Nam June Paik: "Father of video art" and a little "father of the future"

Nam June Paik's life and art: "think art" and "make art" before sales/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 previous PAIK article "Nam June Paik and Medienkunst" in connection with the Kinsey report would surely hook up so that Paik's negative forecast for self-driving cars was no wonder if he could not drive a car ...

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 artificial platform).

works of art presented "Nam June Paik and Media Art" also proves that Nam June Paik preferred to work on his art rather than take care of their sale and presentation. A colorful and long list, but only a very small insight into Nam June Paik's work (nothing more than enough prior knowledge to facilitate the self-determined discovery of Paik's video type), and a work of art like the "Electronic Superhighay" really doesn't arise 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 prices and awards , including from the Guggenheim Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Film Institute; Grohmann Award, the Goslaer Kaiserring and the UNESCO Picasso Medal. In 1999, the ArtNew's magazine included it in its selection of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Since 2002, the NRW art foundation has been awarding the "Nam June Paik Award for Media Art" (also: International Media Art Prize of the Kunststiftung NRW).

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 moderator of an American TV show about young inventors that ran from 1988 to 1994. He organized the "Fad Fair" , inventor fairs for crazy ideas that brought "Inventor of the Year" Award "Wacky Wall Walker" popular, which was sold in the 1980s 240 million times (although the United States had only 225 million inhabitants at that time).

Here you can watch a Wacky Wall Walker "at work":

With a part of the 20 million that the plastic converter brought him, Hakuta saved the Mt. Lebanon Shaker collection . Furniture and household items of the oldest Shaker community in the United States, historically highly valuable and after guiding principles such as "Every Force Evolves a Form" , "Order Creates Beauty" , and "Beauty residues on utility" -made a century before the "Form Follow Function" ideas Louis Sullivans and the Bauhaus architects around Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . Today the collection can be seen again in the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon. Columbia County, New York), see Shakerml.org ).

This was followed by a phase of the business expansion of Hakuta's long -standing interest in medical herbs . Allherb.com , which was launched in 1998, was the "most authentic resource for medical herbs", with shamans and herbal doctors from the Peruvian rainforest for a while.

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 demanding naturopathic platform was a permanent topic in the best-known American media; The Harvard Business School dealt with the unusual company in case studies. Ken Hakuta then became a member of the "Advisory Board of Commissioners" for the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, which houses a significant collection by Nam June Paik's art, and he took over the management of the 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 leading Nam June Paik experts in the world appeared. was held Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 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 an artist born in Korea, whose interest in art with composition and performance started. The chapter "The Cinematic Avant Guard" is a study by the independent film of the 1960s and 1970s, which serves as the background of the representation of Paik's engagement in various artist milieus in New York and its discovery of the electronic moving image by the medium video in the middle of the 1960s.

Performance and films are closely linked to Paik's artistic development as part of the institutional context of television and video. The chapter "The Triumph of Nam June Paik" documents and reflects Paik's heroic efforts to develop and illustrate the expression capacities of electronic image art with regard to meaning 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.

Small consolation for those interested in art, whose assets are not in the area of ​​"completely left": Gagosian only takes over the representation of artists who have prevailed on the market (and "draw the cream", perhaps when we avoid tax, in 2003 the American government complained Larry Gagosian and three of its business partners for evasion of 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.

Because the normal citizen can only buy this art as a calendar image: The prices for paiks art are today in the millions of-range, the start of this development in 2007 was a auction record at Christie's: $ 646,896 (578,463.46 euros) for Paik's "Wright Brothers" from 1995, which is similar to a propeller aircraft from 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: "Ich", Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main
• until June 12, 2016: "Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture", Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
• until John 26 2016: "Marcel Duchamp - Dada e Neodada", Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna Ascona, Ascona
• to 30 OCT 2016: "Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati", Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Oh
• to 11 SEP 2016: "Wolfsburg Unlimited - a city as a world laboratory", art museum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
• to Dec 18 2016: "A Sense of History", Nordstern Video Outkish Center, Gelsenkirchen
• From June 01, 2016: "Collecting is like a diary - small sculptures from 50 years", Galerie Rainer Wehr, 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 the video" should not be quite right: The Pope actually visited New York on October 4, 1965 to advise the United Nations about birth control and the horrors of the Vietnam War (first visit to the Pope in the USA).

Nam June Paik could have filmed him, but not with the first battery-operated, portable portapac CV-2400 because it only came onto the market in 1967. October 1965 the CV-20000 came on the market, "The Most Portable Video Tape Recorder Ever Designed" , but with a weight of 24.5 kg and extremely short-term battery operation hardly any taxitable. It could not have been an early version of the CV-2400 from Japan because the CV-2400 was the first to be delivered in the USA ...

However, it is true that Paik was the first person who spoke of "Electronic Superhighay" . The expression already dives in the paper "Media Planning for the Post -Industrial Society - The 21st Century is now only 26 Years away" , which he wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974.

The expression "Global Village" should also go back to Paik and demonstrate its sense of the possibilities of the new technologies in relation to faster communication between distant cultures. From there to the concept of "information superhighway" , the electronic data highway, which is also attributed to it, the path is no longer far; "The Future is now" should also come from Paik, just a true word when you consider how far he was ahead of his time.

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

Paik's “title” father of video art was and is not undisputed. Above all, he has two serious competitors for honor to be seen as the founder of art with and to be seen "public pictures"

The American artist Les Levine (born 1935) is also considered a pioneer of video and media art,, like Nam June Paik, acquired one of the first portable video cameras available on the American market, and began to transform the new media technology and the results created by this technology into art at around the same time (in the mid-1960s): Levine was the first artist in 1968 Closed-Circuit installation (a kind of forerunner of today's video surveillance systems) and started to produce art by being photographed by a FISH Eye lens "Iris"

However, Levine had a lot of other things to do, in 1969 he connected life and art in Levine's restaurant and published the magazine "Culture Hero" . In 1970 he invented the "Museum of Mott Art, Inc." , became known for the useful tips for artists in the "Catalogues of (after Art)" published from 1971: 'Art for Capital Gains', 'How to Become an Artist's Spouse', 'Where to Be Seen', 'How to Avoid Becoming to Artist's Spouse', 'Activity Selection for Artists',, 'How to Stop Being an Artist', 'Language Services for Painters' and finally 'How to Kill Yourself' ...

Instead, Levine followed a couple of film happings , "I Am An Artist, I have nothing to do with you. I am an artist, I don´t Want to be involved" 1980s , large poster campaigns in the city centers of New York, Dublins, Vienna, etc. Village Voice ” and “ Art in America ” .

In addition, he had professorships at several universities , UA of New York University, took part in Documenta 6, Documenta 8 and the 49th Biennale of Venice, played as a bass player with "The Del-Vikings" DOO WOP, worked for four years as "Artist in Residence" on various universities, won the first prize of the "Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale" and the same Twice the "National Endowment for the Arts" .

The German artist Wolf Vostell has worked with Paiks several times in the times of the decisive course in Paik's career, e.g. B. 1965 at 24-hour happening in the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal. For the "Pioneer of video art", Vostell had already risen in 1958 when he introduced his three-part installation "cycle the black room" with the parts "German view" , "Auschwitz headlight" , "Treblinka" (today part of the collection of the Berlinische Gallery), so he was the first artist to integrate a television into a work of work.

Another early work with a television is "Transmigracion I to III" from 1958, in 1963 Vostell showed his first video art installation "6 TV Dé-Coll/Age" in the Smolin Gallery in New York (today in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid). The Smolin Gallery sponsor after the exhibition success two innovative Wolf vostell TV events.

In the first "Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage & Decollage POSTERS & COMESTOBLE DECOLLAGE", gallery visitors were asked to realize their own decollers on posters at the gallery stands; In the second, "TV Burying" , Vostell uses Decollage techniques to alienate the screen of its actual purpose; For example, pudding cream slices (for throwing) and barbed wire (for wrapping) were used; As a video artist, he was also at the forefront.

These were not Vostell's only trips to art with TV and video, the "grasshoppers" , 20 monitors and a video camera are also known in an installation; The installations "TV shoes" and "TEK" (thermoelectronic chewing gum, an installation of 30 metal piles with barbed wire, 5 suitcases with radios with heat-sensitive microphones, 5 microphone capsules with transmitters, 5 warm light sources, 5000 chewing gum, 2 speakers, 1 amplifier 25 wattage, 1 super radio and 13000 spoons and forces,, 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 plans than dealing with their entire life with screens, only Nam June Paik held out and combined music, video images and sculpture work in a way that should be style-forming for future video artists.

According to John Hanhardt, "through a variety of installations, video cassettes, global television productions, films and performances, Paik has re -shaped our perception of the transient picture in contemporary art," he added.

Nam June Paik was born in 1932 and can stimulate and encourage some citizens of the “Global World of Today” with his career. He has proven very lively that globality is not just a term for trading companies that, depending on the moral level, import new exciting products for their customers or produce the same consumption shit as always exploit. Rather, the wide world belongs to the individual that accesses and forms its world.

This was done long before the “wide world of adventurers” became a global world for everyone, but it is about the basic way of thinking: Nam June Paik still had to take risks and deprivations that a reasonable person who is not in a forced situation would not be received.

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 model in another area: he approached the medium video in a time when the "pictures for everyone" could hardly walk. And he acquired this medium, made a subject instead of waiting for someone who "builds 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 is time for a second wave, for many small search engines that people can find about many small exciting websites and companies ... It is up to them, explore the network, there are already more than the big G; Whether the final revolution of the Enlightenment through knowledge and information exchange on the Internet will become a reality or "is eaten by profit greed" is 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 has experimented in incredible quantities of new configurations with video images and thus opened completely new dimensions to the art forms "sculpture" and "installation". He changed the transmitted statements of the medium of video; In a process that illustrates its deep understanding of the underlying electronic technologies as well as its ability to understand the core of medium television, to turn away from the inside out and thereby create something completely 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, Paik intuitively felt the "power of moving pictures"- and without hesitation he took the chance to acquire the emerging technology and to transform it into a kind of new art that the world has 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.