That Paik’s work became less substantial later in life doesn’t detract from the brilliance and intellectual thrill of much of what is on display. The exhibition includes examples of Paik’s video work, and a wall of material taken from the Paik archives, emphasizing part of its larger argument: That Paik’s studio, his tinkering, his collecting and hoarding of material, was part of his art, or at least essential to an understanding of his larger, life-long project. This includes birdcages, busts of Beethoven and Elvis, and fanciful televisions, from antiques to space-age plastic confections that recall the golden age of Japanese materialism in the 1970s. The assemblage is fascinating, but leaves the unfortunate impression that he was a crank. In fact, he was one of a handful of the most important and influential artists of his generation.
Resilient, determined
(Copyright Nam June Paik Estate) - Nam June Paik, \"Untitled (Newspaper Drawing).”
In the 1990s, Paik took to drawing on the surface of newspapers with colored ink sticks, squiggles and shapes and hatching that sometimes obliterated and sometimes accented articles and photographs. A selection of these drawings occupies a wall, and it makes an unwanted, or sad, impact. One senses vitiation and fatigue, an artist responding to the surface of a changing world, rather than leading the conversation. A late work, made shortly before he died in 2006, is called “Chinese Memory.” It consists of some books with Chinese references, childlike painting on a television cabinet, and a monitor.
“Chinese Memory” feels like an empty but important marker, or reminder: In the end, it’s about memory, about the wistfulness of past. The books suggest the powerful, but subterranean traditionalism that fertilized the best of Paik’s work, his sharp sense not just of art history, but of the history of western culture. Perhaps there’s a comment on globalism in this and other later works.
But both the newspaper scribblings and the images scrawled on the television in Chinese Memory have an air of resignation about them. Something was changing in the media world. The tool or object which once brought us images was losing its materiality, and in turn, it began to seem like we don’t so much consume media as are consumed by it. It had colonized memory, and was moving on to become so much a part of our daily consciousness that nothing could be separated out and set apart from the constant stream of images. There was no more thinker, no more silent Buddha, to ponder the phenomenon. There was no outside to it.
The best reading one can take from these later works is about Paik’s resilience and determination to stay focused on his life-life long project. They feel like a response to, or embodiment of Samuel Beckett’s existential mantra: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
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