Video Visionary
A sexy clip from the father of video art, Nam June Paik
The pioneering video artist Nam June Paik was born in Korea in 1932, the son of a wealthy industrialist. Fleeing the Korean War, his family ended up in Japan, where Paik studied music and art, but he left for Germany, where he met John Cage and joined the neo-Dada arts group, Fluxus, in the early 1960s. In 1964 he moved to New York, and his experiments with video installations and performance became legend. While in residence as an artist at WNET, the New York PBS affiliate, he created Global Groove, a videotape that included manipulated excerpts from TV shows and earlier works by Paik and video artists Jud Yalkut and Robert Greer, as well as contributions by such Paik friends as John Cage and Allen Ginsberg. It was broadcast on WNET-TV on January 30, 1974, and is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Paik, who introduces Global Groove with the portentous statement, “This is 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,” died in 2006, which is late enough for him to have confirmed some of the uncanny truths of that prediction, not to mention some of its inevitable inaccuracies, such as the diminishing relevance of phone books and TV Guide.
