| Nam June Paik dies The 73-year-old artist, who was born in Korea, studied in Japan, began his artistic career in Germany, and moved to America in the mid-60s, was not just a citizen of the world, who connected East and West with his own life. Nam June Paik is a character of a synthetic nature, in which a passion for the Buddhist tradition coexisted with a passion for radical technological experiments, an academic education with shocking gestures, a love of music with a conscious refusal to become a composer and with a preference for pictures on the TV screen over sound. He was called the grandfather of video art, because already in 1965 Paik bought a portable camera, and in 1966 he began making installations from TV monitors.
Before this, he had already participated in the Fluxus group - the most radical artistic movement of the 60s, which tried to expand the boundaries of art to the limit and became famous for its spontaneous neo-Dadaist actions and absurd garbage objects.
One of Nam June Paik's early sculptures, Piano Integral, belongs to the latter - a torn piano, pasted over with all sorts of household items. This is the result of several “concerts” that the young composer gave from 1958 to 1963 - first independently, then as part of Fluxus. He stuffed eggshells, photographs, plastic toys between the strings; the piano was joined by bicycle bells, car sirens, a radio and even a vacuum cleaner - and all this sounded, hummed and rattled, accompanying the musical solo and turning the action into genuine acoustic anarchy. “The piano is a taboo. It must be destroyed,” declared Nam June Paik. Now this revolutionary object adorns the Vienna Museum of Modern Art: Paik has long become a classic, and his technical discoveries, such as video synthesizers or projections that work in real time and broadcast on the screen what is happening here and now, have long been included in the art arsenal.
But Nam June Paik seemed ready for his canonization. He, a Buddhist, found it comfortable to exist in the Big Time. It is no coincidence that in his “sophisticated” video installations he loved to use the bodies of the most antediluvian televisions, building from them giant sculptures in which antique static wood balanced flickering color pictures on a modern display.
And his most famous work, “TV Buddha” from 1974, is also dedicated to the connection of eras: an ancient statue of Buddha seems to be meditating in front of his own image on a television screen. So far, no video artist has been able to achieve such extreme simplicity and at the same time expressiveness of a statement, for most of whom technology is more important than the message. And Nam June Paik, who once studied philosophy at Tokyo University, was first and foremost a philosopher who, in his experiments with new media, was simply trying to find optimal forms for thinking about today's world. He also treated himself with philosophical stoicism. For the last ten years, he was practically paralyzed, but at the same time he continued to give humorous interviews at the opening of his own exhibitions, which, by the way, had not yet taken place in Russia. Fedor ROMER |
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