NAM JUNE PAIK (b. 1932) LIE DETECTOR ROBOT t

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE GERMAN COLLECTION

Provenance
Carl Soloway Gallery, CINCINATTI
Private collection, GERMANY

Literature
"Planet Paik - Nam June Paik's works," David Joselit, ART IN AMERICA, June 2000

If many of his works, Nam June Paik proposes an association between domesticated forms of nature and technology, the ecological dimension in Paik's art reaches beyond such pairings. The science of ecology does not isolate single organisms or even environments, but rather studies their systematic interrelationships. In the media world, one analogue to such integrated systems is the closed-circuit video apparatus in which a camera receives images that it simultaneously relays to a nearby monitor or monitors. The use of closed-circuit video technology was widespread among the earliest practitioners of video art, including Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. Paik, too, explored its possibilities, though in a manner less engaged with surveillance than many of his colleagues. His signature use of the closed-circuit consists of works in which the statue of a traditional figure of reflection, such as the Buddha or a reproduction of Rodin's Thinker, is placed before a camera and monitor to which its image is transmitted as an object of meditation.

The excess Paik produces in his art, both its carnivalesque euphoria and its melancholic distraction, engages a bigger problem than does much recent media art: the problem of television and its role in our world. Paik pummels the television set, extracts its guts and spills them on the floor. But at the same time, he teases out of the monitor a hybrid video stream composed of diverse elements, synthesized and reordered. In other words, Paik sees television as both a set of institutions and a language that, is probably the most widely "spoken" in the world. Holding these two dimensions together, insisting both on their pleasure and their emptiness, their ideological violence and their vertiginous potential, will be Nam June Paik's legacy.