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Nam June Paik |
The unusual arrangement of objects in Nam June Paik’s 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, in fact, 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. Paik had 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 Paik’s homage to his friend, 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.
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, 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. The artist grew up in Seoul, Korea. 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.
— Nancy Spector