>>See also the reprint: Catalogue of the Everson Museum
JH: Global Groove was
produced at WNET Television NY
. It employed the
Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, a technology Paik created with the engineer
Shuya Abe that allowed him to synthesize, to refashion the electronic
image. It was one of the first works using this image processor to
telecast. Paik grasped the potential of video and television as media and
created new tools to transform them.
CK: Did you think about
creating an electronic version of the catalogue?
JH: It was
important to add to the literature by using a traditional print
publication. By reprinting the Everson catalogue we are making it
available to a new generation of scholars. We're interested in other ways
of distributing this information through our
web site.
CK: How involved was Nam June in the New York and
Berlin exhibitions?
JH: I did a retrospective with Paik at
the Whitney in 1982. In 1996, he
suffered a stroke; this impaired him physically, but mentally he's very
sharp and has a great memory and great ideas. In his studio, we worked
with Paik's wife,
Shigeko Kubota,
Jon Huffman, and Ken Hakuda, who is Paik's nephew and manages the
studio. Paik expressed his ideas in drawings and I worked very closely
with him to design and curate the space and to create Global Groove 2004
. The invitation to work with the video wall, his selection of the video
tapes and how he wanted them edited and conjoined with
Candle Projection to create this electronic light environment
installation developed from conversations with him and his studio.
Global Groove at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin: setting up the exhibition
CK: You likened Global Groove to a postmodern
vaudeville. What's the link between television's early history, where
programs resembled
vaudeville, and Paik's use of that quality to deliver
performance-based works?
JH: Global Groove begins
with a statement imagining a moment when TV Guide will be as thick as a
Manhattan telephone directory. We're talking about multiple channels you
switch to as you're going through programs on Global Groove.
Commercials are captured from around the world, as well as
Robert Breer's films and performances by
Charlotte Moorman, his great collaborator. It contains all the chance
happenings. Performance is put onto an electronic stage. Early television
had a static, single-camera setup that literally recreated the stage. Like
early cinema, Paik refashions the electronic image, placing it in a
radically new performance space that television could become. This was
further developed in
Good Morning Mr. Orwell with Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson and
other global performance pieces.
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JH: He embraced the total
possibility of the medium, the interactive quality of it. He talked about
lasers and new forms of transmission in that 1974 Everson catalogue. Now a
new generation of artists is imagining the Internet as a new means of
communication, challenging the frame of that medium.
Proof: pages for the catalogue "Global Groove 2004'. Photo by Cheryl Kaplan
CK: What was Paik's background in science and
technology?
JH: He understood possibilities and had a real
gift for working with collaborators. He found someone like Shuya Abe, and
pushed Abe to reconceive the medium in ways he hadn't imagined. He later
collaborated with
Horst Baumann to create laser works in the 80s and
Norman Ballard to create laser works for The Worlds of Nam June Paik
.
CK: What can be learned from Paik, the "father of video,"
in reference to today's world, which boasts a consumer culture decked out
in digital paraphernalia? Mass consumer culture is fluent in technology,
yet Paik's concepts still haven't been realized at the public level.
CJ: It's amazing that computers come with editing software - that a
philosophy of play is encouraged. In the Everson catalogue, Paik refers to
corporate control over images. In contemporary culture, there are still
safeguards. You can buy the DVD, but you can't copy it, you can't fast
forward through the commercials. There's an illusion of accessibility, but
there are still controls. Paik's concerns in Global Groove are
still at issue.
Global Groove 2004 at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin: setting up the exhibition
JH: Global Groove is about an infinite
expansion of television and video. He imagined the flat screen to expand
the moving image and empower the individual. That was at the radical heart
of his work as a Fluxus artist, how chance and humor can change things.
It's about breaking the mold of the one-way street of broadcast television.
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