Art Like the art forms they contain, some exhibitions offer an instant hit, a legible blast of culture but others require some thought, for you to spend time with them, work with them even, in that way that sometimes happens when you you’re placed in a awkward social situation with a stranger and have to seek some common ground. That’s how I felt this morning strolling about the first half of the Nam June Paik retrospective at Tate Liverpool. I’d originally been invited to the press showing but couldn’t make it after life intervened, but the press office were good enough to provide me with a ticket.
If strangers can be categorised, Paik is something of a friend of a friend. His influences and collaborators are very well known: John Cage, Joseph Beuys and Karl Stockhausen and later Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson and Merce Cunningham. But though he was right at the centre of the New York scene in the 60s this is an example of the Tate using its prominant place within the art world, between obvious blockbusters (Magritte is next) to educate us on those figures who demand to be known too. Stretched across two spaces at Tate and completing at FACT on Bold Street, this collects together over ninety works, many appearing in the UK for the first time.
My first impressions were overwhelmingly negative, the brain splitting video wall of his Internet Dream (1994) with its confusion of clips from old Hollywood films, news items and general technicolour blah bearing down on me, a screen showing Korean adverts for western products and a massive projection of a Joseph Beuys concert skip edited so that eye isn’t given a moment to rest. I sighed. I felt like I was being screamed at and I’d not reached the fourth floor yet. Listening to the mp3 guide helped, with its short introduction to the artist, and eventually as I strolled about upstairs, I think we came to an understanding.
What eventually became my access point was that Paik really was, as this video shows, a technological innovator and experimenter. At a time when people were still coming to terms with television sets as an ordinary domestic items, he was already pulling them apart to see what else he could make them do other than show television broadcasts. In Magnet TV (1965), he was placing the giant hunk of polarised metal on top of a set to see what patterns the cathode ray tube might make. He co-created the Video Synthesizer (1969) which attempted to produced a visual equivalent of the sound instrument, which later gave rise to cellos built from sets whose images change with the stroke of the bow.
In other words he was pushing the available technology to do things which it really wasn’t designed to do yet. Like the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, who produced what sounded like electronic music using audio tape, Paik was looking ahead of his time and creating what he was using what was available to him. He said that in the future everyone would have their own television station and we children of the internet finally do on YouTube. But Paik even demonstrated what he meant. On the day he bought one of the earliest video camera, a Sony Portapak, with all of the world to shoot, he chose to record the most mundane thing he could think of - himself buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket.
So the exhibition is worth visiting for a trip back in time before flat screens when televisions were more present, when a call to the television repair man included the magic of a kingdom of glass and wires behind the screen, rather than, as happened to me yesterday when the man visited to look at my LG LCD, the disappointment of a couple of printed circuit boards. Most of Paik’s work isn’t just the film itself but the technology displaying them, or in the case of the Buddhas creating them, the original video cameras trained on their marble and bronze torsos, the results displayed in the space. Live.
When you do visit, I really would recommend you listen to the accompanying free mp3 guide. Intelligently written in the style of a Radio 4 programme, it features contributions from curator Sook-Kyung Lee and members of the artist’s family. Much of the work on display is an echo. It's documentation for a previous happening or once interactive works (like the Magnet TV) which are now too fragile to be touched. It’s in these sections that the mp3 guide so ably fills in the gaps, especially in relation to Paik’s collaboration with the cellist Charlotte Moorman with whom he created Opera Sextronique, a performance piece which led to her being arrested in New York.
I genuinely think we parted on good terms, Paik and me. The exhibition closes on a stroll through a TV Garden (1974), some Video Fish (1979) and with the chance for us meet members of Paik’s Robot Family (1986-93) and by then Paik definitely wasn’t the stranger he’d been at the start. I’d realised that Internet Dream was his attempt to come to terms with the inevitable information overload which the web would bring and had brought and that if we’re uncomfortable when confronted with that he achieved his aim. He was a visionary.
Nam June Paik is at Tate Liverpool and FACT Liverpool until 13 March 2011. Admission details available here.
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