Paik's Video Sculpture

Paik's Video Sculpture 

John G. Hanhardt 


Nam June Paik's video sculpture includes works which incorporate broadcast images and the actual television set; there are also pieces which, while employing all possibilities of the technology of video imagery, are distinct from broadcast television. This distinction and the permutations Paik creates are integral to our definition of video sculpture. His video sculpture is emblematic of his entire creative output and central to our understanding of his contribution to contemporary art. Basic to this work are the strategies and forms which he carries into his other creative endeavors in performance, musical composition, videotape, and sculpture. Because of the interrelationship between Paik's work in various media there is no linear, diachronic progression from one set of works to another. Rather, within each period of Paik's career there is a cross-fertilization between media: a feature of a particular work will have begun earlier in another art form and will continue through various modifications into other pieces or subsequent reworkings of that project.

The strategies contained in Paik's creative proc- ess and the forms which his work have taken originate in his Fluxus art activities. Fluxus, a term invented by the artist George Maciunas, can be defined as a movement against the perceived tyranny of fixed definitions and categorizations of what constitutes art making and its history. The traditional art-historical practice of establishing canons and hierarchies of acceptable high culture was attacked in manifestos, performances, and exhibitions which sought to blur the boundaries between art forms and their audiences. Paik's close association with the Fluxus group began in the late 1950s in West Germany, where he participated in performances with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and had exhibitions in Rolf Jahrling's Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, and Mary Bauermeister's Atelier in Cologne. After Paik's move to New York City in 1964, he became further associated with George Maciunas and met Charlotte Moorman.

The distinctive features of Paik's art — influenced by Fluxus attitudes — were the active exploration and incorporation of randomness and chance and the appropriation of found objects into his performances and the making of objects. These central aesthetic strategies — of Paik and other Fluxus artists — have their origin in the seminal modernisms of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. It was the art and writings of both artists which Paik transformed in his movement into performance, composition, sculpture, and video sculpture. Duchamp examined the epistemological basis of the aesthetic object in his ready-mades and created a hermetic, personal, and complex iconography, elaborated as a process of transformation in his major project, The Large Glass. Cage's compositions and performances challenged the very premises of Western music by employing found environments of sound, being guided in performance and compositional notation by chance, and altering traditional musical instrumentation. Fluxus artists took up the Duchamp-Cage banner, insisting that the chance transaction between the artist and his material constituted the text of the work of art. From this premise evolved the performances and objects which bear the signs of chance, personal reflection, and ironic commentary on the materiality/ immateriality of art. Nam June Paik's unique achievement was to evolve a visionary persona which coalesced with his art. This singular con- struct, forged in an active appropriation of media and materials, became a Duchampian project of making autobiography the subtext of his art. Thus Paik's work is open and subject to change and modification as he approaches each new installation of a piece guided by both the site of the installation and his rethinking of the project. Accompanying each installation are aphoristic pronouncements, writings, and performances which in their eclectic references to his past and present interests serve to define a distinctive personality and life-style.

In 1963 in an exhibition entitled "Exposition of Music — Electronic Television" at the Galerie Parnass, Paik included prepared televisions — sets whose components had been altered to produce unexpected effects — as part of his performance and installation. It was the first time Paik appropriated television technology and it signaled the beginning of a lifelong effort to deconstruct and demystify television. With sets randomly distributed in all positions throughout the gallery, each television became an instrument, removed from its customary entertainment context, handled and manipulated in a direct and physical way. The exteriors were marked up and cluttered with bottles and other objects, while chairs were scattered about the space. The scanning mechanism in the television was also manipulated, affecting the reception of broadcast images.

Paik's prepared televisions were his first video sculptures. As with the prepared pianos that displayed the residues of use and were radically transformed into sculptural objects, so in the first television sculptures Paik transformed television sets into aesthetic objects in a way that changed our perception of video as an art form.

The transformation of television into a modernist art form came about through Paik's understanding of the social presence and meaning of television. Beginning in the early 1950s, television found its way into virtually every American home as entertainment and as an object that affected the daily habits of the viewer. The viewer's relationship to television was as a passive receiver with virtually no control over what he saw other than to change channels on a homogeneous range of program choices. The viewer was expected to orient himself in front of the set to view stories on a two- dimensional screen which provided an illusion of three-dimensional narrative space. In this way the screen becomes like a mirror whose content is perceived as a representation of reality, a reflection of the real world. But the "real" world was merely the world that mass-media corporations chose to present. And once television gained a permanent place in the home — literally and figuratively — it became a powerful medium whose very pervasiveness rendered it almost invisible: it was taken for granted, and accepted as a commercial commodity. Unlike the film, the other moving-image medium, which is screened in public and theatrical situations, television is a casual viewing experience within the privacy of the home.

To Paik the popular perception of television as only a mass commodity of entertainment, or as simply radio with pictures, was shortsighted, and he set out as an artist to both demystify and change the medium. As he expressed it in his writings, teaching, and, later, videotapes, television repre- sented a new communications technology of enormous potential and signaled the beginning of a postindustrial age where manufacturing, the organization of society, and the making of art would be transformed. Paik viewed the electronic medium of television as a discourse functioning in social, cultural, political, and economic ways. Like the computer and other developments in science, it initiated a change similar in magnitude to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. His art was to reflect radically on that discourse and create a complex aesthetic text that would reconceive television through an array of formal strategies. The television became the center of Paik's art through which he explored visual, performance, and sculptural ideas.

One of the key works Paik developed in 1965 — at his exhibition at the New School for Social Research — was the Magnet TV. A large magnet was placed on the exterior of a television set; as the magnet was moved around, it generated interference with the electronic signal. The result was both the distortion of received images and the creation of abstract patterns of light on the screen's surface.

The means by which the video image was produced and how the viewer related to the television set were pursued further in Paik's Participation TVs, originally constructed in 1969 and first exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. In these projects the viewer either made sounds into a microphone which created abstract patterns on the screen, or saw himself as a multi-colored shadow through the colorization of a black-and-white live video image. The synthesizer added in the 1971 version at the Galeria Bonino made possible a further articulation of more subtle and complex patterns and relationships of images on the screen: the video synthesizer took a closed-circuit camera view of the spectator and distorted it into abstract patterns. This process is an extension of Paik's Fluxus strategy of breaking down the barrier between the viewer and the artwork by having the sculpture's potential activated by the viewer. The arrangement of the monitors in Participation TV is equally important, since it provides each set and its image with a specific site and context.

From the beginning Paik's video sculpture employed either single televisions (Zen for TV) or multi-monitor arrangements {Participation TV). And whether single or multiple images, the physical placement of the television within the gallery space produced a duality of dimensions: Paik's sculpture became both forms around which one could walk and screens on which images moved and changed. The pieces are explorations of space and time articulated by opening up the previously closed and commercially self-contained, unidimensional medium of television. In this way Paik's television, as a sculptural and expanded medium, was similar in its intentions to his 1964 Robot K-456. Fashioned out of an array of spare parts and found objects, the Robot took the shape of a person who, with Shuya Abe's remote-control system, was guided through the streets by Paik. Just as Paik fashioned a human shape out of inanimate bits and pieces of metal and wire, so he took television apart and created visual metaphors out of its materials. Metaphor here signifies what Kenneth Burke called "a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this.'" Paik removes television from its customary setting and transfers it to another one — on the ceiling, amid plants on the floor, or as a cello, a bed, a cross. What Burke, writing in literary and historical terms, refers to as a perspective by incongruity, becomes, when applied to Paik's visual art, a way of viewing a medium within a new set of references. "Indeed, the metaphor always has about it precisely this revealing of hitherto unsuspected connectives which we may note in the progressions of a dream. It appeals by exemplifying relationships between objects which our custom- ary rational vocabulary has ignored." J Paik's strategies establish new ways of viewing television both as an object and as a medium, in terms of what it is we normally see on television, and how we relate to it.

In 1964, after Paik's move to New York City, he began a collaboration with Charlotte Moorman that was to result in some of his best-known pieces. Moorman had been active in the performance of new music and the interpretation of avant-garde pieces here and abroad. Following her performance of Paik's compositions and their active collaboration in events, he began the process of combining video with performance to create a new form of video sculpture. Paik made four works for Moorman, the TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), the TV Cello (1971), TV Glasses (1971), and 7V Bed (1972). Each of these pieces was to be used by Moorman and incorporated into her performances. Paik described the 7V Bra as humanizing technology by associating it with a garment that is so intimate and close to the body. An accomplished classical cellist, she characterized TV Cello as the first development in the cello in centuries.

The four works can be considered independently as sculptural objects, but they are best viewed when modeled and used by the person they were created for. Each one is made up of televisions of different sizes, stripped of their casings, and re- fashioned and contextualized in relation to their respective sizes and functions. The title of each, its placement on the performer, and its shape provide a specific reading of the metaphorical extension of video. While the TV Cello is being played, the screens carry images of Moorman playing, video collages of other cellists and herself, and live images from the studio or performance area. As she bows across the monitors, Moorman is playing with the form of the sculpture and the video images. Thus the objects and screen images present metaphorical forms — synecdoche, metonymy — and irony which constantly jostle with each other. This process of interpretation is further elaborated in the actual performances, in which Moorman and Paik create a theater around the music, sounds, and transformations of the video input.

The TV Glasses contain the idea of vision: they show on their screens what is on the videotape being shot by the camera. The TV Bra for Living Sculpture is a play on words, the "living" bra becomes a living sculpture when it is worn by the performer. The images on the screens represent by substitution the garment's function. The TV Cello becomes a representation by substitution of the cello, as in the Paik and Moorman performance where Paik performs the role of a cello. The form of the cello is subtly extended by the distribution of the three television monitors — the smallest screen in the middle, the larger ones at the top and bottom, forming the shape of a cello — with the videotape showing the playing of the cello. In these sculptures, televisions with their casings removed and their interiors exposed become the most flexible and at the same time most subtle moving- image medium. Paik's video sculptures are a radical play on time, the real time during which they are worn and performed, and the recorded and synthesized times/images that are shown on the screens.

In the late 1960s, Paik initiated a series of large- scale, multi-monitor video sculptures distributed within an exhibition space and within constructions. One of the earliest of these pieces was exhibited at the Galeria Bonino in 1968 and entitled TV Cross. Eight televisions were placed on a metal grid in the shape of a cross and on each of the monitors abstract patterns of lines and light were displayed. The cross, one of the most familiar and most powerful iconographic configurations in Western culture, operates on a level of immediate recognition. The monumentality of scale also arouses symbolic expectations. But Paik subverts these expectations, for his screen images bear no visual or conceptual relation to the cross arrangement of the monitors.

Four major video sculptures, Tish Flies on Sky (1975), Video Fish (1975), TV Bed (1972), and TV Garden (1974-78), are large-scale multi-monitor works where the monitors form a shape or are placed in a context that has specific connotations, thus disposing the viewer to receive and interpret the works in specific ways. TV Garden places television sets on their backs, inside an enclosure also occupied by plants so arranged that we look down from a raised platform into the garden of green plants, while the television screens look up at us with their colored images like brightly colored flowers. Here the television sets function as organic forms, while the videotapes synthesize diverse images and the way they are customarily perceived. Fish Flies on Sky suspends televisions from the ceiling, with their screens facing downward; we view the ensemble by standing up or by lying on cushions on the floor. The televisions juxtapose different videotapes which offer a moving collage of airplanes, dancers, and fish. Here, the placement of the monitors is not affected by the context, such as the plants provided in TV Garden, but instead reorients, in a playful manner, our customary viewing position. In both of these works the orientation of the monitors affects the reading of the images and how we interpret them.

The TV Bed, created for Charlotte Moorman, is an arrangement of televisions, lying face-up on the floor, in the shape of a bed. The title is particularly important in this piece — it signifies the meaning and function of the work. Here video is treated as a traditional plastic medium being shaped into a representational or functional form. The monitors, covered with a sheet of plexiglass, serve a specific physical function as the viewer is encouraged to lie directly on them. It is a participatory work engaging the viewer in the physicality, the shape and density of the actual television monitors.

Video Fish was originally shown with Fish Flies on Sky at the Martha Jackson Gallery. This project provides a coda to the work we are discussing here, as fish tanks, filled with fish, are placed in front of a sequence of monitors on whose screens is playing a videotape of fish. The real environment of the fish placed over the recorded one of the television set causes the monitor to become a fish tank and the fish tank a monitor — an added dimension to the metaphorical strategy implicit in all of these works. The visual quality and colorful playfulness of Video Fish belie its serious commentary on the nature of video as a representational medium and recording instrument. Here, representation and reality join together as equals.

Two other large-scale video sculptures examine our concepts of time and space. Moon is the Oldest TV (1965-76) and TV Clock (1963-81) consist of twelve and twenty-four monitors, respectively. In both works, viewed in a darkened space, the image on the screen is minimal and virtually static, and each is perceived as part of a sequence which must be read as a whole. In Moon is the Oldest TV each monitor displays a shape formed by the manipulation of the internal mechanism of the television set. The shapes, ranging from a crescent to a full circle, form in sequence the phases of the moon. In TV Clock, each monitor is modified so that the television image is compressed into a bar of electronic light. Twelve of the televisions are black and white, twelve are color. Read in sequence, the entire work shows the bar rotating from one static line to another through two twelve-hour rotations. Both pieces in their simplicity provide a conceptual aesthetic that renders each television as a point in time on a physical coordinate of the placement of the sets. These pieces refer back to Paik's early prepared televisions, which altered the insides of the sets to distort the reception of broadcast images. In the later projects, linearity and serial imagery come into play, but without any suggestion of a Minimalist aesthetic, for the televisions are not masked or hidden from view and in their scratched surfaces retain a Fluxus treatment of the television's exterior.

One of the distinctive features of video is the ability to show on a monitor in real time what the camera is recording. Paik employed this technique in many of his pieces, including the TV Cello, when it is used in performance; in a number of other video sculptures it is the central strategy. TV Buddha (1974) and TV Chair (1974) both use single-video monitors and cameras together with an additional sculptural element. In TV Buddha a statue of a Buddha faces a monitor on which it "sees" itself; in TV Chair a monitor directly under a chair shows what the camera views looking up underneath the chair or through an adjacent window. The Buddha contemplates itself, a self-portrait, which fulfills a meditative stare inward into the self, while the chair provides an image, hidden from view, that plays with the notion of sitting on the world or ignoring what goes on around one. In both cases, Paik's video sculpture explores visual puns and ideas that remind one of Duchamp's playful seriousness.

Two recent large-scale video installations have further expanded Paik's notion of video and sculpture. Imagine There Are More Stars on the Sky Than Chinese on the Earth (1981) employs a device developed with video technician Andy Mannick to project a color video image, reflected from the television screen, onto the wall. Here Paik projects the video image through a simple mirror device, which makes a subtly moving and modulating circular image on the wall. Projected in a series, this work creates a sequence similar to Moon is the Oldest TV, but on the wall's surface. In 1981 Paik developed with the German laser specialist Horst Baumann a laser video system which projects moving video images onto the gallery walls. The system enables Paik to manipulate the images to any size and yet retain a remarkable definition and clarity. The video fills the gallery as the spectator moves into the images — the gallery space becomes like a gigantic television screen. This most recent development attests to Paik's continuing interest in new technologies and his ability to transform them into a radically new and constantly engaging experience. In the laser video installations, the images are from Paik's videotapes and we see Merce Cunningham and John Cage filling the space of the walls. In the process, the walls dance with Paik's synthesized images and movements as he presents his videotapes in the new medium of laser. Just as Paik anticipated and paved the way for a new artistic medium, so he is here further expanding our conception of video and of sculpture.




Notes 

1. Kenneth Burke, "Four Master Tropes," A Grammar of 
Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 
Pres 1969), p. 503. 



2. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of 
Purpose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1965), 
p. 90.