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Please note: The music file for this lesson plan is now available. Please email nspector@albrightknox.org for further information.
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Nam June Paik |
Before beginning the lesson with your students, please be sure to read the lesson plan all the way through.
SUPPLIES:
Paper; drawing materials; scissors; glue
Please remember that all answers to these questions should be accepted, as students are responding to and interpreting what they see. Add information from your teacher information (back page) when appropriate.
Ask the following questions while viewing Piano Piece and playing the music on the CD (play Selection 1) included with this packet:
Explain that the composer John Cage was famous for writing music like the music the children just heard. Nam June Paik, the artist, is famous for using non-traditional materials like a player piano and television monitors in his sculpture. He made Piano Piece to honor his friend, John Cage, who had died the previous year, 1992. Some of the videos show images of Paik’s hands and head, some show images of Cage, and some show other seemingly unrelated images, like babies. The player piano plays John Cage’s music all by itself! There is also a surveillance camera that shows the piano playing as you watch. If you put your hand on the keys, the camera would video your hands, which you would see on six of the televisions. When you see Piano Piece in the museum –please don’t touch.
Interview a friend or family member. Ask the following questions and write the answers on this sheet:
What is your favorite color? What is your favorite color combination?If you were a shape, what shape would you be? Why?
What is your favorite possession?
Describe your favorite kind of music? ___________________
Would it be loud or soft? _____________________________
Fast or slow? _______________________________________
Let the person you interview draw a picture of something:
Have the students use the worksheet to interview a friend or family member.
Now, on a separate piece of paper, have your students use the information from their interviews to create a drawing or painting about their interviewee. Tell them you do NOT want them to draw the person! They can cut out the interviewee’s drawing and glue it in their composition.
When they are done, play the three other short selections of music on the CD and ask them to choose one to accompany their drawing, based on what kind of music their interviewee liked. Ask some students to share their drawings and music with the class. If you use class members as the interviewees, see if the students can guess who inspired some of the works of art. Extra: If you have a music teacher, ask him/her to help each student write a very short piece of music, record it and give it to the person who interviewed them to play with their drawing. If you have access to a video camera, use each drawing to create a short video segment about the interviewee. You could play the music during your video shoot!
Photos of the Friends:
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The unusual arrangement of objects in Nam June Paik’s (pronounced Nom June Pike) Piano Piece - thirteen monitors, video cameras mounted on tripods, videotape players, a stool, and an exposed upright piano - appears somewhat haphazard at first. However, the work is a carefully orchestrated composition, created as a tribute to the artist’s close friend and mentor, avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992. A computer program by Richard Titlebaum plays music by Cage on the upright piano, and the composer’s image appears in the four central monitors at the top. The hands and head seen playing the piano in the left and right monitors on the top row and the central monitor at the bottom belong to Paik, who is an accomplished pianist. Alternating with Paik’s hands or head are images of another Cage friend, avant-garde dancer Merce Cunningham, and seemingly unrelated images of babies. The other six monitors show live video of the piano, recorded by the two video cameras. These unusual uses of a piano are appropriate as a tribute to Cage, whose experiments with altered and prepared pianos have become legendary.
Paik met Cage in 1958 in Germany, and that meeting would be a crucial event for Paik’s future role as the "father of video art." John Cage was also important in the history of Buffalo, which was an international center of new music from 1965 until the early 1990s. This was due to a group of musicians known as the Creative Associates, who performed a series called Evenings for New Music at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They were able to attract many of the world’s greatest composers, one of the most important of whom was Cage, who came to Buffalo almost annually.
In the pretaped videos, Paik has manipulated the imagery using a variety of techniques, some of which he developed himself. These visual effects give the entire composition a feeling of energy and movement. Monitors have been placed with certain overall effects in mind as well. For example, the sequencing of the images on the four central monitors at the top create a kind of pinwheel effect.
Paik’s role as a pioneer in video art comes out of lifelong interests. As a child in Seoul, Korea, he had been fascinated by electronics, especially the radio, wondering "Why do people hide in the box?" When television was introduced in the early 1950s, his interest shifted to that technology. When the Korean War began, his family fled to Tokyo, Japan. There he attended the University of Tokyo, studying philosophy, aesthetics, art history, and music. After graduation in 1956, he went to Germany, where he acquired training as a pianist, musicologist, and composer. While in Germany, the center of the electronic music scene at the time, he combined his interests in music, electronics, and art, deciding to "move from electronic music into electronic music with the TV…" to create "something new—the moving painting, with sound." In works such as Piano Piece, Paik has achieved—and moved beyond—that goal.
This lesson plan was written by Esperanza Altamar and Nancy Spector and published for use in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Looking and Learning program, a component of ARTStart. Looking and Learning has been made possible by a generous grant from the Cameron Baird Foundation.
