Nam June Paik passes into the Great Beyond

[Ugly Dougly]

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INVENTED VIDEO ART, SAID `FUTURE IS NOW'
By Laura Wides-Munoz
Associated Press

MIAMI - Nam June Paik, the avant-garde artist credited with inventing video art in the 1960s by combining multiple TV screens with sculpture, music and live performers, has died. He was 74.

The Korean-born Mr. Paik, who also coined the term ``Electronic Super Highway'' years before the information superhighway was invented, died Sunday night of natural causes at his Miami apartment, according to his Web site.

Song Tae-ho, head of a South Korean cultural foundation working on a project to build a museum for the artist, said he learned of Mr. Paik's death from Mr. Paik's nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, in New York.

Mr. Paik's work gained international praise from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, among others, and much of it is on display at the Nam June Paik Museum in Kyonggi, South Korea.

``He really led the development of a new art form, bringing the moving image into the modern art world,'' said John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim.

Hanhardt called Mr. Paik a true friend and a prophet.

``He foresaw that video would be an artist's medium, that it would be in museums,'' he said. ``It's a heroic achievement.''

In a 1974 report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Paik wrote of a telecommunications network of the future he called the ``Electronic Super Highway,'' predicting it ``will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavors.'' Two decades later, when ``information superhighway'' had become the phrase of the moment, he commented, ``Bill Clinton stole my idea.''

He also was often credited with coining the phrase, ``The future is now.''
Trained in music, aesthetics and philosophy, he was a member of the 1960s art movement Fluxus, which was in part inspired by composer John Cage's use of everyday sounds in his music. Another Fluxus adherent was the young Yoko Ono.

Mr. Paik made his artistic debut in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1963 with a solo art exhibition titled ``Exposition of Music-Electronic Television.'' He scattered 12 television sets throughout the exhibit space and used them to create unexpected effects in the images being received.

Later exhibits included the use of magnets to manipulate or alter the image on TV sets and create patterns of light.

He moved to New York in 1964 and started working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman to combine video, music and performance.

In ``TV Cello'' they stacked television sets that formed the shape of a cello. When she drew the bow across the television sets, there were images of her playing, video collages of other cellists and live images of the performance.

[Kinetic IV]

Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway display at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art here in KC is one of the most influential art exhibits I've ever seen. And that exhibit led me to explore things that years later led me to Burning Man.

I rank her and the late Dale Eldred as two of the most influential artists in my life....damn this is a loss.

[robotland]

I've taken inspiration from his work as well. Maybe this afternoon I'll dissect a TV in his honor.

[Ugly Dougly]

I remember in '97 the crew was wandering the playa post burn, looking for hallucinations. There was a blue glow on the horizon. As we approached, it didn't get clearer, it just morphed into more and more strange sights, til finally we got within the same zipcode as the thing, and it was a TV on some sort of rotating arm jig, spinning around and around in the darkness of the playa. Nobody around. Pretty freaky.