who are involved in the move toward independence (from the U.S.) for the Sol- omons. And, as the horrors of the battle are remem- bered, and intensified through the same kind of time- stepped editing and reiteration encountered in Merce and Marcel, the surreality of what Paik describes as the first war of the energy crisis takes hold of the viewer, who can't help but question the way in which war policy is rationalized historically. Though not a revisionist historian, Paik insists on his role as a tragic observer of global conflict seen (again) as a primary result of the lack of communication between diver- gent cultures and ideologies.

If the war and the continuing American presence in the Solomons run through the piece as undercur- rents, time's passage and attendant illusions must be seen as the work's major theme. The use of a highly refined computer-editing system allowed Paik to combine video synthesis of old war film footage with the performance and interview material in such an incredibly dense manner that one is subliminally bombarded with information in rhythmically shifting time perspectives, leaving one with a feeling of video exhaustion: information overload as the battle fatigue of the future.

Perhaps this contemporary cultural malaise lies at the core of all of Paik's videotape work: the effects of information overload on an already alienated popula- tion. In a recent conversation, Frank Gillette (the video artist and photographer who in 1969 wryly termed Paik the George Washington of video) de- scribed Paik's video style in a manner which seems to address the essence of his art: "Paik's style consists in a certain force of assertions suspended between the sublime and the comic. Its standards of precision, its Buddhistic negation of will, its absence of stipula- tions; all combine with persuasive terms to effect an aesthetic discharge at the nausea of absurdity.'" 1

Does Paik's videotape work (combined with his other activities) constitute this "antidote," or is his art merely the finger pointing at the moon? Well, as Paik has said, "the moon is after all the first TV."' b

Notes 1 . Nam June Paik, "Communication-Art," in Douglas Davis: events drawings objects videotapes, ed. David Ross (Syr- acuse, N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1972), pp. 11-12. 2. Nam )une Paik, "Binghamton Letter" (January 8, 1972), in Nam june Paik: Videa 'n' Videology 1959-1973, exhibition catalogue (Syracuse, N.Y. : Everson Museum of Art, 1974), p. 69. (Since this book lacks numerical pagination, for the reader's convenience page numbers have been assigned, page 1 being the Foreword.) 3. Nam June Paik, interview with Russell Connor and Calvin Tomkins, in "Nam June Paik: Edited For Television," WNET-TV, 1975. 4. Nam June Paik, "Electronic Video Recorder," in Videa 'n' Videology, p. 1 1 . 5. Nam June Paik, "Letter to John Cage," in Videa 'n' Video- logy, p. 64; in this letter, Paik pleads with the composer to take television seriously, saying that "TV is also a form of giving away . . . even more so than music." 6. The effect of the video synthesizer relied heavily on the fact that a picture signal has one unique characteristic. Unlike audio feedback (the ear-piercing squeal heard when a live microphone and loudspeaker form a closed circuit and begin to oscillate at a high frequency), video feedback occurs when a live camera is focused on its monitor, producing a mandala-like swirl of exploding light patterns that seem to rotate around a central axis. The Paik-Abe synthesizer used this technique in combination with aspects of the video picture controllable by simple voltage regulation — color intensity and hue, for exam- ple — to produce highly original (though ultimately pre- dictable) imagery. 7. Nam June Paik, "Video Synthesizer Plus," Radical Soft- ware, 1, no. 2 (Fall 1970), p. 25. 8. Nam June Paik, "Versatile Color TV Synthesizer," in Videa 'n' Videology, p. 55. 9. Nam June Paik, "Utopian Laser TV Station," in Videa 'n' Videology, p. 17. 10. The Selling of New York was re-edited into a longer program entitled Suite 212, where the "selling" sequences appeared with additional material by Douglas Davis, Ed Emshwiller, Jud Yalkut, and others, much of which Paik synthesized for inclusion in the piece. 1 1 . "Nam June Paik: Edited for Television," WNET-TV, 1975. 1 2. Also appearing on the show were Douglas Davis and this writer; other tapes featured were by William Wegman and Peter Campus. 1 3. Nam June Paik, "Letter to Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot," in Videa 'n' Videology, p. 63. 14. The original version, completed in 1976, was fifty minutes long; a second version, released in 1979, was trimmed to twenty-nine minutes. 15. Frank Gillette, conversation with the author, November 1981. 16. Press release, Gallery Rene Block, New York, 1978. My thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix, distributor of Paik's videotapes, for providing me with access to the works, and to lames Harithas and Frank Gillette for their con- versations with me on this subject.