A flickering retrospective for Nam June Paik at the Whitney
Mention video to some people and watch their faces fall. If the cliché of "modern sculpture" used to be a piece of stone chewing gum with a hole in it, and that of "modern painting" was a canvasful of drips, then the cliché of "video art" is a grainy closeup of some U.C.L.A. graduate rubbing a cockroach to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes while the sound track plays amplified tape hiss, backward. Video art has not yet shaken off its reputation as clumsy, narcissistic and obscure.
Of course, video has no monopoly on that; most art of any kind, in this overloaded art world, is clumsy, narcissistic and obscure. Still, even video does not have to be, and some of it is not. An indication of this may now be seen at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan through June 27. The Whitney has long been conscientious about video art, showing it in regular programs through the 1970s when other museums would hardly condescend to touch it. Now the Whitney becomes the first American museum to give a retrospective show to a video artist. He is Nam June Paik, a Korean who lives in New York City.
At 50, Paik is the sage and antic father of video as an art form—"the George Washington of the movement," as another experimental artist, Frank Gillette, dubbed him at the end of the '60s. He began by emigrating from his native Seoul in the '50s, first to Tokyo and then to Germany, to study music. In Germany he met Composer John Cage, that perennially controversial guru of the avantgarde, and he was soon busily involved in the multimedia "events" and benignly neo-Dadaist actions of a European artists' group that called itself, for its commitment to change, Fluxus.
Fluxus was less a defined art movement than a loose anarchist confederacy, given to ritual gestures of protest against "high" culture. Paik, who was to move to New York in 1964, would play a piano and then topple it over onstage; he would cut a pianist's shirttails to shreds with scissors, or stage a little musical "event" by dragging a violin along the sidewalk on a string, like a scraped and protesting pet. A cellist, Charlotte Moorman, would appear for Paik at a concert and play her instrument with tiny TV sets rigged over her breasts; or, to the scandal and amusement of the New York art world in 1967, she would perform topless.
Such occasions pass, marked only by photographs. Some of Paik's pieces were more permanent, like a television set with the screen removed and a candle burning in the empty cabinet—a neat comment on the votive, shrinelike role played by TV in the home—or a closed-loop setup titled TV Buddha, in which a stone effigy of the Buddha sits with a camera pointed at it, ceaselessly contemplating its own immobile image in a small monitor.