Nam June Paik

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Korean spelling
Hangeul 백남준
Hanja 白 南 準
Revised
Romanization 		Baek Nam-jun
McCune-
Reischauer 		Paek Nam-jun

Nam June Paik (born July 20, 1932 in Seoul , South Korea ; † January 29, 2006 in Miami Beach , Florida ) was an American composer and visual artist from South Korea and is considered a founder of video and media art .

meaning

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video art who, according to Karl Otto Götz , encouraged him to deal with the medium of television in an artistic way. He was originally a composer and studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. Only later, as a member of the Fluxus movement, did he become a visual artist. In 1962 Fluxus concerts and performances followed in Wiesbaden, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris and Düsseldorf. In 1963 he installed 12 televisions with technically manipulated screens in the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal . Nam June Paik was a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1979 to 1996 , but lived mainly in New York . Paik is repeatedly referred to as the "father of video art". But Les Levine created the first closed-circuit installation with the work Iris in 1968 , and Wolf Vostell was also working on the technical manipulation of picture tubes at the same time. Paik combined Eastern thinking with Western avant-garde. He took up impulses from music and visual arts as well as technical innovations and implemented them in his art.

Life

Nam June Paik's sculpture Pre-Bell-Man in front of the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt am Main
Video Sculpture (1993), Trenton, NJ

Nam June Paik was the son of a Korean textile and steel entrepreneur. His family fled to the start of the Korean War in 1950 through Hong Kong to Tokyo . Here Paik studied Western aesthetics, musicology and art studies from 1952 to 1956 . The subject of his thesis was the work of the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg . In the same year Paik continued his musicology studies at Munich University and also studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner at the Freiburg University of Music . From 1958 to 1963 he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne studio for electronic music of the WDR . Paik took part as a musician in performances of Stockhausen's composition Originale in 1961. Here he developed the concept of "action music", in which he also smashed instruments and mixed random noises with classical sounds, which u. a. also came from tape recorders. He was inspired by the American composer John Cage , whose tie he cut off when he performed his composition Etude for Piano Forte in 1960. Paik remained connected to his artistic beginnings in the Rhineland throughout his life, in particular to Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf and the Cologne artist Mary Bauermeister , in whose studio in Lintgasse 28 he presented his earliest works.

As a member of Fluxus he appeared in various performances in the early 1960s , and in this way came to experimental art and finally to work with televisions as art objects. At first he did not work with video, but manipulated televisions so that they changed and distorted the existing television programs. He also built sound installations with experimentally modified record players and tape recorders. When Sony launched affordable video cameras and recorders in the late 1960s, it moved to making video tapes as well.

At the 24-hour happening on June 5, 1965 in the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal, Paik performed his Robot Opera . He announced: "Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we are fighting back". Other participants were Joseph Beuys , Bazon Brock , Charlotte Moorman , Eckart Rahn , Tomas Schmit and Wolf Vostell . Following the happening, they declared the campaign's photographer, Ute Klophaus , to be a co-author and participant.

Together with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe , Paik developed an analog video synthesizer with which television and video images - e.g. B. with color changes - could be manipulated. The images created in this way became the basis for his video installations and video tapes. His 1973 video Global Groove anticipated the aesthetics of the music video . The avowed Buddhist Paik ironized his belief in 1974 with TV-Buddha , a closed-circuit video installation with a bronze Buddha sitting opposite a screen and seemingly meditating on his live recording, which, however, shows a laterally correct image.

One of his most important collaborators since the late 1960s and early 1970s was the American cellist Charlotte Moorman . The police arrested them at a performance in New York in 1967, in which both artists appeared with naked torsos.

Since 1980, Nam June Paik has mainly created multi-monitor video installations in which he arranged television monitors to form sculptures and used them to simultaneously play several video sequences. In 1982 Paik caused a sensation with a spectacular installation of 384 monitors in the Center Pompidou in Paris .

In 1984 he took part in the exhibition From Here - Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf . At the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Korean presented an even larger art object with a media tower of 1,003 monitors entitled The More The Better .

Nam June Paik became a US citizen and married the Japanese-American video artist Shigeko Kubota in 1977 . In the same year he took part in documenta 6 in Kassel.

Invited by the then commissioner for the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale , Klaus Bußmann , Paik, as a cultural nomad , received the Golden Lion for the best country pavilion in 1993 together with the German artist Hans Haacke, who lives in New York . Nam June Paik was also a participant in documenta 8 in 1987 in Kassel.

Deutsche Post special stamp for Documenta X 1997 - Motif: Video wall by Nam June Paik for Documenta 8

His work has been recognized with numerous solo exhibitions and prizes. Many of his objects and installations can be viewed in museums. His nephew Ken Paik Hakuta runs the Nam June Paik Studio in New York City.

In 1996 he suffered a stroke and since then has been paralyzed on one side and has to rely on a wheelchair. However, his creativity was unbroken, he realized his artistic ideas with the help of assistants. In 1999 ARTnews magazine selected him as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The Nam June Paik Award for media art, named after him, has been presented since 2002 .

In 2003, the Kyonggi Cultural Foundation invited to an international architecture competition with the aim of realizing a Paik Museum in Yongin ( Gyeonggi-do Province ). Paik did not live to see the completion of the museum; he died on January 29, 2006 in Miami. According to Paik's will, a cremation took place and the urn was transferred to Korea.

The winning design by the Berlin architect Kirsten Schemel was built around 30 kilometers south of Seoul in cooperation with the Berlin-based architect Marina Stankovic and after several revisions. The grand opening, at which the widow Paiks was also present, took place in October 2008.

Works (selection)

Part of the collection of the ZKM , Karlsruhe:

  • 1986: Passage (2-channel video sculpture)
  • 1989: Buddha (bronze sculpture)
  • 1989: Canopus (1-channel video sculpture)
  • 1989: Noah's Ark (2-channel video installation)
  • 1989: Evolution (portfolio of 8 sheets)
  • 1984: V-IDEA (portfolio of 10 sheets)
  • 1992: Versaille Fountain (video sculpture)
  • 1994: Internet Dream (video installation), Museum of Modern Art (MMK), Frankfurt am Main
  • 1988: One Candle , Essl Museum - Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg / Vienna
  • 1995: Duet Memory (video installation)

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Wulf Herzogenrath (Ed.): Nam June Paik. Works 1946–1976. Music, flux, video. 2nd Edition. Wienand, Cologne 1980 (exhibition catalog, Cologne, Kölnischer Kunstverein, November 19, 1976 - January 9, 1977).
  • Edith Decker: Paik, video. DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7701-2157-0 (also: Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 1985).
  • Wulf Herzogenrath, Sabine Maria Schmidt (Eds.): Nam June Paik - Fluxus / Video. Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen 1999, ISBN 3-9804084-9-3 (exhibition catalog, Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen , November 14, 1999 - January 23, 2000).
  • Willi Blöß: Nam June Paik. Electric warrior. Willi Blöß Verlag, Aachen 2006, ISBN 3-938182-12-1 .
  • Wulf Herzogenrath, Andreas Kreul (Ed.): Nam June Paik. There is no rewind button for life. Tribute to Nam June Paik. DuMont literature and art, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-8321-7780-5 .
  • Gerhard Finckh (Ed.): "Private". Contemporary Wuppertal collectors in the Von der Heydt Museum. Von der Heydt-Museum , Wuppertal 2009, ISBN 978-3-89202-073-8 (exhibition catalog, Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, March 8 - May 24, 2009).

items

Movie

  • Nam June Paik. Open your eyes. Documentary, Germany, 2010, 61 Min, written and directed. Maria Anna Tappeiner, Production: WDR , Air Date: October 30, 2010, 22: 55h at 3sat , Summary of 3sat.

Web links

Commons : Nam June Paik  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nam June Paik: "Exposition of Music - Electronic Television". Retrieved February 22, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Decker 1988, p. 44.
  3. ↑ Herzogenrath 1980, p. 44.
  4. ↑ Finkh 2009, p. 331.
  5. ↑ TV Buddha (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on October 23, 2012 ; Retrieved February 22, 2013 .
  6. ^ Obituary Nam June Paik. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on October 4, 2013 ; Retrieved February 22, 2013 .
  7. ^ Wall of Light: Nam June Paik Museum in Yong-In. (No longer available online.) German Embassy Copenhagen, 2007, archived from the original on August 9, 2011 ; Retrieved February 22, 2013 .
  8. ↑ Nam June Paik Museum opened. In: The Standard . October 8, 2008, accessed February 22, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Paik, Nam June
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 백남준 (Korean, Hangeul); 白 南 準 (Korean, Hanja)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pioneer of video art
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Seoul , South Korea
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 2006
Place of death Miami , Florida, USA