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).