Get into the Global Groove:
Nam June Paik in the
Deutsche Guggenheim
Nam June Paik: Global Groove, 1973, Video Still
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix © Electronic Arts Intermix
Nam June Paik is a pioneer of the electronic media. John Cage, Paik’s teacher,
also found that Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the ”global village” from
1962 signified the nearly total mediatization of the world. Ever since the
sixties, Paik has been seeking new and innovative forms to express this
vision in his video works, objects, and installations. In his current
exhibition ”Global Groove 2004” in the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Paik is
presenting a new multiple-monitor installation that combines his video
experiments from four decades with a high-speed cut-up comprised of pop
music, performance footage, and manipulated television imagery. Oliver
Koerner von Gustorf on Paik’s call for global communication, the
democratization of the media, and his vision of a TV art station with
worldwide broadcasting.
Nam June Paik, 1986.
Photo: Rainer
Rosenow
”I had no difficulty being Korean in
America. We were thinking in terms of numbers. This virgin land here was
so big that I didn’t have a problem. I could go anywhere. I wanted to do
everything. I was like an elephant in a china shop. I could break
everything.”
Nam June Paik arrived in his adopted country in 1963; in retrospect, the
words he used in an interview for the
NY Arts Magazine in 2000 to describe this time convey something of the
mood of excitement surrounding him as one of the most promising artists of
his generation.
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At the same time, this statement seems exemplary for the
life work of a man who never shrank back from conventions and ingrained
habits. No one can compete with the influence he’s had on subsequent
generations of media artists.
Global Groove 2004, Paik’s most recent video installation at
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, gives a good idea of the uproar Paik’s
multimedia art unleashed in the sixties and seventies. Borrowing from the
title of Paik’s legendary video
Global Groove from 1973, in which he propagated the vision of an art
television station with worldwide broadcasting, Paik’s current work feeds
on earlier single-track videos and TV productions, harking back to his
first video works from the mid-sixties.
In a dynamic environment of TV-screen walls and monitor
groupings, the visitor is confronted with a visual flood of altered TV
imagery and video sequences. A retrospective insight into Paik’s artistic
work becomes coupled with the collective memories of decades of global
television: dancers moving in time to rock music, Pepsi commercials,
drumming Navajo Indians, psychedelic swirls of color, the grotesquely
distorted face of Richard Nixon
, footage from contemporary news coverage, game shows, and soaps – and, again
and again, the bodies and voices of those musicians, writers, and artists
that wrote history together with Paik himself crystallize out of this
dizzying spin: John
Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Beat
poet Allen Ginsberg
, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the New
York Living Theatre, the
cellist and performer
Charlotte Moorman.
Nam June Paik: Global Groove, 1973, Video Still
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix © Electronic Arts Intermix
As an homage to the video art of the past decades, Global Groove 2004
combines the continuous reworking and remix of Paik’s own video
productions and the films and videos of other artists with reflections on
the utopias they convey. "This is a glimpse of a new world, when you will
be able to switch on every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be
as thick as the Manhattan telephone book.” This sentence, spoken off
camera, introduced the original version of Global Groove in the
early seventies; in view of the technological change that’s occurred
since, it almost comes across as touching. This fleeting glimpse at a
long-ago world of tomorrow also inevitably becomes a look at yesterday’s
artistic conceptions of the future. While the internet and television are
becoming increasingly intertwined, and the digital information of the New
York telephone book can be shrunk to the size of a microchip, Paik’s call
for democratization and the de-monopolization of electronic media are as
up to date today as they were then. ”Groove” is a highly ambivalent term.
In light of the word’s meaning as a trail or track in a record, ”groove”
can suggest both a beaten path whose monotony one has become caught in
(”stuck in a groove”) or a joyful call to take part, to relax and join in:
”Get into the Groove!”
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