Nam June Paik

[Dave S]

Pioneering "Video Artist" Nam June Paik died the other day. Paik was reviled by some in the collecting community as the original "fishtank guy", but I never saw him that way. In fact, he was really my first exposure to televisions as something more than "furniture". Whether you love him or hate him, he was an interesting character!

From the Associated Press:

"Nam June Paik, 74, who added video screens and images to art"

MIAMI — Nam June Paik, the avant-garde artist credited with inventing video art in the 1960s by combining multiple TV screens with sculpture, music and live performers, died Sunday night, according to his Web site. He was 74.

Mr. Paik, a South Korean native who also coined the term "electronic super highway" years before the information superhighway was invented, died of natural causes at his Miami apartment, the Web site said.

Song Tae-ho, head of a South Korean cultural foundation working on a project to build a museum for the artist, said he learned of Mr. Paik's death from the artist's nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, in New York.

Mr. Paik's work gained international praise from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, among others, and much of it is on display at the Nam June Paik Museum in Kyonggi, South Korea. "He really led the development of a new art form, bringing the moving image into the modem art world," said John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim.

Hanhardt called Mr. Paik a true friend and a prophet. "He foresaw that video would be an artist's medium, that it would be in museums," he said. "It's a heroic achievement."

In a 1974 report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Paik wrote of a telecommunications network of the future he called the "electronic super highway," predicting it "will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavors." Two decades later, when "information superhighway" had become the phrase of the moment, he commented, "Bill Clinton stole my idea." He also was often credited with coining the phrase, "The future is now."
Trained in music, aesthetics and philosophy, he was a member of the 1960s art movement Fluxus, which was in part inspired by composer John Cage's use of everyday sounds in his music. Another Fluxus adherent was the young Yoko Ono.

[Dave A]

Nam June Paik came along about the same time I did in broadcasting and made me look at my business with an artistic eye. I was not always in agreement with what he did, but he make me think about the flickering image we so treasure.

We are here to look at the end image and how it got there, which is the true history we now preserve. He looked at what was in the image, how it got to us, and how the mahogany and plastic boxes could be interpreted. That was his canvas.

If you think of the metal monstrosities we collect, it is not too far a throw to imagine them as a canvas by themselves in their time.

Most of the producers of the kinescopes we love to view did this inside the CRT. He looked at that very box in our living rooms and our lives.

Is it a lapdog in our living room? A hulking cultural monster? A burden on our lives? The pics Dave posted give you a place to start to think.

Take your pick and give it some thought. He made me think about why we left mahogany boxes and gave in to black plastic boxes. Does the box reflect the content and the time? Cheaper shows, cheaper boxes? He gave an artist's reflection on how we got to where we are and why we made the choices that we let roll over us. Which suffered first, the programs or the delivery vehicle?

Just my thoughts with regards to the art inside and outside the box.

Dave A