3.11.09

Fluxus RECAP

Fluxus - An art movement begun in 1961/1962, which flourished throughout the 1960s, and into the 1970s. Characterized by a strongly Dadaist attitude, Fluxus promoted artistic experimentation mixed with social and political activism, an often celebrated anarchistic change. Although Germany was its principal location, Fluxus was an international avant-garde movement active in major Dutch, English, French, Swedish, and American cities. Its participants were a divergent group of individualists whose most common theme was their delight in spontaneity and humor. Fluxus members avoided any limiting art theories, and spurned pure aesthetic objectives, producing such mixed-media works as found poems, mail art, silent orchestras, and collages of such readily available materials as scavanged posters, newspapers, and other ephemera. Their activities resulted in many events or situations, often called "Aktions" — works challenging definitions of art as focused on objects -- performances, guerilla or street theater, concerts of electronic music — many of them similar to what in America were known as Happenings.

In Latin and other languages, "Fluxus" literally means "flow" and "change." Similarly, the related English word "flux" is used variously to mean "a state of continuous change," "a fusion," and "a gushing of fluid from a body."

George Maciunas (Lithuanian-American, 1931-1978) coined the name Fluxus. He described it as "a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp." He co-ordinated and edited numerous Fluxus publications.

According to George Maciunas, Fluxus intended to "purge the world of bourgeois sickness . . . of dead art," to "promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, anti-art, promote non art reality . . ." and to "fuse the cadres of cultural, social, and political revolutionaries into a united front and action."

Nam June Paik Pt 9 - TV Buddha



Paik's possibly most famous video work was produced as a gap-filler for an empty wall in his fourth show in the Galeria Bonino, New York. Shortly before the opening, he hit upon the idea of making a TV viewer out of an antique Buddha statue once purchased as an investment. The subsequent addition of a video camera meant the Buddha now watched his videotaped image on the screen opposite – past and present gaze upon each other in an encounter between Oriental deity and Western media.
During the 'Projekt '74' exhibition in Cologne, Paik took the Buddha’s place in his recent creation, suggesting the implicit antithesis between transcendentalism and technology was equally present in his own personality.

Nam June Paik pt 8-Electronic Moon #2

The short film is by Nam June Paik's Electronic Moon #2 (1969). Paik is widely considered to be the father of video art, having pioneered the use of television as a creative medium as well as an object of art per se, as his works often featured sculptures made of TV sets and installations involving several TV screens. But Paik also made single-channel works and Electronic Moon 2 is a good example of the lyricism he aimed to achieve with electronic art.

Nam June Paik Pt 7 - Video Garden 1974

Presented at the 'documenta 6' in Kassel, Paik's first large-scale installation 'TV-Garden' is made up by some thirty television sets lying on the floor among a large number of tropical plants. The furiously edited 'Global Groove' video playing on the screens of the TV sets flickers and flashes through the mesh of green. Ambivalent like most of Paik's works, this one leaves open the question of whether we are dealing with a symbiosis of nature and technology, or whether the new media are leading us back into the jungle with their disordered mass of rampant images.

See Pictures Here
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tv-garden/

Nam June Paik Pt 6-Something Pacific 1986

Paik's Something Pacific for the Stuart Collection was his first permanent outdoor installation. This work relates specifically to its site, which includes the lobby of the university's Media Center as well as the lawns surrounding the building. Outdoors, the work features several ruined televisions embedded in the landscape; some are paired with Buddhas, and one, a tiny Sony Watchman, is topped by a miniature reproduction of Rodin's Thinker. In striking contrast to this video graveyard, the lobby of the Media Center houses one of Paik's lively interactive banks of TV monitors. By means of a control panel, viewers are able to manipulate sequences of Paik's own tapes and broadcast MTV. Like much of Paik's art, Something Pacific's outdoor and indoor sections use the video medium to contrast two very different experiences of time -- one involving extended contemplation and the other instantaneous reaction. More importantly, the scattered ruins of televisions offer a cautionary tale for those entering the Media Center. Paik places televisions in the landscape in order to dramatize his belief that television has defined the American landscape since World War II. The outdoor TVs are all "dead" sets, skeletal remains that Paik has returned to nature, perhaps to be discovered in future archeological digs.

View Pictures http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/StuartCollection/Paik.htm

Nam June Paik Pt 5- Global Groove 1974

Watch here
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/

Nam June Paik
«Global Groove»

'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.' Paik’s introductory statement stands for the tape’s compositional principle and message – global channel zapping, in 1973 a visionary precursor of subsequent developments. The spirit of the tape conveys Marshall McLuhan's theory of a future 'global village', which Paik matched with an idea of his own: 'If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.' A typical Paik mixture, the tape includes excerpts from TV programmes, contributions by artist friends such as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, footage by other video artists like Jud Yalkut and Robert Breer, and excerpts from earlier Paik videos. The combination of mass media and avant-garde was aimed at art-lovers and 'normal' TV viewers alike. The video was broadcast by WNET-TV on 30 January 1974.

Nam June Paik Pt 4 - Quotes by NJP

* "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."
* "Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence. "
* "The future is now. "

Nam June Paik Pt 3-Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away»

We now are at a different point in history. The effort to bring black and white children together by means of school busing is going awry. Desegregation strategies have become questionable. But television power can help achieve integration and understanding, and it has the added advantage that it happens over the air, unhampered by our polluted and complicated earth. I wonder what would happen if two day care centers for pre-schoolers, one in a black neighborhood and the other in a white one, would be able to hear and see each other by means of a two-way cable television set-up, so that the children of the two different cultures could start to play with one another over the air waves, without having to cope with stressful bus trips and their negative side effects.
Is this escapism mere hypocrisy, or is it a kind of first aid meant to initiate a long-range cure for the race problem? In any event, the technology exists; it is only waiting to be pressed into service, and it would cost very much less than ferrying kids around by bus.
Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television (for shopping, bibliographies, opinion polls, health care, bio-communication, data transfer from office to office) and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an «expanded-media» telephone system with thousands of novel uses, not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.
This «mini- and midi-television» (to use Professor RenĂ© Berger’s expression) will join ranks with many other forms of paperless information transfer, such as audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, micro-fiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies. All of them together will constitute a new kind of nuclear energy for information and the improvement of society. I would like to call it tentatively a «broadband communication network.» Setbacks suffered by local cable companies have considerably delayed the arrival of this new nuclear energy. A recent article in the New York Times said: «There never was any question that cable television would become an independent medium; the only question was always when? Optimists still cling to their prediction that it will happen in the 1980s; pessimists predict a longer take-off period, some don’t think it will happen before the 21st century.» (10 March 1974).
Even if we accept the most pessimistic forecast, the 21st century is now only 26 years away. The fact that the dilemma concerning VHF frequency stations and public educational television is a direct result of the faulty planning of 26 years ago demonstrates beyond all doubt that the BROADBAND COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION has to begin, and it must begin NOW. (...)

Nam June Paik Pt 2- Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik "The Originale"

Nam June Paik Pt 1-TV BRA FOR LIVING SCULPTURE & TV CELLO

View pictures
http://collections.walkerart.org/item/enlarge_fs.html?type=object&id=874&image_num=1




"As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences." -- Nam June Paik (1965)

"The real implied issue in 'Art and Technology' is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly -- too rapidly. Progress has already outstripped ability to program...TV Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is also one sharp example to humanize electronics...and technology. By using TV as bra...the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology." --Nam June Paik (1969)

TV Bra For Living Sculpture raises a number of relevant questions about the notion of hybridity as we move down the path towards the possibilities of a Y2K apocalypse or a coming virtual nirvana. The object itself, a piece of technology meant to be worn during a musical performance, was itself a radical hybrid in the sense that McLuhan was suggesting. As a work of art it was rigorously intermedial, combining performance, sculpture, and video within the context of an art gallery structure traditionally focused on painting and sculpture. As a pioneering work of video sculpture that transgressed the various traditional boundaries of art, but also the boundaries of conventional science and engineering, Paik and Moorman's TV Bra For Living Sculpture provides an important historical antecedent and antidote to the numbing, ahistorical hysteria that often swirls around the explosion of the digital revolution. (FROM WALKER ART CENTER WEBSITE)

TV Cello (1964...1984 remake for pbs)



[TV Cello is] the first real innovation in cello design since 1600."--Charlotte Moorman

Since the early 1960s, Nam June Paik has explored the potential of television as an art object and an expressive medium. TV Cello is one of several objects Paik designed to be used by the late avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991). The three televisions in this work originally displayed three images: a direct feed of the immediate performance, a video collage of other cellists, and an intercepted broadcast television feed. As Moorman played this one-stringed cello with a regulation bow, she also created a series of electronic sounds, transforming the television into a musical instrument. When TV Cello was acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1992, Paik created new video images for the piece by combining existing footage of Moorman with excerpts from his video work Global Groove (1973).

Getting to Know....Nam June Paik



Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was born in Korea, but moved to New York City in 1964. He is frequently referred to as "the grandfather of video art." Paik began his career as a composer and musician studying at the University of Tokyo, the University of Munich, and the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg, Germany. Influenced by the composer John Cage, Paik's interests brought him into the orbit of Fluxus, an international postwar movement of artists -- many of whom were influenced by the earlier work of Duchamp and Dada -- who sought to break down the barriers between high art and everyday life. Fluxus is often considered "anti-art" in its sometimes violent renunciation of conventional definitions of the art object.

Paik was first drawn to video in the context of his music; it was the random quality of the television soundtrack which initially appealed to him. For over three decades, however, he was a provocative and prophetic spokesman for new uses of television technology and for the relevance of TV to art. He used television sets in startling constructions for performances (i.e., the TV as cello, bra, or glasses) and designed installations composed of televisions transformed into aquariums, and stacked as pyramids. Paik also made TV chairs and many versions of TV robots. He combined fast-paced video clips -- often dramatically colorized -- in high-energy montages programmed over several television monitors. Paik was a pioneer in combining straight or manipulated segments of broadcast TV with artist-produced videos, organized by a complex visual and aural matrix.

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