Nam June Paik: “Father of video art” and a little bit “Father of the future”

Nam June Paik's life and art: “Thinking about art” and “Making art” before sale/presentation

With the performances that he spent and performed together with Charlotte Mooran in the early 1960s, Nam June Paik his big breakthrough, the much -noticed start of a fairytale career.

110 solo exhibitions , 41 to the turn of the millennium, 69 after the turn of the millennium; 58 During his lifetime of the artist, 52 after his death. 711 group exhibitions , 174 to the turn of the millennium, 537 after the turn of the millennium; 295 During his lifetime of the artist, 416 after his death.

Significantly more exhibitions in the new millennium than in the last, it is not better to prove that Nam June Paik was far ahead of his time.

Significantly more group exhibitions than solo exhibitions indicate an artist who prefers to make art rather than exhibition matters and buyers.

The thesis of the previous sentence confirms significantly more exhibitions on the artist's lifetime than after his death and shows how much an estate administrator can achieve who belongs to the artist's closer family and works with his widow without any argument.

This widow, the Japanese-American video artist Shigeko Kubota, married Paik in 1977 and lived together until his death. Probably rather calm and in harmony: Paik lived as a Buddhist, neither smoked nor ever drunk alcohol in his life; Even the road traffic, against which he warned with an accident robots, he knows only out of passive participation, he never sat behind the wheel of a car in life.

At this point, the 100% machos mentioned in the preceding Paik article “Nam June Paik and Media Art” in connection with the Kinsey Report would surely jump in immediately to loudly proclaim that Paik’s negative prognosis on self-driving cars is no wonder if he can’t drive…

But it will hardly come to that, 100%machos rarely read art starting items (unless they belong to the new blow greed-is-horny gallery owners, but then you don't read art starting items on a small independent platform such as Kunstplaza ).

That Nam June Paik preferred working on his art to worrying about its sale and presentation is also evidenced by the series of artworks presented in the article “Nam June Paik and Media Art .” It's a colorful and long list, but still only a very small glimpse into Nam June Paik's work (just enough background knowledge to facilitate self-directed discovery of Paik's video art), and an artwork like the “Electronic Superhighway” certainly doesn't come about overnight…

Probably no art scientist has calculated the proportion of the intellectual preparatory work, the research of the technically feasible and the concept/theoretical construction of the installations in Paiks Oeuvre, but this share is certainly not insignificant.

Nevertheless: For the past 50 years, Nam June Paik has exhibited in the most famous museums worldwide in 1977 in MoMA (Projects: Nam June Paik), 1982 in the Whitney Museum of American Art (Nam June Paik) and in the Center Georges Pompidou (Nam June Paik), 1989 in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Nam June Paik), 1992 in the National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul (Nam June Paik Retrospective: Video Time), 2000 in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (The Worlds of Nam June Paik), and he represented Germany in 1993 at the Venice Biennale. In 1977 he took part in Documenta 6 in Kassel, in 1987 at Documenta 8.

Paik has countless prizes and awards , including from the Guggenheim Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute; the Will Grohmann Award, the Goslar Kaiserring, and the UNESCO Picasso Medal. In 1999, ARTnews magazine included him in its selection of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Since 2002, the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia has awarded the “Nam June Paik Award for Media Art” (also known as the International Media Art Prize of the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia).

His work is in 87 public collections around the world:

• Australia : Queensland Art Gallery + Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, QLD
• Belgium : Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Art, Ghent
• Denmark : Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, Museet for Velvet Art Roskilde
• Germany : Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, Daimler Contemporary + Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for the Museum of Bochum, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art Bremen, Museum Ludwig Cologne, Museum Ostwall Dortmund, Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, K21 Düsseldorf, Museum Folkwang Essen, Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt/Main, Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kunsthalle Mannheim, New Museum - State Museum of Art and Design in Nuremberg, Fluxus+ Potsdam,
  Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, Museum Wiesbaden, Art Museum Wolfsburg
• Finland : Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
• France : Musée de l'Abhet Blois, Musée d'Art Contemporain Lyon, Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain Strasbourg
• Greece : National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
• Italy : Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano, Museo Arte Contemporanea Isernia
• Canada : Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal Qc, National Gallery of Canada Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada Ottawa on
• Croatia : Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb
• Japan : Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Benesse House Museum Naoshima, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art + Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
• Netherlands : Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Gemeentemuseum den Haag
• Norway : Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden
• Austria : Essl Museum Art of the Present Klosterneuburg, Museum of the Modern Salzburg, Museum Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna
• Portugal : Berardo Museum, Lisbon
• Sweden : Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• Switzerland : Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Kunsthaus Zurich
• Spain : Museo Vostell Malpartida de Cáceres, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea Santiago de Compostela
• South Korea : National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea Gwacheon, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art Gyeongju, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art Seoul, Amore Pacific Museum + Nam June Paik Art Center Yongin-Si
• USA : Akron Art Museum Oh, The Contemporary Austin Tx, Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo NY, Ackland Art Museum Chapel Hill NC, Museum of Art and Archaeology Columbia Mo, Honolulu Academy of Arts Honolulu Hi, Indianapolis Museum of Art Indianapolis in, Castellani Art Museum Lewiston NY, Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum Lincoln Ma, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles Ca, Moca Grand Avenue Los Angeles Ca, Brooks Museum of Art Memphis TN, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Miami Fl, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami Fl, Walker Art Center Mineapolis MN, Storm King Art Center Mountainville NY, The Baker Museum Naples Fl, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum + Whitney Museum of American Art New York City NY, Chrysler Museum of Art Norfolk VA, Smith College Museum of Art Northampton Ma, Joslyn Art Museum Omaha NE, Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburg Pa, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco CA, San Jose Museum of Art San Jose Ca, Everson Museum of Art + Point of Contact Gallery Syracuse NY, Arizona State University Art Museum Tempe Az, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden + Smithsonian Art Museum Washington DC
• United Kingdom : Zabludowicz Collection London

Nam June Paik is still present today

Paik died in 2006 in Miami, Florida, the complications of a stroke, the estate is managed by his nephew Hakuta in close contact with the widow Paiks.

Nam June Paik's life, art and art and art is recognized and reflected on in the Nam June Paik Studios ( www.paikstudios.com ). The place where Paik has installed its studio and where its artistic legacy is collected and managed today is in the middle of Silicon Valley, in Woodside.

Woodside is located in Santa Clara Valley, has only 5000 inhabitants and is a kind of artist village of Silicon Valley , beautifully located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paik had entered the right society here, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore have their place of residence here as well as rock musicians Neil Young and Flower-Power-song legend Joan Baez.

Here is the Nam June Paik Archive , compiled by estate administrator Ken Hakuta with the consent of the artist's widow's widow. Since Nam June Paik's death, Ken Hakuta has been in the foreground to put the creative processes in the foreground that have a decisive influence on Paik's art.

He sorts the artist's unstable, unsteady path of Asia through Europe to the USA for today's viewer, examines its changing interests and the effects that these new orientations had on Nam June Paik's art.

Ken Hakuta is Nam June Paik's nephew and known as "Dr. Fad ," host and presenter of an American TV show about teenage inventors that ran from 1988 to 1994. He organized the "Fad Fairs ," inventors' fairs for outlandish ideas, which earned him the Franklin Institute's "Inventor of the Year" award "Wacky Wall Walker ," which sold a staggering 240 million units in the 1980s (even though the US population at that time was only 225 million).

Here you can watch a wacky wall walker “at work”:

With part of the $20 million he earned from the plastic wall runner, Hakuta saved the Mt. Lebanon Shaker collection from being sold off in the 1990s. The collection comprises furniture and household items from the oldest Shaker community in the USA, historically invaluable and crafted according to principles such as “every force evolves a form , “order creates beauty ,” and “beauty rests on utility” —a century before the “form follows function” ideas of Louis Sullivan and the Bauhaus architects around Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . Today, the collection can once again be viewed at the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, Columbia County, New York; see shakerml.org ).

Then followed a phase of commercial expansion of Hakuta's long-standing interest in medicinal herbs . Launched in 1998, the eCommerce platform AllHerb.com was for a time the "most authentic resource for medicinal herbs," with shamans and herbal healers from the Peruvian rainforest on board.

As early as February 2000, Hakuta had no desire to fought better and more unscrupulously more competitors in terms of quality, but rather better in terms of market affairs, but better and ceased the business of the company.

Until then, the ambitious natural healing platform had been a recurring topic in the most prominent American media outlets; Harvard Business School even conducted case studies on the unusual company. Ken Hakuta subsequently became a member of the advisory board of commissioners for the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., which houses a significant collection of Nam June Paik's art, and he took over the management of Paik Studios in New York City.

In 2000, the book “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” by John G. Harnhardt , writer, art historian, curator of film and media art, and one of the world's leading Nam June Paik experts, was published. Harnhardt was the curator of the major Paik retrospective “The Worlds of Nam June Paik,” which was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000.

Harnhardt wants to open a new look at Paik's career and stimulate a new generation of artists to perceive Paik's importance for the art of the late 20th century and its influence on the future of an expanding media culture.

In the chapter “The Seoul of Fluxus,” Harnhardt illuminates Paik’s position as a Korean-born artist whose interest in art began with composition and performance. The chapter “The Cinematic Avant-Garde” is a study of independent film of the 1960s and 1970s, serving as background for the portrayal of Paik’s involvement in various artistic circles in New York and his discovery of electronic moving images through the medium of video in the mid-1960s.

Performance and film are closely linked to Paik's artistic development within the institutional context of television and video. The chapter “The Triumph of Nam June Paik” documents and reflects on Paik's heroic efforts to develop and clarify the expressive capacities of electronic visual art in terms of message and composition.

Since 2015, Ken Hakuta and Shigeko Kubota have been supported by the most marketing aggressive gallery in the world in their efforts for the artist's legacy, the Gagosian Gallery . For the well-being of the artist, but probably to the disadvantage of the interested public: The Gagosian gallery empire has become an empire through art trade and not to make art publicly accessible through efforts. Gagosian art is shown in the eight Gagosian locations in the art centers of the world and at international art fairs, especially in their own galleries, and normal citizens have hardly any access here.

A small consolation for art enthusiasts whose wealth isn't in the "completely extravagant" range: Gagosian only represents artists who have long been established in the market (and "skims off the cream," perhaps while avoiding taxes; in 2003, the American government sued Larry Gagosian and three of his business partners for tax evasion amounting to $26.5 million).

Dollar income taxes). However, their works have already been bought to an extensive extent by the states that are democratic enough for art so that interested citizens can look at them.

For the average citizen, this art can only be purchased as a calendar image: Prices for Paik's art are now in the millions, the beginning of this development being an auction record at Christie's in 2007: 646,896 dollars (578,463.46 euros) for Paik's “Wright Brothers” from 1995, the installation resembling a propeller plane made of 14 TV monitors.

Nam June Paik's work is not only present in public collections, but it is still being exhibited a lot today. There are currently seven exhibitions in four countries in which Paik art can be seen (with the takeover of the marketing rights by the Gagosian Gallery, parts of Paiks Oeuvre could be withdrawn by selling to rich and public-shy collectors of the world public, but public collections also lend their art for exhibitions):

• until May 29, 2016: “I”, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main
• to June 12, 2016: “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture”, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
• until June 26, 2016: “Marcel Duchamp – Dada E Neodada”, Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna Ascona, Ascona
• until 30 Oct 2016: “Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati”, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH
• Until 11 September 2016: “Wolfsburg Unlimited – A City as a World Laboratory”, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
• until 18 Dec 2016: “A Sense of History”, Nordstern Video Art Center, Gelsenkirchen
• From June 1, 2016: “Collecting is like keeping a diary – small sculptures from 50 years”, Rainer Wehr Gallery, Stuttgart

Legendary stories about Nam June Paik

Again and again it can be read that Paik recorded and introduced the world's first video artwork On October 4, 1965, he is said to have bought the first Sony Portapak (transportable video recorder), which was delivered to the USA. On the same day, he is said to have charged the battery and got the Portapak in the Sony shop up to run in order to then make a taxi on the way to friends who should celebrate and try out new acquisition.

The taxi got stuck in the traffic, which was due to Paul VI. Staute, Paik filmed out of the window for 20 minutes and then showed this recording in Cafe á go-go in Greenwich Village to his friends- video art was born .

this mythical version of the “birth of video art” is not entirely accurate: The Pope did indeed visit New York on October 4, 1965, to consult with the United Nations on birth control and the horrors of the Vietnam War (the first papal visit ever to the USA).

Nam June Paik could have filmed him, but not with the first battery-powered, portable Portapak CV-2400, because that one didn't come onto the market until 1967. The CV-2000, "the most portable video tape recorder ever designed," , but at 24.5 kg and with an extremely short battery life, it was hardly suitable for taxi use. It couldn't have been an early version of the CV-2400 from Japan either, because the CV-2400 was the first to be shipped in the USA…

It is true, however, that Paik was the first person to speak of an “electronic superhighway” . The expression already appears in the paper “Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away ,” which he wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974.

The term “global village” is also said to originate with Paik, demonstrating his understanding of the potential of new technologies for faster communication between distant cultures. From there, the path to the concept of the “information superhighway ,” also attributed to him, is not far; “the future is now” is also said to have come from Paik—simply a true statement when one considers how far ahead of his time he was.

Nam June Paik's work and the future: The Future is now!

Paik's "title" as father of video art was and remains controversial. He has two main rivals for the honor of being seen "public images"

The American artist Les Levine (born 1935) is also considered a pioneer of video and media art. Like Nam June Paik, he acquired one of the first portable video cameras available on the American market and began around the same time (mid-1960s) to transform the new media technology and its results into art. Levine was the first artist to develop a closed-circuit installation having himself photographed through a fish-eye lens by his installation "Iris"

But Levine had much more planned. In 1969, he combined life and art at Levine's Restaurant and published the monthly magazine "Culture Hero ." In 1970, he founded the "Museum of Mott Art, Inc." , which became famous for the helpful tips for artists in the "Catalogues of (After Art) Services," published from 1971 onward: 'Art for Capital Gains', 'How to Become an Artist's Spouse', 'Where to Be Seen', 'How to Avoid Becoming an Artist's Spouse', 'Activity Selection Service for Artists', 'How to Stop Being an Artist', 'Language Services for Painters', and finally, 'How to Kill Yourself'...

Instead, Levine staged a few film happenings , “I am an artist, I have nothing to do with you. I am an artist, I don’t want to be involved” , in 1975 on Manhattan’s Bowery Street, and from the early 1980s onwards, large poster campaigns in the city centers of New York, Dublin, Vienna, Munich, etc., and articles for “The Village Voice” and “Art in America” .

In addition, he held professorships at several universities , including New York University, participated in documenta 6, documenta 8 and the 49th Venice Biennale, played doo-wop as a bassist with "The Del-Vikings" , worked for four years as an "Artist in Residence" at various universities, won first prize at the "Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale" and twice the "National Endowment for the Arts" .

The German artist Wolf Vostell collaborated with Paik several times during pivotal periods in Paik's career, for example, in 1965 at the 24-hour happening in the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal. However, Vostell had already risen to the status of a "pioneer of video art" in 1958, when he presented his three-part installation "The Black Room Cycle" with the parts "German View , "Auschwitz Spotlight , "Treblinka" (now part of the collection of the Berlinische Galerie), thus becoming the first artist to integrate a television set into a work of art.

Another early work featuring a television is “Transmigracion I to III” from 1958. In 1963, Vostell presented his first video art installation, “6 TV Dé-coll/age,” at the Smolin Gallery in New York (now part of the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid). Following the exhibition's success, the Smolin Gallery sponsored two innovative Wolf Vostell TV events.

In the first exhibition, “Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage & Decollage Posters & Comestoble Decollage”, gallery visitors were invited to create their own decollage on posters on the gallery walls; in the second, “TV Burying” , Vostell used decollage techniques to alienate the screen from its original purpose; for example, he used custard slices (to throw at) and barbed wire (to wrap around); with this, he was also at the forefront of video art at the time.

These were not Vostell's only forays into art with TV and video; also known are the "Grasshoppers" , 20 monitors and a video camera in an installation; the installations "TV Shoes" and "TEK" (Thermoelectronic Chewing Gum, an installation consisting of 30 metal posts with barbed wire, 5 suitcases with radios with heat-sensitive microphones, 5 microphone capsules with transmitters, 5 warm light sources, 5000 pieces of chewing gum for 5000 visitors, 2 loudspeakers, 1 amplifier 25 watts, 1 super radio and 13000 spoons and forks, all from 1970).

Vostells with the topic of TV and video species , but also, was essentially through that, as a painter, sculptor and happening artist, he had a little more in mind: Vostell is considered the pioneer of the art styles Environment, installation, happening, video art and fluxus , and inventors of the techniques of blurring, dé-coll/age and embedding. From 1974 Vostell dealt intensively to set up a “meeting point for art, life and nature” , since 1976 the Museo Vostell Malportida .

Both “competitors for the title” had better things to do than spend their entire lives dealing with screens; only Nam June Paik persevered and combined music, video images and sculpture work in a way that would become a style-defining influence on future video artists.

John Hanhardt added, “Through a multitude of installations, video cassettes, global television productions, films and performances, Paik has reshaped our perception of the ephemeral image in contemporary art.”.

Nam June Paik was born in 1932, yet his career can inspire and encourage many citizens of today's globalized world. He has vividly demonstrated that globalization is not merely a term for trading companies that, depending on their moral compass, either import exciting new products for their customers or exploitatively produce the same consumer junk as always, avoiding all taxes. Rather, the world belongs to the individual who seizes the opportunity and shapes their own world.

Paik did this long before the “wide world of adventurers” became a global world for everyone through the internet, but it is about the fundamental mindset: Nam June Paik still had to take risks and make sacrifices that a reasonable person not in a coercive situation would rather not do.

But Nam June Paik gives everyone a piece of freedom with the example of his way of life - you don't necessarily have to stay in a country in which war prevails and human rights are kicked with feet. And with his art, Nam June Paik showed the many people who cannot simply escape unbearable situations with his art that goes on in the meantime - today we can all combine ourselves virtually with the world, express our opinion, inform us and others; Know more for everyone as an opportunity that the world will be a little better at some point.

Nam June Paik can serve as a role model in another area as well: He approached the medium of video at a time when "images for everyone" were barely possible. And he appropriated this medium, mastered it, instead of waiting for someone to "build him a suitable app.".

As people did in the early days of the Internet, in addition to a colorful series of terrible web designs, many great small and large platforms have been created, through which important information or with skills and heart produced specialties are made accessible to humans.

Today, a few companies are in the process of reducing the variety of offers and information to what your filter or algorithm flushes up with (paid) advertising or opinion ... And if you want to play there, you have to put a lot of money in our hands, as ourselves tell us in a kind of farce of a young entrepreneur coaching in private broadcasters.

But the internet exists independently of these companies; it's time for a second wave, for many small search engines through which people can find many small, exciting websites and companies… it's up to you, explore the net, there's already more than just Google; whether the final revolution of enlightenment through the exchange of knowledge and information on the net becomes a reality or is “devoured by greed” lies in the hands of internet users.

With its robots, Paik also gave us a number of creative suggestions, you can look forward to what will come from the 3D printer in the near future ...

Paik experimented with video images in an incredible number of new configurations, thus opening up entirely new dimensions for the art forms of sculpture and installation. He transformed the conveyed messages of the medium of video in a process that demonstrates both his profound understanding of the underlying electronic technologies and his ability to understand the core of the medium of television, to turn it inside out, and thereby create something entirely new.

Paik's art was never influenced or limited by the usual technical processing of TV and video. Rather, it used the material and composition of the electronic images and its placement in the room or on the screen in order to fundamentally change them and thus create a new form of creative expression.

It is astonishing and admirable: Right at the beginning of the TV and video revolution in the 1960s of the last century, Paik intuitively sensed the “power of moving images” – and he seized the opportunity without hesitation to acquire the emerging technology and transform it into a kind of new art the world had never seen before.

It is even more astonishing that he could soon make predictions about how the emerging technologies would change our daily life. Now the time has come and it is up to us to take part in the positive changes and to stop the negative phenomena through non -observance ... so that the “Global Village” becomes a “global village” for all people and the “Electronic Super Highway” brings something to everyone.