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 he conceived and performed together with Charlotte Moorman in the early 1960s, Nam June Paik his big breakthrough, the much-acclaimed start of a fairytale career.

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

Significantly more exhibitions in the new millennium than in the last – there's no better way to prove that Nam June Paik was far ahead of his time.

Significantly more group exhibitions than solo exhibitions suggests an artist who prefers making art to acquiring exhibition opportunities and buyers.

Significantly more exhibitions during the artist's lifetime than after his death confirms the thesis of the previous sentence and shows how much an estate administrator can achieve who belongs to the artist's immediate family and works together with his widow without any conflict.

This widow, the Japanese-American video artist Shigeko Kubota, married Paik in 1977, and they lived together until his death. Presumably, their life was rather quiet and harmonious: Paik lived as a Buddhist, never smoked, and never drank alcohol in his life; even the traffic he warned against with crashing robots was something he only knew passively, as he never actually sat behind the wheel of a car himself.

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 that's unlikely to happen, 100% macho types rarely read art articles (unless they belong to the new breed of greed-is-cool gallery owners, but then they don't read art articles on a small independent platform like 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 historian has yet calculated what proportion of Paik's oeuvre is comprised of the conceptual groundwork, the research into what is technically feasible, and the conception/theoretical construction of the installations, but this proportion is certainly not insignificant.

Nevertheless, over the past 50 years, Nam June Paik has exhibited in the world's most prestigious museums , including MoMA in 1977 (Projects: Nam June Paik), the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1982 (Nam June Paik), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1989 (Nam June Paik), the National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul in 1992 (Nam June Paik Retrospective: Videotime), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2000 (The Worlds of Nam June Paik). He also represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1993. In 1977, he participated in documenta 6 in Kassel, and in 1987 in 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 in 87 public collections around the world:

• Australia : Queensland Art Gallery + Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, QLD
• Belgium : Stedelijk Museum for Actual Art, Ghent
• Denmark : ARTS Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, Museet for Samtidskunst Roskilde
• Germany : Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, Daimler Contemporary + Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin, Kunstmuseum 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 Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Neues Museum – State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg, FLUXUS+ Potsdam,
  Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
• Finland : Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
• France : Musée de l'Objet 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 The Hague
• Norway : Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden
• Austria : Essl Museum of Contemporary Art Klosterneuburg, Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna
• Portugal : Berardo Museum, Lisbon
• Sweden : Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• Switzerland : Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Kunsthaus Zürich
• 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 Archeology 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 Minneapolis 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 American Art Museum Washington DC
• United Kingdom : Zabludowicz Collection London

Nam June Paik is still present today

Paik died in 2006 in Miami, Florida, from complications of a stroke; his estate is managed by his nephew Ken Hakuta in close contact with Paik's widow.

Nam June Paik's life, art, and artistic output are honored and reflected upon today at the Nam June Paik Studios ( www.paikstudios.com ). The location where Paik established his studio, and where his artistic legacy is now collected and managed, is situated in Woodside, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Woodside, located in the Santa Clara Valley, has only 5,000 inhabitants and is a kind of Silicon Valley artists' village , beautifully situated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paik found himself in good company here; Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore also reside here, as do rock musician Neil Young and flower-power song legend Joan Baez.

Here is the Nam June Paik Archive , compiled from the estate by executor Ken Hakuta with the consent of the artist's widow. Since Nam June Paik's death, Ken Hakuta has focused on highlighting the creative processes that decisively influenced Paik's art.

He sorts out the artist's erratic, unsettled path from Asia through Europe to the USA for today's viewer, examining his changing interests and the impact 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 no longer wanted to fight against competitors who were by no means better in terms of quality, but better equipped and more unscrupulous in terms of market influence, and ceased the company's business operations.

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 aims to offer a new perspective on Paik's career and to encourage a new generation of artists to recognize Paik's significance for late 20th-century art and his 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 in their efforts to preserve the artist's legacy by what is arguably the world's most aggressively marketing gallery, the Gagosian Gallery . This is to the artist's benefit, but likely to the detriment of the interested public: the Gagosian gallery empire grew through the art trade, not through efforts to make art publicly accessible. Gagosian art is primarily exhibited in its own galleries at its eight locations in the world's art centers and at international art fairs; the average person has virtually no access to it.

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 extensively purchased by states that are democratic enough for art, so that interested citizens can view 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 also frequently and enthusiastically exhibited today. Currently, seven exhibitions featuring Paik's art are taking place in four countries (with the acquisition of the marketing rights by the Gagosian Gallery, parts of Paik's oeuvre could be withdrawn from public view through sales to wealthy and publicity-shy collectors, 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

It is often claimed that Paik the world's first video artwork in 1965. He is said to have purchased the first Sony Portapak (portable video recorder) shipped to the USA on October 4, 1965. On the same day, he is said to have charged the battery and gotten the Portapak working in the Sony store, before taking a taxi to visit friends who were to celebrate and try out his new acquisition.

The taxi got stuck in traffic, which was congested because of the Pope Paul VI's visit; Paik filmed for 20 minutes out of the window and then showed this recording to his friends at the Cafe á Go-Go in Greenwich Village – 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).

With that, Vostell was essentially finished TV and video art a pioneer of the art styles Environment, Installation, Happening, Video Art, and Fluxus "meeting place for art, life, and nature" in the western Spanish village of Malpartida de Cáceres Museo Vostell Malpartida since 1976 .

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, through the example of his life, offers everyone a glimpse of freedom – one doesn't necessarily have to remain in a country at war where human rights are trampled. And for the many people who cannot simply escape unbearable situations, Nam June Paik, through his art, has shown a perspective that now extends even further – today we can all connect virtually with the world, express our opinions, and inform ourselves and others; more knowledge for everyone as a chance that the world will one day become a little better.

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, alongside a colorful array of terrible web designs, many great small and large platforms have emerged, making important information or skillfully and lovingly produced specialties accessible to people.

Today, some companies are trying to reduce the variety of offers and information to what their filter or algorithm pushes to the top in terms of (paid) advertising or opinion… and anyone who wants to play along has to spend a lot of money, as self-proclaimed experts tell us in a kind of farcical young entrepreneur coaching session on private television channels.

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.

Paik has also given us a number of creative suggestions with his robots; we can look forward to seeing what else will come out of 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, he used the material and composition of electronic images and their placement in space or on the screen to fundamentally transform them all, thus creating 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.

Even more astonishing is that he was soon able to predict how emerging technologies would change our daily lives. Now the time has come, and it is up to us to embrace the positive changes and stop the negative ones by ignoring them… so that the “global village” becomes a “global village” for all people and the “electronic superhighway” benefits everyone.