A Performance Art Manifesto

1. Working Definition of Performance Art
A performance art piece is an authentic action performed before an audience, framed as performance art, and belonging more readily to the performance art genre than to any other genres.

2. Identifying It: Performance Art is Performance Art
In performance art, a performance art action is framed as performance art, and not as drama, dance, music, "the performing arts", film, video, painting, sculpture, mime, poetry, spoken word, oratory, circus arts, etc., although these and other art elements may be sometimes appear similar to performance art, and they can surely be appropriated by performance art.

Performance art has an art history with lineage and evolution. Mixing two genres together does not necessarily give rise to performance art. However, there is no "usual" means or technology for achieving expression in performance art. Where dance usually employs bodies, film usually employs light, and painting usually employs paint, performance art can employ anything, or re-work the means of other genres to dadaist extremes like bodies through a projector.

More than any other performative art form, performance art is defined by the presence of a performer, an audience, and a performer's action. Dance doesn't require an audience for dancers to dance; drama doesn't need an audience for actors to act. Without an audience, however, performance art ceases, becoming mere action.


Performance art is sometimes compared to drama because both genres employ action, but often they couldn't be more dissimiliar. First, performance art often lacks "acting"—performers may not "pretend" to be characters in other times and places who convey stories. Performance artists may address the audience directly, eschewing the fourth wall. A performance art piece may lack any conscious narrative. There may be no speech, gesture, or movement. If a performance artist makes a voice like a chipmunk, the performer is not necessarily pretending to be, or imitate, a chipmunk—it may simply be the performance artist speaking like a chipmunk, or the chipmunk-speak may have no consciously rational reason for being used at all—performance artists have been known to recite incoherent texts for hours. And when it comes to objects, performance artists may use them as expected, or invent bizarre new uses for them: where an actor might drink from a water glass, the glass to a performance artist might be a car, for example, or a toilet, or the performer's mother, all three, or none.

Here is one test for performance art: if an action can be reframed so it is immediately recognizable as belonging to a historical genre that is not performance art, then the action is probably not performance art.

Here is another: see or do enough performance art, and you'll know what it is (and isn't).

3. Authenticity: Evidence of an Authentic Performance Art Action is Not the Action Itself
A performance art action, as it unfolded, was authentic in space and time. If an action was recorded using technology, the record's contents are not the same as the action that unfolded.

If a record of a performance art action is played or shown, the playing/showing is an action in itself, but this action is not necessarily performance art.

Debris, art objects, and other remnants from a performance art action that unfolded can serve as sculpture, memory, evidence, archeological artifacts, choreographies for future performances, etc., but they are not in themselves performance art.

4. Corollaries:
A record of an authentic performance art action can only simulate the action that unfolded.

Performance art simulations aren't performance art (unless appropriated by performance art).

To witness an authentic performance art action, the audience should be present when and where the action unfolds (unless not having the audience present when and/or where the action unfolds is part of a performance).

Performance art decays instantly and is unrepeatable; because performance art can't be bought or sold like objects, it will always be a radical force in the art world with little to lose.

Performance art manifestoes should never be trusted.

Print-Out on the New Art (1968)

A new art has been with us for nearly a decade now, as it emerged from the void that followed the diminishing presence of abstract expressionism. One would hope that happenings, pop art, minimal sculpture, and the like are, like the computer and thermonuclear capability, sufficiently established in our common sensibility by now so that we can accept them as subjects worthy of intelligent discussion. Nonetheless, the criticism of the new art distinctly of the sixties has been just about as baffled and evasive, if not downright ignorant, as, say, most writing about computers; for the new art, sometimes masquerading as an anti-art, is so radically different from the dominant styles preceding it that the long-established critics have been less than helpful.

In contrast, as the creators of the new art are, by and large, intelligent, educated, and unashamedly articulate people, their own writings often provide the best guides to comprehension and judgment. Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (1966) and Store Days (1967) are the first full-sized books by two of the new art’s most eminent and articulate practitioners. As their respective authors, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenberg are both adventurous artists, who have created theatrical pieces and prose essays as well as objects to be displayed, so the books they produce are distinctly unlike any tomes we know, and yet as coherent and authentic as everything else they have done.

As vanguard artists of diversified talents, both have intelligences integral enough to create books that esthetically resemble their art, and each possesses in addition a distinct sensibility that informs every page. Whereas Kaprow’s book is logical, definite, and accessible, Oldenburg’s is cunningly ironic, indefinite, and elusive. Oldenburg has a literary mind, trained in English at Yale and then honed on journalism in Chicago, that concocts suggestive allusive prose and cultivates perceptual enhancement; Kaprow, trained originally in philosophy, practices clear exposition and champions intellectual reforms.

Let me start by saying that the latter’s book is, among other things, the most substantial exposition we have of the aesthetic aspirations and critical ideas that inform much of the recent scene. If nothing else, it demonstrates why Kaprow became the primary theorist of several tendencies in post-abstract expressionist American art. His 1958 essay on “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” forecast, if not influenced, the styles of art that we now call pop and happenings, while the manuscript of this book, which he circulated among friends for several years before its publication, had an enormous influence upon many of the most interesting current talents. American publishing took an unconscionably long time to get his words into public print (nearly everyone, rumor has it, enclosed a cutely worded rejection slip, as if to exonerate himself from the industry’s Philistinism). It is even more regrettable that reviewers and review editors have so far been slow to recognize its seminal significance.

In his essay on Pollock’s legacy, Kaprow, then a young painter of some reputation and an instructor in art history at Rutgers, wrote the following prophetic words:



Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movement, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, seen in store windows and on the streets, and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents.




This belongs among the most important passages in modern aesthetics; for not only did his writing influence several students and colleagues at Rutgers who have since established themselves as important artists (George Segal, Lucas Samaras, Robert Watts, Robert Whitman, and Roy Lichtenstein), but it also reached other maturing artists who were then total strangers, among them Claes Oldenburg. In addition, Kaprow successfully coined an epithet—in his case, “happenings”—which so appropriately characterized a certain kind of experience that the term has since entered common parlance. Once a polemical young prophet, he is now, at forty, an elder sage.

As a practicing critic, certified art historian (M.A., Columbia), and recognized creator, Kaprow functions as what the sociologists would call a participant-observer—a man who is very much part of an activity and yet able to achieve the psychological distance necessary for discriminative analysis. Assemblage, Environment & Happenings opens innovatively with a long sequence of strategically arranged pictures which have their own story to tell, particularly about how examples of the new art resemble certain older works and how happenings by various practitioners exhibit visual similarities—by implication, how new art, even if concerned with “reality,” inevitably comes out of previous art.

The text that follows is richly perceptive, invariably sensible, patiently persuasive, and eminently comprehensible. Everything is so thoroughly thought through that Kaprow seems to have considered nearly all problems that his new art raises. Although his prose inclines toward excessively long, sometimes “elegant” sentences (perhaps out of stylistic indebtedness to his sometime Columbia teacher, Meyer Schapiro), Kaprow talks about the new art in the common tongue, avoiding the needless complexity and jargon that afflict so much art criticism. No intelligent reader can miss, let alone misunderstand, his major points, or doubt his concluding words:



If some of the past is still meaningful, as it assuredly is, then what is to be retained in the present work is not archaistic mannerisms, easily recognized and praised for this reason, but those qualities of personal dignity and freedom always championed in the West. In respecting these, the ideas of this book are deeply traditional.




The mixed-means art form that Kaprow calls “happenings” descends from several discernible tendencies in modern painting. The first, probably instigated by Marcel Duchamp, considers any and all materials and subjects as viable for artistic use. Out of this tradition springs not only pop art, junk sculpture, and certain primary structures, all of which employ subject matter previously dismissed as not-for-art, but also the current wholesale rejection of the classical hierarchy which regarded the female nude as the most ideal form and, by implication, disposable junk as the lowest. In his own creative career, Kaprow wanted to see how much “art” he could discover, or create, in seemingly intractable materials. After pursuing this interest in his painting, he eventually made a leap to an entirely radical position—that his own art should eschew, as thoroughly as possible, any semblances of the arts we know. This purpose drove him through an “exhibition” of piles of discarded automobile tires, Yard (1961), to his present position in which he neither makes not even compiles art objects. Happenings he now considers a kind of heightened format (a criterion usually signifying “art”) in which an indeterminate number of people gather together to participate in certain predetermined activities which may take place in any kind of terrain and over any length of time; as an unprecedented open art form, happenings are, for structural precedents, as much indebted to non-competitive games as to art.

The three words in Kaprow’s title outline a second tradition of contemporary painting that likewise culminates in happenings—the imposition of greater dimensionality upon the processes of painting. Whereas assemblage, originated by Picasso back in 1912, is by definition a three-dimensional collage that usually incorporates materials not normally found together or common to the currency of art, an environment escalates the collage-principle to a multiplicity of assemblages that literally encases the spectator—an enclosed space wholly designed as an artistic object. In his own development as a “painter,” Kaprow recapitulated this historic development, creating first cubist paintings in the late ‘40’s, then “action collages” which consist of materials rapidly slapped together into three-dimensional assemblages (which he invariably pronounces as an American word, with the accent on the broadly articulated second syllable), and eventually environments, which took him out of the frame of painting. Kaprow’s next step, which historically represents his innovation, came in Penny Arcade (1956), where he animated the subjects within that closed space, creating a kinetic environment, and thereby bestowing the fourth dimension of time upon painterly activity.

His next move, as logically derived as all his previous leaps, came in the path-breaking 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) where he introduced into the gallery setting live performers in place of objects and, therefore, created an experience closer to theater than painting. He has since taken his performance work out of the gallery situation entirely, discarding the theatrical convention of an intentional audience along with such other theatrical conveniences as a beginning and an end. “The room”, he writes in retrospect, “has always been a frame or format too.” (In art-historical retrospect, we can also see that another of Kaprow’s leaps consisted of appropriating the act of painting, which so preoccupied the earlier generation of “action painters,” and making the artist’s movement itself into the stuff of art.) As an appendix to his critical text, Kaprow’s book reprints the outline-scripts and photographs of several of his own pieces, as well as those of eight other practitioners around the world. This part too is chosen and presented with taste and care.

My main criticism of Kaprow’s book is its presumptuous exclusivity. Though his own conception of happenings is quite clearly explained, he does not sufficiently differentiate them from other theatrical events that occasionally pass under the same name, such as the performance pieces of John Cage, Robert Whitman, Ken Dewey, or Oldenburg. My own suggestion, which is developed in my forthcoming study, The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968), is that Kaprow’s pure happenings represent only one of the four distinct genres of mixed-means theatrical art—the others being staged happenings, kinetic environments, and staged performances. Each of these achieves a particular mix of the general dimensions of time, space, and materials. Perhaps because Kaprow has the philosopher’s preoccupation with correct positions and thus the necessity of excluding invalid alternatives, he is the only major mixed-means practitioner to devote himself entirely to pure happenings, as the text explains why his own ethics persuaded him not only to give up painting but to regard the other mixed-means genres as essentially compromised. (This devotion to rationally deduced scruple has led to quarrels with other artists, Oldenburg among them.)

Second, his commitment to the development of his own ideas forces Kaprow to create the false impression that happenings historically extend primarily from preoccupations within the traditions of painting (with a dash of John Cage!), which is a myth perpetuated in too much early criticism of the new visual/performance art. Actually, there is more evidence that the current mixed-means theatrical art comes from modern eccentric tendencies in all the artistic means it encompasses—painting and sculpture, music and dance, theater and film; and just as every contemporary painter, in Robert Motherwell’s phrase, carries the history of modern painting in his head, so the major creators of mixed-means theater are polyliterate and multi-sensitive enough to be familiar with the relevant esthetic precedents in all these fields. Otherwise, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is an important book, easily the most resonant overview we have of the painting and post-painting of our time; to my mind, it was indisputably more deserving than, say, all the 1967 National Book Award nominations under “Arts and Letters.”

Oldenburg’s Store Days is an entirely different sort of publication, designed less as an exposition than as a memento of Oldenburg’s first major artistic innovation and first great work of art. “The Store” (1961) was a real Lower-East Village store filled with miscellaneous objects, most of which Oldenburg created in the semblance of junk and then actually offered for sale; and this “store” subsequently became the setting for his first major series of mixed-means theatrical events, “The Ray Gun Theater” (1962). In contrast to Kaprow, whose interest is mostly in conceptions, Oldenburg is primarily concerned with image and materials. His leap in “The Store” consisted of making the stuff within the store itself into an artistic object that bore approximately the same ironic relation to a real store as his miscellaneous sculptural objects did to their respective models. For this reason, just as we can appreciate his mammoth Giant Hamburger as a sculptured object that at once resembles a hamburger and yet expresses other archetypal resonances (some of them sexual, the erotic suggestiveness of familiar objects being a favorite Oldenburg theme), so The Store was a store, where things were sold, and yet it was much else besides.

His book differs from Kaprow’s in another respect. Though Oldenburg is no less an intellectual than Kaprow, as well as no less skilled with words, he uses his intelligence in an entirely different way. Whereas Kaprow wants to explain, as a teacher might confront his class, Oldenburg, not an academic, weaves an imaginative and thoroughly ironic commentary composed of prose materials as miscellaneous as the stuff of his store—historical data, replicas of important printed matter (such as a business card), sketches, price lists for the objects, photographs (that are not as explanatory as Kaprow’s), scripts for his staged performances, various recipes, aesthetic statements, ironic declarations and even occasional aphorisms. “Boredom is beautiful, but it is hard to keep awake.” The result is an open-ended and semi-satisfying pot-pourri of bookish materials standing in relation to a real book as The Store did to a real store. “My piece is called a store because like a store it is a collection of objects randomly placed in space.” For the words “store,” “objects,” and “in space,” consider substituting “book,” “phrases,” and “between hard covers.”

The following passage, perhaps the most famous, should convey Oldenburg’s canny style. In addition to parodying Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, his words also echo ironically Kaprow’s inventory of viable materials, quoted above, and perhaps the whole tradition of artists’ manifestos:



I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for an art that takes from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse, and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.




The point, of course, is that the art that he eventually created—the giant hamburger and toothpaste tube, the collapsible “soft” bathtub, and the misshapen bedroom set-has itself an ironic relation to his prescriptions. “What I want to do more than anything else,” he solemnly asserts at another point, “is create things just as mysterious as nature.”

Squarely in the great tradition of ironists, Oldenburg aims to fuse contraries, usually in the cross-grained fashion of plywood. “My art is a resolution of opposites,” he declares in what I take to be a lapse into pure seriousness; and the art critic David Bourdon has pursued this point. “He simultaneously strives for elegant and vulgar forms, animate and inanimate forms, solidity and bodilessness, empathy and indifference. In addition, he is coping simultaneously with metaphor and concreteness, figuration and abstraction, memory and present, mystery and commonplace, individuality and mold, commerce and art.” Similarly, I would say that Store Days as a book resolves both sense and nonsense. No reader should be fool enough to take everything he says seriously-but in the nonsense lies a clear sense of Oldenburg’s incorrigibly ironic and articulate sensibility. In publishing such an unusual book, the Something Else Press does what every truly avant-garde publisher should do-produce tomes that no other house would even consider seriously; for it “explains” Oldenburg’s sculptural and theatrical art less by declarative statement than by inferred resemblance.

ART IS BOOKS, Guy Bleus

1
History in a nutshell : art today is what it is thanks to the historic avant-garde of Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. In this rupture-period, with a multitude of artistic experiments, the concept of art itself was questioned. "Tin" books were made by the futurists; etc. Much later in the sixties, the technical innovations (photocopy- and offset-machines) opened new perspectives for the rapid printings of the neo-avant-garde of Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, Gutai, etc. Yet the seventies and especially the eighties became a flourishing period for the production of artists'books. Other influences upon the evolution of artists'books were the book-illustrators and above all the concrete and visual poets, when their semiotic analyses developed into a position where the text was leaving the pages of the book.

2
A multiplicity of terms has been used to indicate this artistic phenomenon: artists'books, artists'bookworks, books by artists, books as artwork, artists' publications, bookworks, bookism, book art, object books, book objects, etc. The boundaries among the different used terms are not always clear. In general a distinction has been made between a) "bookworks" (or "artists'books"): to denote books as containers (of ideas) (performance books, visual poetry books, etc.) and b) "book objects": to denote those books that must be considered as an art object in a spatial context. But the term "artists'books" is also being used to indicate a) and b). Anyway, all artists'books are produced by artists and regarded as works of art. To the advantage of the artists, I prefer to employ a wide and flexible interpretation of the notion "artists'book", going from book objects, to bookworks and periodicals in a limited edition. At the end, it is not important if a work becomes classified under the heading "artists'books". Not the classification, but the artist and his/her art are important.

3
Without injuring the decorative value of a "binding de luxe" or "de luxe limited edition", an artists'book may not be confused with it. An artists'book is always an original, not a reproduction. Although it can be a single item or a multiple artwork.

4
Artists'books operate within a formal book-structure, but without being hooked on the traditional requirements of texts and illustrations. For that reason artists'books demand a new way of reading, that takes into account the logical structure and the dialogical experience of the work. So, every bookwork is an invitation to explore the different levels of it. Or after Roland Barthes: "Le plaisir du livre d'artiste".

5
Although artists'books form an autonomous art discipline, there is a close relation with the Mail-Art Network. Mail-Art is a body with many hearts and the artists'book is one of them. Most mail-artists (or networkers/communicationists/media-artists) are more or less involved in creating bookworks and the greater part of all artists'books is gained by post. The idea of dividing Mail-Art from artists'books is typical for the art-critic, not for the artist. Peculiar to the artist of today is the easiness of crossing borders of different media or genres.

6
As already said, artists'books are books made by artists. The book is used as an art-medium, like the painter uses the canvas. These books can rather be called "exploring-books" than "reading-books". For a certain purpose, as to inventory, a classification can be useful. Therefore I mention some terms of the comprehensive arsenal of bookworks : sculptural books, hole books, accordion books, transparent books, braided books, chapbooks (folkbooks), note-books, flipbooks, sketchbooks, copy art books, recycling books, performance books, project books, concrete books, photograph albums, shade books, marbled books, microfilmbooks, etc. Moreover a multiplicity of techniques exists: (unica or multiple editions) handmade books (scrolled booksworks, (leather) bindings, rubber stamp books, folded bookforms, ...); printed books (self-publishing, prototypes, small presses, ...); microfiche publications; xerox; photographs; lithography books; etc. Further the pages can be made of felt, glass, clay, steel, vinyl, leather, handmade paper, etc. The sending of all these book-forms has also contributed to the development of the Mail-Art Network.

7
In plastic arts books receive a special place. After all, what remains of an exhibition when it comes to an end? Nostalgia, a vague recollection and some photographs? But especially the "book", the catalogue of the show. Books are the genuine and tangible memory. This reminds me of the L.H.F.S.-Mail-Art show I curated at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels in 1981. The idea was to hold the whole exhibition in your hand. All together 17 micro-fiches, including more than thousand Mail-Art works, were housed in a booklet. Hence it appears that the epistemological problem "if a book can reproduce reality" was out of question. The problem was : can the exhibition replace the book?

8
What is a book ? "An instrument of communication; to convey meaning; a publication for tangible circulation" (Britannica); "24 pages of which 22 are printed" (U.S. Postal Service); "A number of printed or written sheets of paper, etc. fastened together, usually between protective covers" (Webster). A book can be a) a reflection of reality; b) the carrier of an idea or message; c) a new reality, the message itself. An artists'book is a book, not because it fulfils the essential characteristics of it, but on account of the fact that the artist says so. Furthermore, an artists'book can also be a sculpture or an installation, etc.

9
It is conspicious that poets and novelists survive by living in symbiosis with paper and books. They remain loyal to the Gutenberg medium and use books as containers of poems or novels, not as art-objects. On the other hand plastic artists create or transform books by giving them a formal function or placing them in a unusual artistic context. They interchange the utilitarian with the aesthetic function. No books as "vehicles" of art, but as art itself. The book is completed with new meanings.

10
An artists'book is not an anti-book, but an apologia for the widening of the idea "book". For the artist the book is a challenge to interpret in a new way the classic dichotomy of form and content. (S)he attacks the essence of the book to reconcile the text, its structure and the matter holding the text, by transforming them into images.

11
In comparison with rather immaterial media as radio or television, books have the advantage to be more tangible. This palpability becomes unreal and celestial when you have the strange experience of holding a book in your hands, that was written a thousand years ago or more - and have the impression of defying the notion of time. This aesthetical experience is characteristic for the artists'book. It is made to be touched and to give a tactile pleasure. This portable art-form provokes a personal contact, demands to be cherised and to be smelled at. An artists'book is an intimate work and covers a one-to-one relation. It transcends the alienating position of the book today, the mass production of pocket- and paperback editions or the very expensive slick-books that swallow the enchantment of the book and make it worthless.

12
"Most books are primarly about something outside themselves; most book-art books are primarily about themselves." (Richard Kostelanetz)

13
A photograph or an illustration of an artists'book is always an impoverishment. One can not reproduce a 3-dimensional object in a 2-dimensional plane. The spatial aspect of the book becomes neglected. The same difficulty appears with sculptures. The experience to touch or walk about them becomes omitted. A book about artists'books is a contradiction. It can be handled, but the art-works, represented in it, can not.

14
Books are not evident. They are not necessary. Some cultures functioned and function well without them. A book is a small unit of order in the big Chaos. It links separated things, not connected before. Without books, history wouldn't be the same. Today, the position of books is threatened by other media. Politicians play their wargames via telecommunication media. However, books can still have an enormous impact. One of the most discussed books of the last years is undoubtedly Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". The belief in books as "carriers" of ideas has not ended yet. Most religions are still based on the existence of (revelations in) books. And some of these books are not mythical or containers of myths, but myths itself.

15
Since the rise of electronic reproduction methods, everybody has the opportunity to be a publisher of books. We live in an age of "communicationism". The communication is more important than the art-objects. The ephemeral character is neglectable. (Meta-)communication is the art. The dialogue is not only more useful than the conflict, but even more necessary on a global level. Art is an attitude.

above is copied from: http://www.mailart.be/art_is_books.html

The Failure of Names, By James Prosek, Orion March/April 08

To see more of James Proseck’s images, click here.

WHEN I WAS FOUR OR FIVE years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table. As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures: Cock of the Rock, Plate-Billed Toucan, Motmot. Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.

When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself—by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition. At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types I could find in books and magazines.

In my mind, an animal was distinct from others if it had been given a scientific name. My view was that the classification of creatures was figured out by authority figures and that I should defer to that authority. In the process of painting different types of trout, though, I learned that even the authorities could not agree on the names they gave to describe the enormous diversity of fishes in the Salmonidae family. Some trout had been named a separate species and subsequently renamed a subspecies, placed in a different genus, or just pushed into a category with allied species. The history of the naming became as interesting to me as the physical diversity of the fishes themselves, which I loved to paint.

I wanted to believe that there were many more distinct creatures rather than fewer, because then I had more trout to paint and to put into what I hoped would eventually become a book of the trout of North America. I used any and all sources I could find in assembling what eventually did become my first book, Trout: An Illustrated History—a book of seventy watercolors. I had not yet explored the idea that naturalists named things because they wanted to create a legacy for themselves, or wished to be published more, or because of an innate human compulsion. I accepted the names without question—at least where there was consensus. Where there wasn’t, I either made an educated decision or included the argument over a species’ status in the text that would accompany each fish.

Since I had seen only a fraction of the trout I painted in my book, there was some amount of mythologizing and imagination involved. I had traveled across country with a friend for a summer when we were just old enough to drive, and we hiked and searched out native trout in many western states. The rest I painted from photos other people had taken and from descriptions in old books. A favorite source was David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann’s 1902 book, American Food and Game Fishes. Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, named a fair number of the native trout west of the Continental Divide, including some trout he described only from dead specimens. The “longfin char” of the Canadian Arctic was based on a tenuous description from a remote lake in Greenland. But Jordan was an authority, so I happily added his fish to my list, and painted it from his descriptions.

As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place. Through genetic analysis, which was fairly new in the early ’90s, it was discovered that rainbow trout (from the Pacific coast) and brown trout (introduced from Europe) were not as closely related as once thought. The genes showed that the rainbow trout was more closely related to Pacific salmon, fishes that die when they spawn, of the genus Oncorhynchus. The brown trout was more closely related to the Atlantic salmon, and remained in the genus Salmo. The native trout of my home state, Connecticut, the brook trout, was actually a whole separate genus, Salvelinus, more closely related to the Arctic char than to the rainbow or brown trout. Technically, it was no longer correct even to call the book I was working on Trout. I found myself wanting to ignore the namers because they were getting in the way of my own personal vision.

I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy—those like Carl Linnaeus—once believed. That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature). These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public. None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected.

In the process of painting and writing my second trout book, Trout of the World, I gathered most of the information firsthand during extensive travels through Europe and Asia. As I saw more of the world and its trout in person, a few things became clearer to me. A species like the brown trout, its native range stretching from Iceland to the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, from the Kola Peninsula in Russia to Morocco, was highly variable. Pretty much every stream I pulled brown trout from, they looked different—not only every population, but every individual. There was no way that names could account for all this diversity. Were names then inadequate in the face of our changing relationship with, and view of, nature?

Ironically, despite the beauty and diversity I had witnessed, the differences between the fish I saw were not as great as I’d wished they’d been—not as great as the differences between the trout in my first book, when I accentuated characteristics that I had deemed important, based on bad photos and vague descriptions and colorful names. I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity (golden trout, Oncorhynchus aguabonita; blueback trout, Salvelinus oquassa), but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.

Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work. For a long time I thought that my profession would be architecture, and that’s what I initially studied in college. The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. After drawing curvilinear lines, first emanating from the points on the body of a seahorse, I realized the lines were helpful as visual aids to point out particular parts of a creature that I wanted to bring attention to. The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath. In this way, the lines became a very personal visual taxonomy, replacing the lingual one.

The lines in these works are also there to acknowledge that nothing is absolute, that even the laws of physics, though tested again and again, may one day buckle in the face of some unknown force. How can we say for sure otherwise? We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to that authority prevent us from looking at things with a fresh perspective? Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it. It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.

Celestial Spheres, Lita Albuquerque's ceremonial art, By William L. Fox, Orion March/April 08

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas, which means most of us also live under streetlights, divorced from the night sky. Disconnect yourself from the stars and you lose sense of living on a planet, a small body in space. Lose track of your limitations and you no longer know where you live, which makes it increasingly unlikely you will know how precarious the human condition can become on Earth. Lita Albuquerque is seeking to counter this loss by reconnecting us to the sky the old-fashioned way—through ceremonial art.

The Antarctic is the logical place for her to have started.

Tom Griffiths, an Australian historian who visited the Antarctic in 2002–2003, put it this way in his book Slicing the Silence: “In Antarctica you are intensely aware of the celestial Earth.” The continent is not simply “the end of the Earth,” he says, but “a place from which to intellectually encompass the planet and a privileged human window on the universe.” Albuquerque’s large-scale installation Stellar Axis: Antarctica is the first artwork to fully take advantage of that privilege. It is part one of a two-part planetwide project meant to do a simple thing that bears complex results: remind us that the stars continue to shine during daylight and connect heaven to earth, or spirit to matter.

The Antarctic’s Ross Ice Shelf is the largest single piece of ice in the world, a flat expanse the size of Spain and up to a thousand feet thick. Albuquerque found herself standing there amid ninety-nine ultramarine spheres at midnight during the austral solstice of 2006. That would be winter in the north, but summer in the Antarctic. And that would be daylight here, not nighttime. She and her four teammates were working fifteen miles out from McMurdo, the largest base on the continent, where they installed the spheres, representing the ninety-nine stars of greatest magnitude in the Southern Hemisphere.

Albuquerque credits her fascination with the celestial vault to growing up in Carthage. She was boarded there in a Catholic convent and in the evenings would watch the stars rise and set over the twin horizons of the north African desert and the dark waters of the Mediterranean. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 with a degree in art history and a fascination with ancient rock art and ceremonial sites. By 1978 she was strewing rocks and dry pigments across the floor of the Mojave Desert, early versions of her constellation pieces. In 1980 she turned the Washington Monument into the gnomon of a giant sundial in the nation’s capital, and in 1996 she created a star field around the pyramids of Egypt, alluding to their astronomical orientation. The Stellar Axis operation is her most ambitious project to date.

Two specific ideas compelled Albuquerque to create Stellar Axis. First, by mirroring constellations on the ground, her project would remind us that the stars are always with us, no matter how obscured by the position of the Earth. She would reverse the figure-to-ground relationship of stars to sky at solstice. The white ice would become the black sky, the dark blue spheres the light of shining stars.

Her other idea was based on what we call diurnal motion: as the Earth rotates west to east, the stars seem to move in the opposite direction. If you are standing in the Northern Hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate counterclockwise around the Pole Star. If you are standing in the Southern Hemisphere, they appear to rotate in a clockwise direction. If you imagine light from the two apparent motions meeting in the center of the Earth, the geometrical figure created would be a double helix, a spiral with a constant diameter like a strand of DNA. Albuquerque visualized this helix as a metaphor for information passed down over time, whether through the light of stars or through our genes.

She enlisted the help of Simon Balm, an astrophysicist who had worked previously at the South Pole. Simon had the math skills and field experience to transfer the positions of the stars into an accurate configuration on the ice. The artist and astrophysicist were joined by photographer Jean de Pomereu, filmmaker Sophie Pegrum, and cinematographer Lionel Cousin, all of whom would document the event but also help install the spheres representing the stars.

Their preparations took more than two years. In order to pull off such a large project in the Antarctic, it was necessary to obtain the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which administers America’s science operations on the ice as well as projects by visiting artists and writers. Albuquerque’s challenge was to piggyback her team and materials onto the existing stream of supplies for the scientists. It’s a cost-effective strategy for the government, relatively friendly to the environment, but a nightmare to implement.

For example, Albuquerque’s spheres had to be manufactured so that they could be packed in halves, both so they would fit in the available cargo and so they could be reassembled solely by her team under the challenging conditions on the ice shelf. Then snow anchors had to be devised so that the spheres would not blow away and violate Antarctic Treaty provisions regarding waste on the continent. In fact, the NSF required her to subject the spheres to 110-mile-per-hour winds in a test tunnel.

On December 7, Albuquerque and her team, along with a gaggle of scientists, arrived at McMurdo aboard a cargo jet. After a week sorting their gear—and completing the survival courses required before being let loose on the ice—they headed out with the first of their six crates of stars. The NSF had assigned them a four-hundred-foot-diameter plot out near the ice runways, a two-hour drive on snow machines over the ice shelf. The site offered a pristine view of Ross Island and the perpetually steaming Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano. It was a sublime place to work during the evenings with the sun only a few degrees above the horizon.

After Albuquerque selected what she thought would make the most aesthetic center for her work, Balm bored out a hole for the first pole with a gasoline-powered drill, then set out the forty-eight-inch sphere representing Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, were it visible. The deep blue sphere seemed to barely touch the ice, to almost float above the surface as if unsure whether it belonged to the sky or the ground.

It was December 14, and the solstice was on the twenty-second. All ninety-eight other “stars,” of descending magnitudes and represented by graduated spheres in seven steps down to ten inches, were aligned from Balm’s hole according to his GPS, the array representing the entire dome of the “night” sky from horizon to horizon. It took the team all nine days to install Stellar Axis, a job that in a more benign environment could have been done in two; but they made it just in time for fifty-one people from McMurdo to troop out on midsummer and gather at the center of the piece.

Albuquerque and Balm had stomped out an Archimedean spiral that wound into the array—the same kind of constant radius spiral found in DNA. Everyone walked along the path for ten minutes until meeting at the endpoint, then walked back out while being filmed from a helicopter, their heavy red parkas in contrast with the dusky blue spheres. At the conclusion, they spontaneously fell backward and made snow angels.

“I can’t help but think that Paleolithic people mirrored stars on the ground,” Albuquerque mused during an interview in Santa Monica one afternoon upon returning. “There’s archeological evidence that they did so in many sites around the world.” It would have been part of their quest for the numinous, the tradition in which she places her work. But her more immediate concern is how she will create the second half of the Stellar Axis project. When Balm drew an imaginary line from their site on the Ross Ice Shelf through the center of the planet, he ended up with a spot just off the coast of Greenland. They can get there, or close enough, on a charter ship, but how to deal with spheres in the water is something she and Balm haven’t yet solved. When they do, and when the other half of this artwork is realized, Albuquerque will have completed one of the largest gestures made by an artist on behalf of the marriage between the constellations and Earth.

Time as Medium: Five Artists' Video Installations, Barbara London

1995, Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 1

Over the last 30 years artists have exploited time as a unique effect of video. Dissociated into segments and reconstituted in diverse ways, video time is an expressive element in the installations of Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill. Although not motivated by scientific paradigms, video-makers’ work often bears on the evolving concept of time in twentieth century science.

In the mid-196es, when the introduction of the Portapak video camera to the consumer market initiated video as an art form, the ideas of critic Clement Greenberg were well known within the artistic community (1). His analysis of Modernism stipulated that each discipline must search for and determine what is unique and irreducible to that art. Many of the artists who tried their hand at video were modernist in the Greenbergian sense. They focused on the effects peculiar and exclusive to video.

In their experimentations with the medium, video-makers pointed their cameras at the live picture on the monitor and discovered the recursion phenomenon popularly known as feedback. They colorized black-and-white sequences and rearranged the digital image on the screen by modulating the video signal. In addition, various forms of interactivity, such as using a magnet to warp a television image, added a new dimension of “nowness” to the exploratory works of these artists.

A fuller study of time resulted from the interplay between the viewer, the live camera, and prerecorded video material. Time was speeded up, slowed down, frozen, and otherwise mangled within a context that allowed viewer participation. The ability to split time into segments and reconstitute them within the actual flow of the present moment is unique to video.

The course of real time-the order of events and their duration-is identical to that of video time. Anyone with a portable television at a football game would confrm that the action on the set temporally matches the play on the field. The correspondence leads viewers to perceive any modification to the normal flow of video events as a tampering with real time. Thus artists discovered in video time a medium with expressive qualities. In transfiguring the ribbon of time that is video, artists worked directly with an elusive idea that has engaged philosophers for millennia. The resulting art, like the ideas put forth by science, underscored the complex character of time.

At the beginning of this century, Newton’s notion of absolute time (a reference frame for all temporal measurements) was superseded when Einstein declared that time is meaningful only in association with space. He introduced an infinity- of times, each linked to one of an infinity of spaces. In quantum mechanics the concept is equally odd, linking time to energy through the uncertainty principle and then abandoning what little remains of these mental constructs in the abyss of complementarity, a theory that defies rational apprehension (2).

Video-makers are not concerned with explicating the large questions that preoccupy scientists. In their handling of time, artists rework commonly held notions at least as often as they incorporate scientists’ radical ideas. Rarely do these domains intersect as effectively as in the art initiated by video technology.

Shock of the Present
In Corridor Installation (1970), Bruce Nauman lined up six long corridors, as if offering a traveler a choice of realms to explore. Three of the corridors are only wide enough to peer into, and the others so narrow that they are barely passable. One of these corridors has two identical monitors at the far end, stacked one on top of the other. On each screen is an image of that empty corridor. The simplicity- of the arrangement is curious, enticing. Entering the confining space forces one to proceed in small steps, elbows pressed tight against the body. Suddenly one’s picture, shot from behind, appears on one of the two monitors. This monitor is live, in the present. When turning about to find the camera, which is positioned above the entrance, one’s face appears on the monitor; but because one is looking backwards at the camera, the image on the monitor is not accessible. Spinning between camera and monitor, the visitor cannot capture the instant when his or her visage is on the monitor. These two events-a viewer looking at the monitor, and the shot of his or her face on the monitor-cannot occur simultaneously in the present.

The other monitor, not connected to a camera, shows a tape of the empty corridor. The unchanging picture on this monitor mocks the efforts of the viewer to alter the order of events on the live monitor. Installation art often completely surrounds the viewer. For someone immersed in such an installation, the word “participant” portrays the relationship to the work more accurately-or perhaps “victim” is more appropriate in the case of Corridor Installation. The experience is somatic. The spectator’s body feels trapped, hemmed in by walls as well as by the inflexible nature of the present moment.

A Video Koan
In Nam June Paik’s installation TV Buddha (1974), a video camera captures a sculpture of the Buddha and transmits the live image to a monitor. The Buddha, gazing knowingly at his image on the screen, evokes an obvious question, a video koan: What is the difference between the Buddha staring at a live (present time) image of himself and the Buddha confronted with a replay of a videotaped (past time) representation? For a viewer studying the Buddha on the monitor, clearly there is no difference. An image on television does not carry a time signature. As Eastern philosophy teaches, “Time is an illusion”; among Western philosophers, “Time is a human construct” expresses a similar conviction.

The monitor, housed in an ovoid plastic enclosure, is attractive, and the sculpture of the Buddha is particularly beautiful. Asia, in its timeless wisdom, appears adequate to the challenge of modern technology. The confrontation is balanced and contemplative but also suggests conflict. After all, Zen koans do have answers, often dispensed by a traveling monk who wishes to supplant the reigning master of the monastery. To Paik’s koan, the sojourner might respond by leaping into action and placing a hand over the camera lens. This gesture accentuates the difference between a live connection to a camera and a prerecorded tape, but as with many koans, the rejoinder only launches other mind twisters.

Reflections in Space and Time
Monet’s famous paintings of water lilies put multiple spaces in the same place. At least three distinct spaces can be discerned: the surface of the water on which the lily pads float, the shallow space below the surface of the water - where the stems of the water lilies are visible, and the sky, of clouds reflected from the pond’s surface. Monet intends that the three milieus be seen concurrently. Though this spatial illusionism is not uncommon in Western painting, the notion of many spaces within the same space clashes with normal experiences of space.

Einstein’s recognition of multiple spaces is also enigmatic. He asks us to imagine a small box s situated, relatively at rest, inside the hollow space of a large box S. Then the hollow space s is part of the hollow space of S, and the same small space that contains both of them belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and to assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other. Einstein elaborated this notion in his theory of special relativity, which proposes that at every place, there are an infinite number of spaces, each in motion with respect to one another (3).

The multiplicity of spaces understood in Einstein’s conception and perceived in Monet’s painting can be experienced in Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s) (1974). The installation consists of a room with mirrored walls and a monitor inset into the middle of one wall. Reflections of everything within the room stretch as if reaching toward a distant horizon. Usually people within a multi-mirrored enclosure, such as a hall of mirrors in an amusement park, are seduced by the myriad reflections of themselves. They notice only their own solid body repeated many times, not the space they inhabit. However, the effect is different in Graham’s environment because of the image on the monitor. Captured by a hidden camera, the mirrored space of the room is depicted on the monitor and thus forms part of the endless reflections. Consequently, the room is the focus of attention. It appears as an infinity of spaces that are reflections of a single space-the mirrored chamber.

In the theory of special relativity, the conceptions of space and time are bound to one another: Time has meaning only in reference to an associated space. Furthermore, each place in space-time encompasses an infinity of space-times in relative motion. These ideas are difficult to fathom. Perhaps they are beyond comprehension, but Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s) is able to unite space and time by introducing a time delay of several seconds between the camera and the monitor. Each of the myriad reflections encompasses two space-times-the present of the enclosure, and the past of the monitor. Though not an exact analogue of special relativity, the reflections challenge traditional ideas about space and time.

The images on the monitor inset in the wall correspond to the experience of a memory, which has two distinguishing qualities: the impressions of a memory exist in the present, and they are remembered to have existed in the past. These elements are explicit in the German expression for memory: ist geschehen which translates literally as “is happened”: a memory “is” in the present as well as has “happened” in the past. Within Present Continuous Past(s), the knowledge that the current moment will appear as a memory after a short time delay adds an element of consciousness of the present instant. Viewers flail their arms in order to distinguish clearly the difference between the live image and the delay. In the normal course of events, people are rarely aware that now is the present instant.

The Specious Present
Time, as a phenomenon of human experience, is universally recognized. But the origin and properties of a sense of time remain themes of philosophical disputation. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Edmund Husserl’s philosophical tome published in 1905--the same year Einstein proclaimed the theory of special relativity--proposes that time is not divisible. In his analysis, he allows “starting points” because an awareness of events beginning (and ending) exists, but he insists that duration cannot be divided into the instants of its existence (4).

The philosopher William James, writing in the late nineteenth century, expounds contradictory views. For James, time consciousness is stitched together from pieces of time; long times are conceived by combining shorter segments. He attributes the original intuition of time to “a constantly conscious duration,” lasting from a few seconds to not more than a minute, which he terms “the specious present.”

In Decay Time (1974), Bill Viola isolates a unit of time, and impresses it on a viewer’s consciousness. The installation consists of a darkened room, intermittently illuminated by a strobe. Only for an instant does a camera aimed at a viewer have enough light to form a likeness, which appears as a life-size projection on a wall. In Viola’s words, “The image is
born, flashes before the viewer’s eyes, then dies in blackness, enduring only in memory” (5). The remembrance, William James would claim, is the experience at the foundation of time consciousness. The blinding flash of the strobe suitably represents the knife-edge between past and future. The record of that instant, appearing on a screen and slowly fading, is in keeping with William James’s characterization of the present “Where is it, this present?” he asks. “It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming” (6).

A Time-Space System
Gary Hill’s Suspension of Disbelief (for Marinne) (1992) comprises 30 rasters (monitors stripped of their outer casings) set horizontally side by side in an I-beam. Images flash from one cluster of screens to another, in shifting patterns reminiscent of a musical composition. Two young and slender nudes, a man and a woman, stretch across several monitors, fitting within the narrow frame. They are in repose, yet their images are propelled rapidly across the screens, at times slowly and sometimes wildly as in a flamenco dance. In an unusual effect, a figure, restricted to only two screens, appears to fold back onto itself, hovering in place like a hummingbird. ()r briskly shuttling, the personage may suddenly stop, suspended in a nervous stasis. For a moment the body becomes statuesque, as if carved in marble and laid to rest atop a medieval tomb.

The full figure displayed across several screens in Suspension of Disbelief is an illusion. The original footage was a pan shot of the person. If the clip were played back normally on a video deck, only a segment of the body would appear on a monitor at any instant. The phantasm is generated by time-shifting discrete frames-consecutive frames are lined up and then played at the same time so as to portray a complete entity.

Suspension of Disbelief implements a different sort of shift to engender motion. A computer-controlled device hurtles images across the rasters by directing one frame of video to a monitor and steering subsequent frames of the series to adjacent screens. The 30 frames in 1 second of video played at standard speed matches the 30 frames in the I-beam. In effect, duration has acquired spatial representation.

Although Hill uses only recorded images, the present is manifest through a system of “switching” individual video frames. The computerized electronic “deranger” slices duration finely, concurrently reconstituting the visual sequences in an elaborate manner. The orderly flow of time has been transformed into a multidirectional torrent.

As the end of the millennium approaches, and with recent books proclaiming the end of history and the end of art, an essay that treats time in the twentieth century- would be remiss if it did not proclaim the end of time. Clearly the arrow of time is bent. The assurance that time flows in an unending regular manner no longer applies. Time must now conform to a menu of future events. Doctors, for example, herald the advent of immortality: some children born in the coming century will not die (although time inflation may make their endless life seem bounded). The final coup de grace, relegating time to the overflowing dustbin of history, will occur when Einstein’s theory of relativity comes to life and an astronaut returns from a space voyage to discover that his or her child is older in appearance as well as in . . . what should it be called, Einstein time? Of course appointments will still be made at a certain hour, and there will be time for coffee breaks, but a widespread awareness will exist that we don’t really know what time it is.

References and Notes
1. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
2. Robert Bruce Lindsay and Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (New York: Dover Publications, 1957).
3. Abraham Pais, “Subtle Is the Lord. . .” The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
4. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, translated by James S. Churchill (Indiana University Press, 1964).
5. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer eds., Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture;Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990) p. 483.
6. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) p. 398.

Above copied from: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/ptext.php3?id=51&page=1

Global Grove, Nam June Paik

The video was broadcast by WNET-TV on 30 January 1974

Nam June Paik--composer, performer, and video artist--played a pivotal role in introducing artists and audiences to the possibilities of using video for artistic expression. His works explore the ways in which performance, music, video images, and the sculptural form of objects can be used in various combinations to question our accepted notions of the nature of television.

Growing up in Korea, Nam June Paik studied piano and composition. When his family moved, first to Hong Kong and then to Japan, he continued his studies in music while completing a degree in aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. After graduating, Paik went to Germany to pursue graduate work in philosophy. There he became part of a group of Fluxus artists who were challenging established notions of what constituted art. Their work often found expression in performances and happenings that incorporated random events and found objects.

In 1959 Paik performed his composition Hommage a John Cage. This performance combined a pre-recorded collage of music and sounds with "on stage" sounds created by people, a live hen, a motorcycle, and various objects. Random events marked this and other Paik compositions. Instruments were often altered or even destroyed during the performance. Most performances were as much a visual as a musical experience.

As broadcast television programming invaded the culture, Paik began to experiment with ways to alter the video image. In 1963 he included his first video sculptures in an exhibition, Exposition of Music--Electronic Television. Twelve television sets were scattered throughout the exhibit space. The electronic components of these sets were modified to create unexpected effects in the images being received. Other video sculptures followed. Distorted TV used manipulation of the sync pulse to alter the image. Magnet TV used a large magnet which could be moved on the outside of the television set to change the image and create abstract patterns of light. Paik began to incorporate television sets into a series of robots. The early robots were constructed largely of bits and pieces of wire and metal; later ones were built from vintage radio and television sets refitted with updated electronic components.

Some of Paik's video installations involve a single monitor, others use a series of monitors. In TV Buddha a statue of Buddha sits facing its own image on a closed-circuit television screen. For TV Clock twenty-four monitors are lined up. The image on each is compressed into a single line with the lines on succeeding monitors rotated to suggest the hands of a clock representing each hour of the day. In Positive Egg the video camera is aimed at a white egg on a black cloth. In a series of larger and larger monitors, the image is magnified until the actual egg becomes an abstract shape on the screen.

In 1964 Paik moved to New York City and began a collaboration with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman to produce works combining video with performance. In TV Bra for Living Sculpture small video monitors became part of the cellist's costume. With TV Cello television sets were stacked to suggest the shape of the cello. As Moorman drew the bow across the television sets, images of her playing, video collages of other cellists, and live images of the performance area combined.

When the first consumer-grade portable video cameras and recorders went on sale in New York in 1965, Paik purchased one. Held up in a traffic jam created by Pope Paul VI's motorcade, Paik recorded the parade and later that evening showed it to friends at Cafe a Go-Go. With this development in technology it was possible for the artist to create personal and experimental video programs.

Paik was invited to participate in several experimental workshops including one at WGBH in Boston and another at WNET in New York City. The Medium is the Medium, his first work broadcast by WGBH, was a video collage that raised questions about who is in control of the viewing experience. At one point in a voice-over Paik instructed the viewers to follow his directions, to close or open their eyes, and finally to turn off the set. At WGBH Paik and electronics engineer Shuya Abe built the first model of Paik's video synthesizer which produced non-representational images. Paik used the synthesizer to accompany a rock-and-roll soundtrack in Video Commune and to illustrate Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. At WNET Paik completed a series of short segments, The Selling of New York, which juxtaposed the marketing of New York and the reality of life in the city. Global Groove, produced with John Godfrey, opened with an explanation that it was a "glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." What followed was a rapid shift from rock-and-roll dance sequences to Allen Ginsberg to Charlotte Moorman with the TV cello to an oriental dancer to John Cage to a Navaho drummer to a Living Theatre performance. Throughout, the video image was manipulated by layering images, reducing dancers to a white line outlining their form against a wash of brilliant color, creating evolving abstract forms. Rapid edits of words and movements and seemingly random shifts in the backgrounds against which the dancers perform create a dreamlike sense of time and space.

Nam June Paik pioneered the development of electronic techniques to transform the video image from a literal representation of objects and events into an expression of the artist's view of those objects and events. In doing so, he challenges our accepted notion of the reality of televised events. His work questions time and memory, the nature of music and art, even the essence of our sensory experiences. Most significantly, perhaps, that work questions our experience, our understanding, and our definitions of "television."

-Lucy Liggett

above copied from:

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/P/htmlP/paiknamjun/paiknamjun.htm