I recently saw the work of Nam June Paik, currently being exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MoMA.)
If you are unfamiliar with him, Paik has been called the “father of video art.” He was born in 1932 in what is now South Korea, lived in Japan, Germany, and the United States. He died in 2006. I have only read about Paik in the magazines but never really experienced his work in person — a shame, considering how much of his work is at the core of modern visual and interactive post-Internet life.
Take, for instance, his 1968 creation, The Electric Chair. The art piece comprises a CCTV camera pointing down at a chair with a television under the transparent seat. The TV displays the live video feed from the camera. Paik was pointing to a future where video would become a deeply enmeshed part of our lives in creating this work. Looking around, whether it is TikTok, Snap, or Zoom, the Electric Chair is all around us.
The Chair is just one of the many pieces of work he created that pushed his core belief in an electronic superhighway. He translated that idea into an art installation “constructed of 336 televisions, 50 DVD players, 3,750 feet of cable, and 575 feet of multicolored neon tubing.” Sadly, this piece of art isn’t available for us to see here in San Francisco. For me, (Read more…)