Word: paik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Insofar as he settles anywhere on earth, Korean-born Video Artist Nam June Paik, 53, lives in Manhattan. More specifically, he inhabits the top of a converted warehouse with a rusting cast-iron facade in SoHo. Entree to Paik's aerie comes via a freight elevator, with the host himself hauling on the chain pulley that drags the motor into grumbling life. As the aging contraption shakes and shudders toward the fifth floor, Paik says in heavily accented English, "After this, everything anticlimax...
...quite. Paik's cavernous loft resembles a Sony factory that was in the process of being ransacked by terrorists when an earthquake struck. Television sets, some dead and most of the others crying out for intensive care, are scattered everywhere, along with packing crates and snaking piles of electronic debris. Paik, a short, roundish man with close-cropped black hair, pads in his slippers through the clutter, happily and completely at home...
What does he do here? He experiments with the ramifications of an insight that came to him several decades ago. Paik was perhaps the first person to perceive the TV screen as a canvas and, ergo, the stream of electrons that creates images on the picture tube as paint. Presto, video art, which means scrambling, bending, rearranging or just generally messing around with the picture on TV sets. As practiced by Paik and his followers, this tinkering can lead to anything from vivid static and colorful snow to whimsical sculptures of the video age. When New York's Whitney Museum...
Then he met American Composer John Cage, who was visiting Germany. "He was exotic," Paik says approvingly. "I hear about Robert Rauschenberg from him, and about other artists doing new things in New York. I think, 'Slowly, slowly, America is coming...
...Paik had no intention of speeding this process along when he finally came to the U.S. in 1964. He merely wanted to visit Cage and his cronies. His first impression of New York City was far from favorable: "It was as dirty as Paris and as ugly as Dusseldorf." Yet Paik found himself extending his stay: "I keep saying, 'Half more year, half more year...