Nam June Paik. Video Time – Video Space

In 1991 the Kunsthaus showed a series of large video works made since the 1970s by Nam June Paik (‘Video Space’, made up of about forty works, installed by Toni Stoss). In parallel, in the Kunsthalle Basel, the exhibition ‘Video Time’ was taking place, showing the life of the artist through works and documents (curated by Thomas Kellein). Nam June Paik, born in Seoul in 1932 and deceased in Miami Beach in 2006, is seen as the founder of video art: In 1963, for the first time, he had used a manipulated TV monitor, at the same time as Wolf Vostell. In 1979 Paik became professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and commuted back and forth between New York and Germany. Paik was an inexhaustible experimenter who artistically processed the never-ending stream of images from the TV companies. He was one of the first to use the portable video cameras manufactured by Sony in Japan, and he manipulated the then customary tube cameras with magnets. His art counts as difficult, but it also includes certain visual and entertainment values. Paik had studied the history of music and composition in Germany, and this had a strong influence on his art. Legendary is his collaboration with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, who performed Paik’s compositions. This involved touching on certain tabooed elements when Paik had Moorman appear onstage at times with her upper body naked and with mini-monitors on her breasts (for example in ‘Opera Sextronique’, 1967). He also repeatedly referred to his Far-East origins: ‘TV Buddha’ (1974) shows a statue of Buddha meditating in front of its live image on the monitor, and for TV Garden (1974) he arranged monitors with the screens pointing upwards between exotic pot plants, as in a jungle. Both works could be viewed in the Zurich exhibition. Matthias Frehner described the most recent phase of Paik’s works (including the thirteen-part installation ‘My Faust’, 1989–1991), which is clearly distinguishable from his minimal beginnings, as ‘baroque, lush, pomp-loving and megalomaniacal’ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). Laszlo Glozer found the Zurich show ‘magnificent,’ but thought that its Basel counterpart was even more exciting (Süddeutsche Zeitung). The two exhibitions were later combined in Düsseldorf and Vienna.