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Paik was interested in technology, of course—but in a lax, low-tech way. The rise of kinetic and programmed-systems art in the '60s brought with it the hope that some electronic Leonardo might emerge from all the squeaking and twinkling: a new figure of the artist as cybernetic technocrat, a Tatlin with a 64K chip. No such figure emerged, and Paik in no way resembled him. His machines were crude, funny, aleatory gremlins, held together by string and Scotch tape; one of them, a robot named K-456, is preserved in the show. Controlled (in a vague way) by a model-aircraft radio transmitter souped up to send commands on 20 channels, this frail creature did manage to perform in Germany and even in Washington Square Park, where it walked, spoke, waved its arms and excreted a stream of beans.
Paik's television pieces tend toward disciplined confusion; ends stick out everywhere. They have no narrative structure. Can one speak of decorative TV? If so, Paik makes it. The keynote of the Whitney show is struck, as soon as one gets out of the elevator, in the first installation on view: a row of goldfish tanks. Behind each tank is a TV screen silently emitting its bright electronic collage through the water; live fish swim in front of magnified images of themselves; there is a glimpse of sky underwater, a figure, a swirl of interference pattern. In Fish Flies on Sky, 1975, several dozen TV sets are hung from the ceiling and one lies on one's back, looking upward, as the staccato montages of fish, dancers and an old World War II monoplane cavort and twirl. In TV Garden, the sets are dispersed through a peculiarly unconvincing grove of indoor plants, glowing and babbling like discarded electronic detritus left in an artificial jungle.
The effect of such pieces—particularly Fish Flies on Sky—is curiously soothing; once urgent images, struggling to claim one's attention through the set, are multiplied and dispersed into pretty electronic wallpaper, and one's distance from the screens makes them look almost floral. It is low-fidelity TV, short on information, long on suggestion; Paik has more than once compared his work with that of Monet, whose lyrical blurs and water reflections were at the opposite extreme of pictorial strategy from the precise definition of an Ingres. "As collage technique replaced oil paint," Paik declared almost 20 years ago, "the cathode-ray tube will replace the canvas." Of course, collage never replaced paint, and the idea that everything that canvas and paint can do may be better done by manipulating a stream of electrons was one of the harmless delusions of the '60s."
But the direction of Paik's aim is clear enough: rather than compete with the informational power of "real" television, he wants to alter the box into a form of pure play, electronic finger painting. It is his solution—and a very adroit one—to the fact that the TV screen, small and intimate as it is, can never acquire the grand declamatory power of film or canvas. There is no such thing as a physically impressive videotape. The scale is not there. But the tape can involve you and even promote an occasional sense of mystery; and this, if not always profoundly, is what Nam June Paik's installations do. —By Robert Hughes