NAM JUNE PAIK

Peter Wenzel Collection

02.11. - 29.11.2009. 
Barrell Gallery, HDLU 

Paik’s investigations of video and television and his key role in transformation of electronic moving image into artistic media are a part of the history of new media.

Paik’s exhibition in Split retrospectively presents the oeuvre of an artist who joined together the expressive possibilities and conceptual power of performance with the new technological capacities of moving image. Paik’s works are concerned with everyday objects like television, which can be connected to heritage of Neo - dada or Fluxus movement that he was part of. The television prophetically becomes a center of his oeuvre; he predicted its popularity today as well as he did the process of globalization. Although Nam June Paik is not interested in television as a box, as an object, he is interested in what is inside and what ultimately brought him to video art.

Paik deconstructed TV as a media - with satellite broadcasts, video installations filled with humor and a hidden message. He erased the borders of art and popular culture. TV as a motif and as a new media is a central theme Paik’s exhibition in Split.

Television as a motif and media is a central backbone of the exhibition in Split, where it is presented by Paik’s number of works carried out in classical techniques – drawings, patchworks and graphics with television as principal motif. It is personified; the bearer of socio-political message, colored, without picture but the distinguishing gently rounded frame is always present. Paik’s fascination with the new media – which television was in his time – is set in context of his entire opus at the exhibition in Split. Communication is what interests Paik throughout his opus, communication on the level of media as well as on the level of the artists he worked with - Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, mentor John Cage –which he includes in his vast exploration of media, television and communication, erasing the boundaries of artistic categories.

From the actions from the period of Fluxus, the print of a tie on a piece of paper from the action „Originale“ by Karlheinz Stockhausen, radical and absurd actions that have provoked surprise and shock, to last post-video works in which he uses laser technology, Paik as an artist has contributed to the creation of media culture and expanded the boundaries of defining art.

Marina Majić

Exhibition is made in cooperation with:

                         and                

Also thanks to MUO, Museum of Arts and Krafts, Zagreb