| Exhibition | Intermedia Theater) |
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| Period | 2015-06-27 ~ 2016-01-17 |
| Venue | Gallery 1, Nam June Paik Art Center |
| Planning | |
| Curator: Lee Sooyoung Artists: Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Manfred Leve, Peter Moore, Ben Patterson, Ben Vautier |
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| Summary | |
| If intermedia are a place where art meets life, a theatre is a place where life and desires collide with each other, and therefore, conflicts, frustrations, and catharsis are flying around. And peculiarly, Paik had a constant desire for a new medium. He spent all his money to buy at least more than thirteen TV sets for his first solo exhibition in 1963. It goes without saying that latest electronic devices were high-priced for their high performance, as they are today. Paik succeeded in creating elegant color images out of three black-and-white TV sets. A magical catharsis was awaiting him. Although the price of color TV sets was going to soon drop enough for him to buy it and Paik himself knew this, he was unable to wait and kept on longing for a new medium. At the end of the brochure for the preview of the film shot with a Sony Portapak video camera he bought after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Paik wrote his dream of establishing many short-pulsed laser radio or TV stations. Laser was Paik’s last medium, or a destination point of the Paik-style intermedia dialectic. Even when the fees for the satellite signals were tremendous, he never gave up his desire that two parts from two different continents exchange feedbacks simultaneously and meet each other through media. To take a road that has never been taken and to challenge a new medium are not easy at all. Nevertheless, Paik willingly walked in that way and made us happy. He taught us the sound heard when a violin or a piano is broken, how to play music with a penis, and how to imagine Beethoven simultaneously played on the earth, the moon, Venus and Mars. When we just sit down in the audience, absentmindedly watching the show, he encouraged us to stand up, walk forwards to a TV, shout in front of it, and find our face and time in it. Paik-style catharsis is of great importance for our spiritual maturity. |
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