Paik would open up a whole range of possibilities in the new medium of video art: in March 1963, in Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (a wonderful, programmatic title for an exhibition), he first used television sets, responding to input from the viewer, to create electronic paintings (Participation TV). He was the first to demonstrate publicly and verifiably all sorts of different artistic uses for the medium of television, and this marked the beginning of a career during which he, more than any other visual artist, foresaw and actively influenced the technological, philosophical and social development of the new media – television, video, computers and lasers.

 

Fluxus, a notoriously difficult-to-define international movement, represents another, arguably more direct, link between electronic musical composition and film and video art. From the beginning, it was associated with electronic music. Joseph Beuys described those original Fluxus concerts were organized by people whose interest was in sound rather than in painting or sculpture, moreover, were against the traditional idea of the concert. The time-based nature of experimental music, along with the electronic element, was to lead to Paik’s and Vostell’s work with electronic images. (Comer, 2009)

 

I chose this video not only because it has two dancing figures but also the way images are experiemntally ovelapped with computer graphic. Some scenes made by computer graphic effect (fig.2) remind the movement sequences of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. (fig.3)

 

In May 1999 the American magazine ARTnews included Nam June Paik in its list of the century’s 25 most influential artists, alongside Picasso, Duchamp and Rauschenberg. He had come a long way since 1962, when he presented One for Violin Solo at the Fluxus event Neo-Dada in der Musik at the Düsseldorfer Kammerspiele and shocked his audience in the darkened space by smashing his violin on a table. How did Paik go from enfant terrible to being the first professor of video art at Düsseldorf Academy (in 1982) and a universally respected star of the museum world? How did he manage to be both anti-artist and artist in one, to be a theoretician and practitioner of our networked world at the same time as he kept his distance as an ironic humanist?

 

From the start his aim was not only to harness technological progress in communications media as an acceptable artistic tool, but also to use his own imagination to spur on that progress and, in so doing, to break down the seemingly rock-solid barriers between the different realms of art, including the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’. 

Over the decades his work met with immediate acceptance from fellow artists and art historians alike.