Electronic Finger Painting

By ROBERT HUGHES

A flickering retrospective for Nam June Paik at the Whitney

Mention video to some people and watch their faces fall. If the cliche of "modern sculpture" used to be a piece of stone chewing gum with a hole in it, and that of "modern painting" was a canvasful of drips, then the cliche of "video art" is a grainy closeup of some U.C.L.A. graduate rubbing a cockroach to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes while the sound track plays amplified tape hiss, backward. Video art has not yet shaken off its reputation as clumsy, narcissistic and obscure.

Of course, video has no monopoly on that; most art of any kind, in this overloaded art world, is clumsy, narcissistic and obscure. Still, even video does not have to be, and some of it is not. An indication of this may now be seen at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan through June 27. The Whitney has long been conscientious about video art, showing it in regular programs through the 1970s when other museums would hardly condescend to touch it. Now the Whitney becomes the first American museum to give a retrospective show to a video artist. He is Nam June Paik, a Korean who lives in New York City.

At 50, Paik is the sage and antic father of video as an art form--"the George Washington of the movement," as another experimental artist, Frank Gillette, dubbed him at the end of the '60s. He began by emigrating from his native Seoul in the '50s, first to Tokyo and then to Germany, to study music. In Germany he met Composer John Cage, that perennially controversial guru of the avantgarde, and he was soon busily involved in the multimedia "events" and benignly neo-Dadaist actions of a European artists' group that called itself, for its commitment to change, Fluxus.

Fluxus was less a defined art movement than a loose anarchist confederacy, given to ritual gestures of protest against "high" culture. Paik, who was to move to New York in 1964, would play a piano and then topple it over onstage; he would cut a pianist's shirttails to shreds with scissors, or stage a little musical "event" by dragging a violin along the sidewalk on a string, like a scraped and protesting pet. A cellist, Charlotte Moorman, would appear for Paik at a concert and play her instrument with tiny TV sets rigged over her breasts; or, to the scandal and amusement of the New York art world in 1967, she would perform topless.

Such occasions pass, marked only by photographs. Some of Paik's pieces were more permanent, like a television set with the screen removed and a candle burning in the empty cabinet--a neat comment on the votive, shrinelike role played by TV in the home--or a closed-loop setup titled TV Buddha, in which a stone effigy of the Buddha sits with a camera pointed at it, ceaselessly contemplating its own immobile image in a small monitor.

Paik was interested in technology, of course--but in a lax, low-tech way. The rise of kinetic and programmed-systems art in the '60s brought with it the hope that some electronic Leonardo might emerge from all the squeaking and twinkling: a new figure of the artist as cybernetic technocrat, a Tatlin with a 64K chip. No such figure emerged, and Paik in no way resembled him. His machines were crude, funny, aleatory gremlins, held together by string and Scotch tape; one of them, a robot named K-456, is preserved in the show. Controlled (in a vague way) by a model-aircraft radio transmitter souped up to send commands on 20 channels, this frail creature did manage to perform in Germany and even in Washington Square Park, where it walked, spoke, waved its arms and excreted a stream of beans.

Paik's television pieces tend toward disciplined confusion; ends stick out everywhere. They have no narrative structure. Can one speak of decorative TV? If so, Paik makes it. The keynote of the Whitney show is struck, as soon as one gets out of the elevator, in the first installation on view: a row of goldfish tanks. Behind each tank is a TV screen silently emitting its bright electronic collage through the water; live fish swim in front of magnified images of themselves; there is a glimpse of sky underwater, a figure, a swirl of interference pattern. In Fish Flies on Sky, 1975, several dozen TV sets are hung from the ceiling and one lies on one's back, looking upward, as the staccato montages of fish, dancers and an old World War II monoplane cavort and twirl. In TV Garden, the sets are dispersed through a peculiarly unconvincing grove of indoor plants, glowing and babbling like discarded electronic detritus left in an artificial jungle.

The effect of such pieces--particularly Fish Flies on Sky--is curiously soothing; once urgent images, struggling to claim one's attention through the set, are multiplied and dispersed into pretty electronic wallpaper, and one's distance from the screens makes them look almost floral. It is low-fidelity TV, short on information, long on suggestion; Paik has more than once compared his work with that of Monet, whose lyrical blurs and water reflections were at the opposite extreme of pictorial strategy from the precise definition of an Ingres. "As collage technique replaced oil paint," Paik declared almost 20 years ago, "the cathode-ray tube will replace the canvas." Of course, collage never replaced paint, and the idea that everything that canvas and paint can do may be better done by manipulating a stream of electrons was one of the harmless delusions of the '60s."

But the direction of Paik's aim is clear enough: rather than compete with the informational power of "real" television, he wants to alter the box into a form of pure play, electronic finger painting. It is his solution--and a very adroit one--to the fact that the TV screen, small and intimate as it is, can never acquire the grand declamatory power of film or canvas. There is no such thing as a physically impressive videotape. The scale is not there. But the tape can involve you and even promote an occasional sense of mystery; and this, if not always profoundly, is what Nam June Paik's installations do. --By Robert Hughes

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