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02/07/2006: "NAM JUNE PAIK"

NAM JUNE PAIK

I attended the funeral of my dear friend Nam June Paik yesterday. The funeral took place at the Frank Campbell Funeral Chapel on 81st Street and Madison Avenue, New York City.

In attendance was the complete A List of the Art world. Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Jean Claude and Christo, Besty Broun director of the Smithsonian, John H. Hanhardt, curator of the Guggenheim, and Bill Viola.

There were faces in the crowd of people I hadnt seen in some 30 years. German museum director Wulf Herzogenrath told me that he purchased the Paik Abe Synthesizerfor his museum. That was the very first piece of electronic equipment my hands ever touched. Suffice to say, Herr Herzogenrath was delighted to learn as the medium was at its shear infancy.

Paik influenced the entire world, taking steps that were not here before. He called me "A crazy man" because I took stills of moving images which he was not doing and saw the digital world just above the mountain. As most of you know, Paik was kind enough to write the Introduction to my book, "Laurence GARTEL: A Cybernetic Romance, published by Gibbs Smith, Utah, 1989. I will forever be indebted to him for his wonderful words, and kind thoughts.

In true Fluxus style, Paik's nephew Ken Paik Hakuta told everyone to cut off their neck ties in homage to Paik. Yoko Ono placed it on Paik's body resting gently. It was indeed outrageous and Paik's final performance.

I have the whole Funeral and "After Party" at the Mark Hotel documented in both stills and digital clips. I plan on posting this on my website as soon as possible for all the world to see.

May the vision of great artists live on.

Laurence GARTEL
Digital Media Artist

Replies: 2 Comments

on Wednesday, February 8th, jose freitas cruz said

Filmmaking is an art. However, the video camera – a great tool, notwithstanding – has led too many people to believe that they are filmmakers or that the images they film, and how they happen to capture them, attain the status of art. But how often do they, really? I wasn’t going to comment on this one Andrew, given Nam June Paik’s recent passing away but your comments are pertinent and I didn’t want to stand on the side, indifferent. Many will disagree with you and me, and vehemently so, as we will no doubt witness a few responses up this thread, but there is yet to be a video artist who will show up and truly blow us away with an installation equivalent as unforgettable as Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ or Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’. What I see happening is that great lengths are taken to make simplistic ideas more profound and meaningful than they were ever intended to be [an attitude that is all-pervasive in the current trend]. Paik’s work was shown here in Lisbon in the late nineties and it left me bemused, both with the work itself and with all the hype that surrounded it. Having lived on the periphery of things for the past 4 years (not that Lisbon is that much more central] I haven’t had much exposure to recent developments, but what I read – and especially how it is written about – puts me off going out of my way to repeat the experience unless, of course, I happen to stumble upon it. If and when I do, I keep an open mind and I stop to watch in the hope that it will trigger some unexpected synapse, but so far the impression has not been sufficiently strong. Having said this, it must be argued that without Nam June Paik’s pioneering efforts the guy or gal who is yet to appear and blow us all off our feet would probably not yet be in the making.

on Wednesday, February 8th, Andrew said

In the seventies, when Nam June Paik came to exhibit at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, I worked with him setting up his show. He hung video cameras on cords over piles of bricks, set them swinging, and displayed on monitors what they observed. I never got a straight answer from him about what this meant. He looked down on us Syracuse students who were helping him, and carefully tended his 'star' status to keep everyone else at a distance. Effective this was, because all inattendance spoke in hushed tones about how priviledged we all were to be in the presence of such a genius.
Bill Viola, then a teacher at Syracuse, was in a way his protege, or tried to be, and I remember his angry two page response to my one page answer to a question about Marshal McLuhan's book, 'The Media Is the Message'. I protested that the media, television, was not being used as well as it could have been, numbing people's minds with repetative shows like 'Gilligan's Island'. The narcotic effect of those images of bricks taken through the swinging camera seemed to strengthen my dislike for video art, and I began to see that simplifying things which already had shallow content was, to my sorrow, to be the thing of the future.
A man stands in front of a building with a single window in it's face, which comes crashing down, leaving the man still standing in the space where the window's opening was. The write up of this video art stressed how this man was risking everything to be in exactly the right spot, how close he was to death, etc. Impressive, except I'd seen this trick before, done by stunt men in early silent movies. This video artist made a career out of variations on this single theme. For a Charlie Chaplin film, it was one of thousands of elements, none of which were important enough to be a hundred percent of a film's content.
The pretense is great, but not the vision of the artist. Wolf Vostell, will anyone remember him or Fluxus a hundred years from now?
The A list, agreeing with each other to conserve their own stature in the Art world. If they don't do it, no one will, so I guess it's a question of survival.