Nam June Paik: Celebrating the moving image

Decay · 2020-07-24T13:12:14.306Z

Welcome to "...Is that Art? Friday" week 6! To follow the video art theme of the latest art review on Rita Castanheira's work, this week's art forum post is about the artist that changed the media world as we know it as today. Nam June Paik is a pioneer of video art, and his career was celebrated in an exhibition earlier this year at Tate Modern. This article is based on that exhibition. “Foot Switch Experiment” (1963) With almost 50 years of career, Nam June Paik opened up a lot of what is our mass-media nowadays. Being a pioneer using the screen as his canvas, he was and still is a massive influencer on new Art Movements and Media, such as Video-Art and New Media Art. Paik, especially during his experimental works, presented this sense of borders between digital and physical. Whenever there is a digital work, there is a sculpture/installation characteristic to it. This idea that TV is part of your furniture, part of you. The “Foot Switch Experiment” (1963) is a perfect exaggeration of how our TV’s are an extension of ourselves, being a performative act between the viewer and the object. This early artwork is mimicking the layout of a typical living room: TV screen on a wood (almost) eye-level stand. The only change is that Paik is actively asking the viewer to be active and “play” with the TV screen by not giving us a sofa to sit and relax, but instead giving us a wired footswitch with instructions to switch on the TV. “Foot Switch Experiment” (1963) is a massive silent critique to society and it is introducing us to a huge relationship between Paik’s work and Marshall McLuhan further writings. Nam June Paik is quietly raising awareness of our relationship with the screens by including us in the performative piece. As McLuhan references in his text “The medium is the Message” (1964), the TV is just a piece of data that needs our interaction to convey meaning. In this artwork, we are conveying this TV screen to light up with no information to be absorbed, so the piece ends there. Where in a normal situation, either nowadays or back in Paik’s time, the TV lighting up is just the beginning of the performance. The screens are more influential on our lives nowadays than ever before and they are everywhere. They no longer need human interaction to convey meaning. Instead, media is conveying meaning to us. “TV Cello” 1971 Following this idea, “Tv Cello” is another work that has a silent, strong impact on the viewer as it brings this nostalgic vibe as we watch this woman playing a 3 different sizes TV screen mounted on top of each other with cords crossing it vertically in the middle to imitate a cello. This 3 “TV Cello” performance that we watch on a loop is the exact same display we have in front of us which is why it gives the viewer this strong perception of missing. This artwork, as “Foot Switch Experiment” creates awareness of another perspective of the thin line between the physical and the digital. In this case, “TV Cello” questions the real image as an object. Our eyes are conveying a succession of meaning to the images we are watching, but we are unsure where it starts. A notion very easy to depict in Paik’s CCTV works where exposed images of the real-time objects are real-time objects themselves through TV screens. Paik was really interested in CCTV because it was a closer and more simplistic extension of the TV’s Mass Media. It is everywhere, and it doesn’t necessarily mean truth, as in Magritte "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (1929) work for instance, where this idea of the untruthful but realistic images is a lot easier to comprehend. Cameras record real life, but that doesn’t mean those images can still not be manipulated. Three Eggs (1975 -82) We live in an age where we are an omnipresent CCTV camera through the devices we carry and though all the images we share on social media. Privacy is becoming a lost notion in time, and no longer we can depict the real from the real. We are the conveyed meaning images living in a lifetime performance where the borders separating us and the machines have vanished. As I first mentioned, this exhibition is greatly situated in time because of its critical content in relation to our bond with technologies. We are still at the beginning of the untruthful era and Paik will still be influential in 100 years’ time. Do you think video art is art? If yes, are selfies art? What is the difference? What do you think about Nam June Paik's work? Let me know what you think 😉 ______________________________________________________________________________________ Footnotes McLuhan, M. (n.d.). The Medium is the Message. [ebook] Available at: http://Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan ©1964 [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019]. Paik, N. (n.d.). Foot Switch Experiment. [image] Available at: https://welcometothedigitalart.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/artworks-4/ [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019]. Walker Art (2019). TV Cello. [image] Available at: https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/tv-cello [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019]. Korea.net (2018). Three Eggs. [image] Available at: http://m.korea.net/english/NewsFocus/HonoraryReporters/view?articleId=159192 [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019].

top of page

This site was designed with the

.com

website builder. Create your website today.Start Now

DECAY

bottom of page