In the flux: from electronic music to the electronic
image
In reference to Paik’s performance
during the Originale happenings, which Karl Heinz Stockhausen
initiated in Cologne in 1961, the composer wrote: ”Paik came to the stage
in silence and shocked most of the audience by his actions, which were as
quick as lightening. For example, he threw beans up to the ceiling and
into the audience. He then hid his face behind a roll of paper, which he
unravelled infinitely slowly in breathless silence. Then, sobbing softly,
he pressed the paper every now and then against his eyes until it became
wet with tears. He screamed as he suddenly threw the roll of paper into
the audience, and at the same moment he switched on two tape recorders
blaring a sound montage typical for him consisting of women’s screams,
radio news, children’s noise, fragments of classical music and electronic
sounds…”
Like all the actions of
the
Fluxus artists, who began forming in the early sixties, Paik’s anarchistic
attacks on both instruments and public struck at the very heart of the
grim
Adenauer era, outraging bourgeois ideas concerning ”beautiful” and
supposedly neutral art. Like Stockhausen’s Originale, Fluxus
artists called the performances they put on over the following years
”concerts,” even though they had very little to do with an ordinary
understanding of music. Instead, the participants staged short
Dadaist scenes in which musical instruments and their manipulation played
a central role. Artists such as
Joseph Beuys,
Wolf Vostell, Emmet Williams, and
George Maciunas aimed at the dissolution of the traditional status of the
art work, which no longer had to be a durable marketable product, but
could be transitory and consist of a mere action. Even while Paik was to
later stress that it had been a stroke of luck to have met great artists
such as Beuys or John
Cage in Germany, in retrospect it seems as though the revolutionary
West German art scene had been waiting for someone like him to come along.
Born in Seoul in 1932 as the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Paik
resisted his parents’ plans for a bourgeois career early on. At the age of
fifteen, the talented piano student was not only fascinated by the
teachings of
Karl Marx, but also by the compositions of
Arnold Schönberg, which he was introduced to in high school. In 1949,
following the outbreak of the
Korean War, the family had to flee via Hong Kong to Tokyo, where Paik
studied music and art history and philosophy for three years. He graduated
with a work on Schönberg’s serial compositional techniques.
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Zen for Head, Paiks Interpretation of
La Monte Youngs Composition 1960# 10,
performed at Städtisches Museum Wiesbaden,
August 1962 © Photo dpa
In 1956, Paik’s
interest in western classical and modern music brought him to Germany,
where he studied at the University of Munich and later at the Freiburg
Academy of Music; in 1959, he worked together with the composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen in the
WDR Studio for Electronic Music, which was where his first electronic
compositions were made. Paik had met Stockhausen in 1957 at the
International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt; the encounter
was to exert a strong influence, as did his friendship with John Cage. For
Cage, who was probably the most well-known American composer of the 20th
century and who was intensely involved with
Zen Buddhism, mutual permeation and a lack of intention and attachment
became the defining factors of his music. Performed for the first time in
1952, his piece
4’33 was based on a very simple instruction: the musician
should spend precisely four minutes and 33 seconds on an instrument
without playing a single note. The fascination of the piece lies in the
silence, in which every reaction from the public, from the creaking of a
chair to an uneasy cough, is consciously perceived and incorporated into
the composition.
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