| Exhibition | Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds |
|---|---|
| Period | 2013-08-09 ~ 2013-10-19 |
| Venue | Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh |
| Planning | |
| No other artist has had greater influence on the use of technology in art than Nam June Paik; he prophesied changes that would shape the ideas, ‘Participation TV’, ‘Random Access Information’ and ‘Video Commune’. Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik's first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music - Electronic Television (Wuppertal 1963), when the artist brought television in the realm of art for the first time, presenting it as a tactile and multisensory medium. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, Paik believed that artists should humanise technology, get their ‘fingers in and tear away the wall’ of the establishment. Paik, a trained musician, treated technology as a material part of his repertoire, which later expanded to include video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers. Invited by the Edinburgh International Festival 2013 with a grand theme of ‘art and technology’, Nam June Paik Art Center will fill Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, where such notable historical figures as Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell attended, with electromagnetic waves to reverberate with the diverse forms of Paik's practice. Drawn primarily from the Nam June Paik Art Center's collections including videos, sculptures, photographs and archival materials, the exhibition is intended to shed new light on the artist Paik who was a rigorous but always humorous thinker and experimenter at the same time. As first Paik exhibition in Scotland, birthplace of electromagnetic theory and television technology, Transmitted Live will demonstrate how revolutionary the artist remains for contemporary audiences in encouraging creative engagement with technology. In the opening week, a special programme of performances will take place as an integral part of the exhibition to broaden its amplitude. Four international contemporary artists selected for the performances, namely, Takehisa Kosugi(Japan), Byungjun Kwon(Korea), Okkyung Lee(Korea), Haroon Mirza(UK) are those who have participated in the Nam June Paik Art Center’s projects before, reinvigorating Paik’s artistic spirit in terms of truly transcending the boundaries of music, visual art and performance art. Transmitted Live which will continue after the Festival until October is all the more meaningful with another Festival exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, which is a Royal Collection Trust exhibition held in the Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse. The works of Paik and Da Vinci embodying the innovative artistic exploration of technology will resound together throughout the city of Edinburgh and beyond. www.eif.co.uk/paik |
|
| Summary | |
| Entering the Georgian Gallery of Talbot Rice, the visitor should be ready to move to the tune of Global Groove, Paik’s video about music and dance as a means of global commu-nication. Having a commanding presence in the same room is Video Chandelier No.1: moving images on small television screens and light bulbs switched on, along the tangled-up cables in the shape of a splendid chandelier dangling from the cupola, form a kinetic composition from top to bottom in a fascinating interplay with the room’s neoclassical interior. The White Gallery of Talbot Rice welcomes you with Fontainebleau, a massive gilt frame that holds twenty small monitors showing flashy images. Replacing the tradition¬al canvas, the televisions show the hyperdynamic changes from image to image, being variably and endlessly modulated. What unrolls onwards after this picture frame are Paik’s musical wonders. The interestingly anthropo¬morphic sculptures of video robots Schubert and Beethoven are positioned to face each other in the opposite walls. Made of various vintage televisions and radio casings, they are motionless, but their flashing and fleeting video images allow them to acquire magi¬cal qualities of being animated. In the centre of the room the TV Cello’s transparent belly lays bare its televisual cir¬cuits, with which a contrast is made by the videos of femininity on the screen, i.e., Char¬lotte Moorman playing TV Cello and a nude woman in an egg shape. The piano in Elec¬tronic Opera No.2, which is a kind of music video of classical music, goes up in flames to a Beethoven piano concerto, while the piano in Piano Concert is a prepared instrument for Paik’s performance where it was pushed down repeatedly towards eggs, fruits, a radio switched on, and his own body Paik placed on the floor in turn. The violin of MS-Fluxus-sus (Symphony No.7) pairs up with a remote controller so that the performance becomes the floating instrument’s journey on the river, while Symphony No.6 is a performance of relay where one performer plays a single note and then passes only the violin’s bow to the next performer, who plays another note, passes the bow again to the next, and so forth. Symphony No.5 is a score full of mysterious combinations of sentences relating to time perception, sexuality and politics, and classical music. Some of his seminal single-channel videos are shown on old CRT televisions in a specially designed ‘video parlour.’ Suite 212, for example, manifests musical nature from its title, borrowing a musical form of suite to which Manhattan’s area code 212 is added. This work consists of thirty videos, about five minutes long each. Paik fused fragments of city life into his audiovisual synthesis revealing New York changed and dominated by the mammoth media and information industries. Paik did not follow a prescribed path but paved the way by going through the circuits at first hand. He pre¬ferred the surprise of byproducts created by mistake and chance, achieved through the process of trial and error. This is well represented in Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer. Developed to edit, manipulate and synthesize television images, the video synthesizer was for Paik a playable console into which all his past television experiments were accumulated. Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer was first used in Video Commune: Beatles from Beginning to End, a four-hour live broadcast on WGBH in 1970. In addition to the display of his experimental televisions, Transmitted Live has a section in which you can catch a glimpse of Paik’s New York studios through archival materials. Also featured in this exhibition are historical materials from 1963, including a series of photographs, posters and newspapers—a vivid documentation of Exposition of Music that takes you to time travel for the epoch-making exhibition. Vibrating with his creatively destruc¬tive energy as a boundary breaker, this exhibition also embraces such con¬templative works as Hand and Face and TV Buddha, which highlights the fact that Paik was ingenious at orchestrat¬ing what appears contradictory, what stands at opposite ends. |
|