In the case of his
Homage to John Cage from 1959, Paik for the first time developed his
concept of action music in which random noises and moments of silence held
the same value as the musical sounds of a classical instrument. While Cage
had been implementing prepared pianos, radios, tape recorders, and record
players as musical instruments since the early fifties, Paik also saw the
visual qualities these objects possessed. His first one-man exhibition
took place in 1963 in the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. Exposition of
Music – Electronic Television was based on two themes: music and
television; it transferred performance ideas onto an arrangement of
manipulated objects. Viewers were able to experience the multi-media
environment directly in the gallery space – not as passive recipients, but
as active participants.
|
Random Access, 1963 (destroyed)
Installation with magnet tape in "Exposition of Music- Electronic TV"
Galerie Parnass Wuppertal
©Photo: Manfred Montwé
|
Installation view: Expositions of
Music – Electronic Television
Galerie Parnass,
Wuppertal
1963
©Photo: Rolf Jährling
|
In the spirit of a Zen master that sends his pupils into a
state of shock with blows and other incomprehensible behavior in order to
open their minds to new understanding, Paik confronted the public with a
severed cow’s head strung up above the gallery’s entrance. Following
Cage’s idea of
indeterminacy, the exhibition involved the viewer as ”musician” or
”composer.” Thus, a motor-driven rotating ”Schallplatten–Schaschliks”
(”Shish-Kebab Record”) with a movable arm could be played at will, while
the bits of audio tape stuck all over the walls for the work Random Access
could be listened to with a sound head and collaged together to compose
new pieces of music.
|
Random Access, 1963 Installation
view: Exposition of Music – Electronic TV Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal
1963
©Photo: Rolf Jährling
|
|
|
Random Access, 1963 Installation
view: Exposition of Music – Electronic TV Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal
1963
©Photo: Manfred Montwél
|
Paik’s sound installations were complemented by his visual
experiments: tuned to certain volumes, radios, microphones, and foot
switches attached to television sets set off little explosions of dots on
the TV screen or made the image grow larger or smaller. The disturbance
and misappropriation of the running television programs that Exposition
of Music – Electronic Television called for constituted a
milestone in video art. The exhibition dissolved the boundaries between
listener and composer, while its radical intervention into television
called the roles of broadcaster and viewer into question. Almost
imperceptibly, Paik’s formal experiments set a process into motion that
could no longer be checked: the discovery of television as a means of
artistic expression was to soon ally itself with the demand for the
medium’s democratization and for an interactive dialogue designed to
connect people in real ways instead of inundating them with a one-way
overload of electronic images.
Video Fish, 1975 (Version of 1977)
Three-channel video installation with monitors and fish tanks,
documenta 6, Kassel, 1977 ©Photo: Friedrich Rosestiel
On the Path to a More Humane Technology
Again and
again, Paik’s art of the sixties and seventies invoked the electronic
media as a kind of human ”second nature” in a way that was clearly
different from the prevailing view of television as a fixed and monolithic
medium. These video environments often combined video and television with
natural and organic elements. Thus, in the artificial landscape of the
TV Garden (1974), the flickering screens of TV sets shined like exotic
flowers scattered among potted plants. For
Video Fish (1975), Paik installed aquariums in front of a row of
monitors. Small fish darted back and forth before manipulated footage of
Merce Cunningham’s dance performances, looking like miniature copies of
the huge fish that filled the screens in the background.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
|
