The Worlds of Nam June Paik

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
From February 11 to April 26, 2000

Modulation in Sync, Video Fish, Candle TV and TV Garden are just a few of the works created by Nam June Paik, the Korean artist to whom the New York Guggenheim Museum is devoting a large retrospective exhibition. Modulation in Sync: Sweet and Sublime (2000) is an amazing installation involving the entire museum space. In the central hall, called “the rotunda”, one hundred TV monitors have been positioned, broadcasting the most oddly assorted images; from there a waterfall, crossed by a green zigzag laser, travels up the seven floors of the museum to the ceiling, where a series of spirals, also green, chase one another. From the ceiling large vertical screens reach the rotunda, in contrast with the elegant spiral structure of the museum. On these screens images of famous and less famous people are projected, such as Merce Cunningham, David Bowie, Philip Glass, Joseph Beuys, or Lou Reed. Walking along the museum ramps one can see other works by Paik: among them Video Fish (1975), in which television has become an aquarium containing real fish; TV Garden, a garden consisting of plants and videos; and Family of Robot, in which the robots are made with several TV monitors. All of Paik’s works analyze how natural elements may interact with technological equipment, in particular with television monitors. Paik anticipated, back in the Sixties, the still ongoing debate on the relationship between the natural and the artificial, not only in the visual arts, but also in music and the performing arts. He also transformed video into an expression medium able to give new meanings to the moving image. TV Clock (1963), installation made of twenty-four monitors in which the passing of time is disassembled into a band of light crossing the screen horizontally, is an exemplary work on this subject. Moon is the oldest TV (1965) shows instead how a modified cathode-ray tube is capable of simulating the shape of the moon.




Lorenza Pignatti
Translation by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski