Art & Technology with Nam June Paik & Bruce Nauman
Art and technology are inseparably intertwined. Inventions and advancements such as pens or oil paints were important breakthroughs in previous eras, and likewise cameras or computers have been shaping our post-modern art processes today. In the early 1960’s and into the 70’s many artists began to experiment with video production by using new tools and manipulating existing media. Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman were two of the most influential artists working in the new realm of video art. Television sets, closed circuit video feeds, and Portapak systems quickly became the diction of this developing language. Nevertheless, languages evolve over time. New video media in the 60’s begged to be explored, and today the blossoming digital culture landscape equally demands examination. By taking cues from visionary artists like Paik and Nauman we may begin to lay the groundwork for the forward extensions of video and cinema.
To discuss Paik without mentioning Fluxus would be short sighted. After Paik relocated to Germany from Seoul via Tokyo, his art world reality came of age during the anti-art movements of the 50’s and 60’s. While in Germany Paik met and worked with many essential members of the Neo-Dada group known as Fluxus. George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, said of the movement, “[It] is definitely against art-object as non-functional commodity–to be sold and to make livelihood for an artist. It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art including the eventual needlessness of itself. It should not be therefore permanent.” Despite a lack of agreement on didactic definition for Fluxus, this statement does explain why ephemeral/temporal works such as music, performance, and video were often favored. Paik had been classically trained in music and connected well to the avant garde composer John Cage. Cage was highly influenced by Zen Buddhism, a trait that Paik was skeptical of at first. Paik spoke of his skepticism at one of Cage’s concerts in Darmstadt, Germany, “I went to see the music with a very cynical mind, to see what Americans would do with Oriental heritage. In the middle of the concert slowly, slowly I got turned on. At the end of the concert I was a completely different man.” It was not long before Paik’s familiarity with music led him to explore other art-making processes. This journey started with performance pieces that often employed manic acts and audience interaction. It did not take long, however, before Paik started tinkering with, and then dissecting the television set. On this shift Paik recalled, “March 1963. While I was devoting myself to research on video, I lost my interest in action in music to a certain extent… I stocked my whole library except those on TV technique into storage and locked it up. I read and practiced only on electronics. In other words, I went back to the spartan life of pre-college days… only physics and electronics.” One of Paik’s earliest television pieces was a TV set on its side with a single vertical glowing line, entitled, Zen for TV (1963), a nod to Cage’s influence. Another piece that drew upon Paik’s experience with audience interaction is Participation TV (1963) — a television that played frantic dots as a result of a viewer speaking into a connected microphone.
Paik continued to pioneer in video art many decades following his formative years in Germany. His innovative steps into new worlds can serve as a framework for inspiration and a recipe for experimentation. Television and video were produced as a means of communication and likewise social media functions for the purpose of providing a network of interactions between people no matter the distance that separates them. The problems that faced a burgeoning visual communication culture in the mid twentieth century are visiting us today. Issues such as social bubbles, cyber-bullying, identity theft, fake news, hyper-superficial consumerism, internet addiction, etc. are penetrating our lives and need the attention of artists, not only activists. Material provided from the technological side is equally as rich. Seeds like Facebook live video, 360° video, crowdfunding, dating apps, and virtual reality are being planted in very fertile ground. Contemporary artists who feel drawn to this continuously developing medium can approach investigation in manner that resembles Paik’s process of curiosity, irreverence, and hinted madness. Moving forward we can be inspired by the German philosopher T.W. Adorno, “Progressive consciousness is moreover inconceivable without a moment of spontaneity through which the spirit of the times takes on specific characteristics, rather than just reproducing itself mechanically in art. This specification in turn is an outgrowth of history in the sense of Marx’s notion that any epoch takes up only such problems as it can solve. Indeed it seems that in every epoch aesthetic forces of production, talents, emerge which respond quite intuitively to a given technology, pushing it forward by means of some kind of secondary mimesis.”
Whereas Paik, in many cases, may be said to make art about technology, Bruce Nauman uses technology to make art. His body of work is extensive but I will be focusing on the earlier pieces that used the Sony Portapak. Nauman started in painting and sculpture upon arriving in the graduate art program at UC Davis but did not wait long before starting the mental exercise of dissection. Fellow graduate student, Frank Owen, recalls a conversation with Nauman in reference to his work of stretching canvases for another painter — “I don’t want to make art that way, where you know what you are going to do in advance.” Nauman has also said, “I’ve always been interested in what happens in the studio. Where does this stuff come from? I like watching myself figure out what to do next. Even if you think you have an idea, you have to sit down and see what really happens, see what’s really there after you’ve putatively finished. Just being in the studio helped me think about how to be an artist.” What follows this thought train is the exploration of his own body as material. Nauman cleaned out his studio of all art-making equipment and materials and began to perform in an intentional, yet very fluid manner. Art historian Coosje van Bruggen says of this time period, “Alone in his studio, with only himself as a reference, he began to measure his surroundings in terms of his own body; he grew increasingly interested in its reifications and applied its function of sitting, standing, pacing and the like in his performances.” Immediately there comes a problem. The artist and the empty room together become a bubble that pops before anyone sees it. Anyone who does not meet the criteria of being Bruce Nauman must trust that the tree does make a sound as it falls. Three years later Nauman began to restage his performances in front of the camera. Each performance was one hour long, as dictated by the length of a spool of half-inch videotape. Pieces such as Bouncing in a Corner, Exaggerated Walk, and Walk with Contrapposto begged to be felt emotionally by the viewer but also anticipate an audience with eyes that demand authenticity. On this relationship between the viewer and video-documented performance Nauman states, “If you really believe in what you’re doing and do it as well as you can, then there will be a certain amount of tension — if you are honestly getting tired, or if you are honestly trying to balance on one foot for a long time, there has to be a certain sympathetic response in someone who is watching you. It is a kind of body response; they feel that foot and that tension.”
So what are we left with to face? Nauman uses video as more than a stage, more than documentation, but less than the pure live performance. For Nauman, video serves as a necessary resolution to the problem of wanting an audience while still performing in solitude. This problem parallels the tension between art and the explosion of digital culture. Many artists have embraced the driving force of our era but there is still a gap that has been birthed from the fundamentally traditional methodologies of art school. Art critic Ben Davis states, ‘“Contemporary art” defines itself as a special sphere, not just different but better — more sophisticated and smarter — than other media phenomena. The problem with this self-image is that the contemporary world is ruled by technologies that are vastly more technically sophisticated than anything within reach of the conventional art world — a gulf separates what is taught at the most sophisticated art school from what is taught in the most basic computer engineering class… “art that uses social networks,” offers an imaginary resolution for the contradiction of the visual arts in a world ruled by technology whose sophistication and complexity transcends them.”
Moving forward there is plenty of room for exploration of digital culture. Artists should take the opportunity to be on the fore of asking questions that cut deep into the mechanisms of our contemporary world. What do digital cave drawings look like? What comes after digital? Can networks and virtual communication be viewed as material? What are the politics of internet-based art? The list will not end anytime soon. These questions may use contemporary words but their roots are very similar to the questions that were asked by innovative artists like Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman. Taking cues from their pursuits would serve all artists well.
Written by Ryan Meyer in 2017
Bibliography
Davis, Ben. “Ben Davis on Social Media Art — Artnet Magazine.” Artnet.net, 17 June 2010. Web. 17 Mar. 2017.
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