[백남준] '존 핸하르트(John G. Hanhardt)', 그에 대한 관점

존 핸다르트(John G. Hanhardt)가 본 백남준

Chance in a lifetime: John G. Hanhardt on Nam June Paik.

 

 

DO YOU KNOW....?

How soon TV-chair will be available in most museums?

How soon artists will have their own TV channels?

How soon wall to wall TV for video art will be installed in most homes?

-Nam June Paik, A New Design for TV Chair, 1973

 

 

 

THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE of Nam June Paik--who died at his home in Miami Beach Miami Beach, city (1990 pop. 92,639), Dade co., SE Fla., on an island between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean; inc. 1915. It is connected to Miami by four causeways. on January 29--is clear in the expressions commonly used to describe his unique role in transforming the nascent medium of video into a contemporary art form, from the "father of video art" to the "George Washington of video." It is incredible to think that an entire decade before Paik predicted the ubiquity of video technology in A New Design for TV Chair, he was featuring his "prepared," or altered, televisions in solo exhibitions. And as we become the media culture he envisioned in his artwork and writings, we can see how the range of Paik's creative accomplishments and both the prescience pre·science

n.

Knowledge of actions or events before they occur; foresight.

 

prescience

Noun

 

Formal knowledge of events before they happen [Latin praescire to know beforehand] and breadth of his thinking--in a practice unlike anything that preceded him--are all the more astonishing a·ston·ish

tr.v. as·ton·ished, as·ton·ish·ing, as·ton·ish·es

To fill with sudden wonder or amazement. See Synonyms at surprise. . From his early performances to his work in music, television, video, and film, Paik was constantly in action, exploring and expanding the horizons of art.

 

The story of Paik's life follows a global trajectory. Born into a prominent family in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, he studied musical composition and art at the University of Tokyo “Todai” redirects here. For the restaurant called Todai, see Todai (restaurant).

 

The University of Tokyo (東京大学 . At age twenty-four, after completing a thesis on Arnold Schonberg Noun 1. Arnold Schonberg - United States composer and musical theorist (born in Austria) who developed atonal composition (1874-1951)

Arnold Schoenberg, Schoenberg, Schonberg and graduating with a degree in aesthetics, Paik traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in twentieth-century music--first attending the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where he met composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and then returning two years later to settle in Cologne, where he worked at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk's Studio for Electronic Music. (Stockhausen was based in the city, and it was there that Paik would meet John Cage Noun 1. John Cage - United States composer of avant-garde music (1912-1992)

John Milton Cage Jr., Cage .) Paik's studies led him to focus on musical composition as sequences of events unfolding over time: His notations mapped actions in addition to tones. One consequence of this technique was that Paik's individual pieces could not be duplicated--leading Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti to suggest that films be made of Paik's concerts as a means to establish scores. That never happened, but their suggestion is an indication of Paik's improvisational approach and commitment to the idea of musical composition as performance.

 

In his work, Paik removed the classical instrument from its customary sacred position, treating it as a material object to realize both new sounds and shapes. In One for Violin Solo, 1962, for example, the violin is gradually lifted above the head of the performer and then smashed on the podium; in the previous year's Violin with String ("Violin To Be Dragged in the Street"), the instrument is pulled along pavement. Other performances featured Paik's handmade instruments, such as one fabricated out of string and a wooden crate for Urmusik, 1961. It was also around this time that the artist began to incorporate technology into live performances, scratching phonograph records Phonograph Records

 

audiophile

 

a person especially interested in high-fidelity sound equipment and recordings on tape or disks.

 

audiophilia

 

1. the state or condition of an audiophile.

2. to generate unexpected sounds and playing audiotapes of specially edited mixes of musical styles and sound effects sound effects

Noun, pl

 

sounds artificially produced to make a play, esp. a radio play, more realistic

 

sound effects npl → efectos mpl sonoros

 

. This resulted in irreverent, cascading series of actions in which chance was a key strategic ingredient: On occasion Paik might, for example, play a piano while covered in shaving cream and flour, eventually overturning the piano and jumping on it. Such transgressive trans·gres·sive

adj.

1. Exceeding a limit or boundary, especially of social acceptability.

 

2. Of or relating to a genre of fiction, filmmaking, or art characterized by graphic depictions of behavior that violates socially violence released enormous energy into the audience--confronting the protocols of the staged musical performance and seeking to shock viewers into relinquishing any complacent acceptance of compositional formula or tradition-bound belief in performance as a risk-free site.

 

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

 

News of these events quickly reached New York New York, state, United States

New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , where George Maciunas George Maciunas (November 8, 1931 – May 9, 1978) was a Lithuanian born, American artist who was a founding member of the Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Maciunas is generally credited with having invented the name "Fluxus. was prompted to invite Paik to join Fluxus after hearing his Etude e·tude

n. Music

1. A piece composed for the development of a specific point of technique.

 

2. A composition featuring a point of technique but performed because of its artistic merit. for Pianoforte, which premiered in 1960 at Cologne's Atelier Mary Baumeister. During the performance Paik jumped into the audience, cut Cage's tie with scissors scissors

 

Cutting instrument or tool consisting of a pair of opposed metal blades that meet and cut when the handles at their ends are brought together. Modern scissors are of two types: the more usual pivoted blades have a rivet or screw connection between the cutting ends , and doused him and composer David Tudor with shaving cream. The audience sat in stunned silence as Paik left the room. A short time later the phone rang offstage. It was Paik calling from the street to say the performance was over and everyone could go home. Paik described such performances as attempts to find a way out of the "suffocation suffocation: see asphyxia. of the musical theater as it is," adding that he sought to "complement Dada with music" and believed that "humor was not an aim but a result." The neo-Dadaist impulse in these events was so expanded that Cage himself noted, "You get the feeling very clearly that anything can happen, even physically dangerous things."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

 

Eventually, Paik's desire to make music visual found expression in a fascination with television--a letter to Cage in 1959 clearly expressed his theoretical and artistic interest in the medium--and, more specifically, with continually changing audiovisuals appearing on televisions that he set as objects into art installations. The relationship of this emerging technology to his sound and performance pieces was signaled in the title of his first solo show. "Exposition of Music--Electronic Television," at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963, was of groundbreaking significance, featuring both "prepared" musical instruments and televisions. For example, Klavier Integral, 1958-63, a piano covered with a bizarre assortment of noisemakers (as well as barbed wire barbed wire, wire composed of two zinc-coated steel strands twisted together and having barbs spaced regularly along them. The need for barbed wire arose in the 19th cent. , clocks, eggshells, and a bra), appeared with Random Access, 1963, a reel-to-reel audiotape au·di·o·tape

n.

1. A relatively narrow magnetic tape used to record sound for subsequent playback.

 

2. A tape recording of sound.

 

tr.v. player disassembled so that audiences could rub the player's magnetic recording head over strips of audiotape stuck to the gallery wall, causing loudspeakers to emit previously recorded sounds. These pieces were displayed alongside Paik's transformations of monitors--the first such works of this kind that he exhibited--which were placed on their side or upside down and scattered about the room. In addition, Paik extended the de-collage technique that characterized his early artworks and writings, as he distorted the broadcast electronic image by breaking or tearing it from within, rather than by adding to it. By disturbing the flow of moving images, Paik seized control of the television set, at once refusing the standardized broadcast image and remaking it as his own. Paik understood that television could be an interactive and artist-empowered instrument rather than simply a one-way conduit of received programming--even before the commercial development of the portable videotape player and recorder. Just as Paik the performer had challenged audiences, so the artist would challenge the construction and treatment of television viewers as passive consumers, whether in his manipulations of entertainment (Variations on Johnny Carson vs. Charlotte Moorman, 1966) or news programming (George Ball on Meet the Press, 1967).

 

Only in part was Paik remaking and humanizing technology in a carnivalesque spirit of play and freewheeling free·wheel·ing

adj.

1.

a. Free of restraints or rules in organization, methods, or procedure.

 

b. Heedless of consequences; carefree.

 

2. Relating to or equipped with a free wheel. invention. Consider his remote-controlled automaton automaton: see robot; robotics Robot K-456, 1964, which he used in performances both onstage and in the street. Outfitted with tape recorders and a messy mass of wires snaking around a metal frame in a blocky humanoid shape, this comic mobile sculpture was featured in Paik's Robot Opera as part of the Second Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, which also took place in 1964, the year Paik moved to New York. Robot K-456 shuffled down the sidewalk, playing political speeches by John F. Kennedy "John Kennedy" and "JFK" redirect here. For other uses, see John Kennedy (disambiguation) and JFK (disambiguation).

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917–November 22, 1963), was the thirty-fifth President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in and, as Paik would say, "shitting" beans out its backside. When I organized Paik's 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. It was an outgrowth of the Whitney Studio (1914–18), the Whitney Studio Club (1918–28), and the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928–30). , Paik set Robot K-456 in motion again, this time down the sidewalk and across Madison Avenue, where a car ran into it in a staged accident. When a television reporter asked Paik what had happened, he replied, it was the "catastrophe of technology in the twenty-first century. And we are learning how to cope with it."

 

Paik had originally planned a six-month visit to New York, joining his Fluxus colleagues and learning about American culture firsthand; but this arrangement became permanent as he enthusiastically responded to opportunities the city offered. In New York, Paik was able to act on his interest in television and video within an expanded community of artists and technicians, finding the means to realize his ambition to remake television, open up the art world to novel technologies, and devise new forms of creative expression. His first solo show there took place in 1965 at the New School for Social Research New School for Social Research: see New School Univ. , and was unlike anything seen before: "Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist.[1] He is considered by some[2] : Cybernetics cybernetics [Gr.,=steersman], term coined by American mathematician Norbert Wiener to refer to the general analysis of control systems and communication systems in living organisms and machines. Art and Music" featured an array of televisions, magnets, and electronic coils used to fashion electronic moving images from the material properties of the cathode ray tube See CRT.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

(hardware) cathode ray tube - (CRT) An electrical device for displaying images by exciting phosphor dots with a scanned electron beam. CRTs are found in computer VDUs and monitors, televisions and oscilloscopes. . Two of the works included, Magnet TV and Demagnetizer (Life Ring), both of 1965, remade re·made

v.

Past tense and past participle of remake. the instrumentality Instrumentality

 

Notes issued by a federal agency whose obligations are guaranteed by the full-faith-and-credit of the government, even though the agency's responsibilities are not necessarily those of the US government. of the medium by using powerful magnets to radically distort and allow for the modification of the received broadcast image on the television screen, reconfiguring its properties and meanings.

 

Paik possessed a legendary ability to seize cutting-edge technological developments--from the Porta-Pak to digital editing systems--and master their capacities so that he could incorporate and remake them to achieve creative ends. To explain his approach, he once wrote:</p> <pre> In usual compositions, we have first the approximate vision of the

 

completed work (the pre-imaged ideal or "IDEA" in the sense of Plato).

 

Then, the working process means the torturing endeavor to reach this

 

ideal "IDEA." But in experimental TV, the thing is completely revised.

 

Usually T don't, or cannot, have any pre-imaged VISION before working.

 

First I seek ... the "way,",,,,, that means, to study the circuit, to try various "FEED BACKS", to cut some places and feed the different

 

waves there, to change the phrase of waves, etc. </pre> <p>Among the very most important tools Paik created to assist in this creative process--indeed, what provided the technical basis for his single-channel videotapes and works for broadcast--was the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, developed in the late '60s in consultation with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe. Used by Paik to mix film and video, and to colorize col·or·ize

tr.v. col·or·ized, col·or·iz·ing, col·or·iz·es

To impart color to (black-and-white film) by means of a computer-assisted process: "Be prepared . . . for the . . . , drop out, and add visual information, the synthesizer synthesizer

 

Machine that electronically generates and modifies sounds, frequently with the use of a digital computer, for use in the composition of electronic music and in live performance. was his means for combining high and low, popular and mass culture in his performances and in a continual remix of his videotapes. For example, in Global Groove, 197% a signature work made with the Paik-Abe Synthesizer, one finds a heady mix of music and imagery by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels; Japanese television commercials for Pepsi-Cola; Cage, Korean folk dancers, and Allen Ginsberg. The synthesizer was a technological innovation and, in Paik's hands, anticipated our rapid-fire, multichannel Using two or more paths for transmission or processing. It can refer to a variety of architectures including (1) multiple I/O channels between the CPU and peripheral devices, (2) multiple wires in a cable, (3) multiple "logical" channels within a single wire or fiber or (4) multiple experience of digitally manipulated media today.

 

Indeed, Global Groove opens with narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. Russell Connor's visionary voice-over, in which he reads a text written by Paik: "This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on earth and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." The futuristic pronouncement was in keeping with Paik's wide-ranging writings, which consist of a large body of aphoristic aph·o·rism

n.

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage. See Synonyms at saying.

 

2. A brief statement of a principle. and extended reflections on media and culture. But it is important today to recall that while the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer employed in Global Groove pioneered the techniques of morphing and collaging moving images later developed and used on commercial television, on another level it represented Paik's vision of an open discourse for television--a world in which everyone would be a producer. He mixed his own work together with films and tapes by other artists, as well as with commercials taken off the air. This pirating of material that is then broadcast across the planet speaks to the open borders that he foresaw for artists on television.

 

Paik's most elaborate engagement with television in this regard consisted of his live satellite transmissions of performances, which linked different countries and broadcast networks and celebrated both avant-garde and popular culture. His ability to produce work on such a scale--convincing funders, television networks and performers to participate--was truly astonishing. Building on the open-borders concept of Global Groove and expanding on the notion of live performance and its international dissemination through new technologies, Good Morning Mr. Orwell stands out among these transmissions: Broadcast live on January 1, 1984, the program was transmitted via satellite simultaneously to Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the United States. The work featured Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Philip Glass, Yves Montand, Ben Vautier, and the band Urban Sax, among others. (George Plimpton hosted the event in New York and Jacques Villars hosted in Paris.)

 

Paik's approach was interdisciplinary, moving from history and economics to politics and culture: As an artist who traveled frequently and who could call many countries home--and as someone not stuck in a single art form ideologically or commercially--Paik constructed a world-view from multiple streams and shifts of information. In particular, Paik had uncanny insight into the workings of postindustrial post·in·dus·tri·al

adj.

Of or relating to a period in the development of an economy or nation in which the relative importance of manufacturing lessens and that of services, information, and research grows.

 

Adj. 1. capitalism and popular culture, and their combined political potential--especially in regard to the attraction of Eastern Europeans behind the iron curtain For the Iron Maiden video by the same name, see .

 

Behind the Iron Curtain is a concert recorded by Nico for "Pandora's Music Box '85" at De Doelen Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal (Great Hall), in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on October 9, 1985. to freedom and to the role that television and video could and would play in the break from repressive regimes. In my conversations with Paik, who was an avid consumer of information--always reading newspapers and magazines and watching television, both at home and while traveling--we often discussed current events and history. He felt that the biggest threat to state Communism was the power of television and rock 'n' roll rock 'n' roll: see rock music. to transmit and express the flow of ideas and freedom into those countries. I remember his observation, "Radio Free Europe Radio Free Europe (RFE), broadcasting organization established in 1950 with the stated mission of promoting democratic values and institutions. Its original purpose was to broadcast news to countries behind the "Iron Curtain" during the cold war. is interesting and informative, but the noise that jams that station is also interesting and informative.... Enjoy both. Jam your TV station and make it 'Radio Free America.'" His was a mobile practice through which to destabilize de·sta·bi·lize

tr.v. de·sta·bi·lized, de·sta·bi·liz·ing, de·sta·bi·liz·es

1. To upset the stability or smooth functioning of: arguments and points of power, always steeped in his subversive Fluxist attacks on convention meant to provide audiences with new ways to see and experience the world.

 

Global Groove would later appear as part of the installation TV Garden, 1974, playing on monitors and televisions of various sizes, all set among plants filling an entire gallery. First installed in 1974 but re-created on numerous occasions (including his two retrospectives, the first at the Whitney in 1982, and the second at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: see Guggenheim Museum. in 2000), the piece is an effusive ef·fu·sive

adj.

1. Unrestrained or excessive in emotional expression; gushy: an effusive manner.

 

2. Profuse; overflowing: effusive praise. expression of television's spread as medium and art form. Among Paik's strategies in his video sculptures and installations was the use of nature as a means to create a metaphor for the growth of television; but other pieces, such as Real Plant Live Plant, 1978, and Real Fish Live Fish, 1982, also employ the closed-circuit camera to explore point of view and the representation of the real and the illusory. For his Guggenheim retrospective, Paik's connection of technology to nature responded to Frank Lloyd Wright's conception of nature's relationship to design: Paik's Modulation in Sync, 2000, activated the entire rotunda rotunda

 

In Classical and Neoclassical architecture, a building or room that is circular in plan and covered with a dome. The Pantheon is a Classical Roman rotunda. The Villa Rotonda at Vicenza, designed by Andrea Palladio, is an Italian Renaissance example. , featuring a seven-story waterfall through which lasers were projected. Lasers were also projected overhead onto the oculus oculus

 

(Latin: “eye”) In architecture, any of several elements resembling an eye, such as a round or oval window or the round opening at the top of some domes (see Pantheon). ; video projections appeared on the rotunda walls, and a bed of monitors on the floor played an edit from his videotapes and international television projects. Paik called the installation a "postvideo" piece that utilized the energy of laser technology to suggest the future of communications and our global media culture.

 

By the '90s, Paik realized that video was being absorbed into a media culture of multiple modes of delivery, and he became fascinated with integrated platforms of moving-image displays, and by the ability to move programs through various technologies. This interest was perhaps expressed most clearly in Megatron/Matrix, 1995, a video wall with a sound track and one hundred monitors controlled by a highly sophisticated computer program allowing monitors to become a continuous surface, with background and foreground images moving across the screens. It was, in a sense, a piece that recalled his statements decades earlier about a wall-to-wall TV-Chair.

 

In Paik's art and ideas, technology is an enabling rather than determining factor in a dynamic remix--offering the opportunity to expand beyond the artificial boundaries established by the art world, and to function outside the categories used by critics and art historians to package the interpretation of art. Paik was a master of working within institutions, surprising everyone by getting them to cooperate and support his projects. But he was also an activist who sought to change the ways museums and foundations worked, producing a momentum of support for younger artists--even while, true to his Fluxus roots, he was not interested in establishing a "school of video art." He truly enjoyed challenging himself and finding energy in all forms of music and creative expression. Wanting to never be bored, he felt that change and surprise facilitated the making of art, whose greatest power is to give us new ways to observe and understand the world around us. Paik did just that.

 

Even after Paik (survived by his wife, the video artist Shigeko Kubota) suffered a stroke in 1996, he continued to work in his studio in SoHo and was planning a project for the John Cage centennial at the time of his death. I was fortunate to have known Nam June and to have worked with him on a number of exhibitions and commissions. He was my greatest teacher and inspiration as I embraced video art and sought to make a place for it in the museum. For his generosity and genius, and his uncanny mix of visionary and pragmatic thinking, Paik will be missed.

 

JOHN G. HANHARDT IS SENIOR CURATOR OF FILM AND MEDIA ARTS AT THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

 

 

 

1. Paik Nam June’s Art

Paik studied music composition first in Korea, then at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote his thesis on Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1956 Paik traveled to Europe and settled in Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music and performance. During studies at the Summer Course for New Music in Darmstaat in 1958, he met composer John Cage. Cage's ideas on composition and performance were a great influence on Paik, as were those of George Maciunas, the founder of the radical art movement Fluxus, which Paik was invited to join.

 

Paik's initial artistic explorations of the mass media of television were presented in his first solo exhibition in 1963, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. This milestone exhibition featured Paikís prepared televisions. Paik altered the sets to distort their reception of broadcast transmissions and scattered them about the room, on their sides and upside down. He also created interactive video works that transformed the viewers' relationship to the medium. With these first steps began an astonishing effusion of ideas and invention that over the next 30 years would play a profound role in the introduction and acceptance of the electronic moving image into the realm of art.

 

In 1964 Paik moved to New York and continued his explorations of television and video, and, by the late 1960s, was at the forefront of a new generation of artists creating an aesthetic discourse out of television and the moving image. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Paik also worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other artists and working to realize the potential of the emerging medium. Along with his remarkable sequence of videotapes and projects for television—featuring collaborations with friends Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, David Bowie, Cage, and Merce Cunningham—he created a series of installations that fundamentally changed video and redefined artistic practice.

 

Paik oeuvre later included television sculpture, satellite art, robotic devices, laser art(post- video), and giant video walls with synthesized imagery pulsating from stacks of cathode-ray tubes.

 

 

 

At the crossroad: Paik's electronic superhighway

 

 

by J. Ronald Green

 

Why is the new, massive, high-powered show by the acknowledged founding father of video art touring the byways instead of the highways of American museums? Nam June Paik's "The Electronic Super Highway: Travels with Nam June Paik," recently at the Columbus Museum of Art, its third stop on a national tour, is almost a blockbuster. It includes 36 complex video sculptures, several of which are installations within installations, and more than 650 working video monitors and TV sets. If that accumulation of works does not quite add up to a blockbuster, the added effect of visual and audio energy provided by 650 rasters, countless speakers, and Paik's 30-beat-per-second editing rhythm, increases the density of the show to the point that it is almost impossible to take in. On one of my visits, the mother of a couple of grade-schoolers was leaning against a pedestal in the last room of the show, the room that contains photographs and reconstructions of Paik's earliest (and quietest) work. She volunteered that the show was too much for her, but that her active children, who were still exploring the exhibit, seemed to find such level of activity normal.

 

Paik has left an enviable record in the art world. He was welcomed into the elite of the avant garde at an early age, collaborating with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the Fluxus founders in their heyday. He created some of the icons of the '50s and '60s avant garde, with his smashed pianos and his Charlotte Moorman variations. He has generated a long trail of single-channel videos, famous performances, landmark exhibitions, and impressive catalogs, along with an extensive secondary critical literature. He has had the support of giant corporations and has produced giant works, including a piece designed for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul that contains over a thousand video monitors. His dealer, Carl Solway, reports that he may do a bigger piece for the Atlanta Olympics.

 

Why, then, is this show not playing in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago? One could try to answer that question in a journalistic way by exploring how the show was curated and put together, and by analyzing the relevant relationships within the art world. But there must be a larger reason.

 

To begin with, Paik's work is stuck at a crossroad defined by two diametrically opposed critical positions within the art world. The positive position is well-stated by two of Paik's earliest and most influential supporters: David Ross, the George Washington of video curators (from the Everson Museum in Syracuse, to the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and currently, as Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art); and John Hanhardt, the George Washington of film and video curators (the Walker Art Center, and for the last two decades, curator of film and video at the Whitney). Hanhardt has written repeatedly about the significance of Paik's work, and his 1982 Paik retrospective at the Whitney is one of the most significant events in Paik's career, as well as a major move for video in the art world. Hanhardt has always valued Paik's playfulness, humanism, inventiveness and positive attitude toward technological change and its potential instrumentality for social and cultural change. Hanhardt has celebrated Paik's global optimism, as well as qualities of generosity and leadership within the video-art movement. Hanhardt's article in a recent catalog lovingly reviews the major metaphors of Paik's vast outpouring, grouping his art objects under categories such as "organisms," which includes TV Garden (1974-78); "architectural arches," which includes Video Arbor (1989), an outdoor arch of monitors that has become overgrown with vines; "the [evolved] individual," which includes his original Robot K-456 (1964); "the [evolved] family," including his Family of Robot (1986); and "the global village," which includes certain installations in the new show being reviewed here, such as SYS Cop (1994), E-Mail vs Snail Mail (1994), Video Server (1994), and Couch Potato (1994), the global village's policeman, postman, video store and typical resident, respectively.(1)

 

David Ross's early support for Paik's work is evidenced by his retrospective of Paik at the Everson in 1974; in a recent interview Ross conducted with Paik, Ross expressed a deep appreciation of Paik's historical accomplishment.(2) Ross sees Paik as the embodiment of a utopian moment in the 1960s when a generation of new artists and curators believed that technology could help change society; Ross has valued - and has helped establish