My essay “Paik, Musically: Fluxus—Stockhausen—Cage” for the online catalog of a research project on Nam June Paik at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, has just been published. The publication is bilingual, English and Korean. I am thrilled to find myself in such a distinguished, international company of authors: René Block, Byeongwon Ha, Sungook Hong, Eunji Kim, Manfred Montwé, Jasia Reichardt, Shinya Watanabe and Gregory Zinman. My sincerest thanks to Eunji Park and and Deoksun Park for the invitation to contribute to this project and to what will become a physical book accompanying a Paik exhibition next year. Looking forward to seeing the exhibition!
Poster for the second Avant-Garde Annual Festival of New York, 1964. Ha YoungJun Collection.
I was thrilled to have been invited to share thoughts on the concepts of time, change, materiality, and art since the 1960s in the Bard Graduate Center series Three Questions.
We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (2019) terminates a long silence in publishing primary sources related to Nam June Paik’s work. The volume sheds new light on Paik’s artistic-philosophical project which is currently on view in the traveling exhibition Nam June Paik: The Future is Now soon to reopen at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
What does it mean to work across media and genres utilizing cutting edge technologies to produce artistic work? What does it mean to compose works “unusually” rather than to follow a pre-imagined ideal? Can assembling the world from found materials, embracing chance and error, and tinkering with what is already given become an alternative to the conventional modes of creation?
Nam June Paik is rightly acknowledged as a pioneer and propagator of the use of new technologies to generate works that expanded our understanding of what an artwork is, what it does, and how it perseveres over time despite its technological transformations. Notably an action performer and grant experimenter of television in his early years— his emergent intermedia practice owed much to his musical and aesthetic studies in Japan and Munich as well as to his involvement in the avant-garde and electronic music and Fluxus in Germany— Paik spent most of his adult time in New York adapting the language of video and television as an artistic means. The works he created, and these which rest dormant in archival sketches, writerly drafts, and visual mock-ups, speak to his immense ambition and will to experiment with the potentialities offered by then little-explored electronic media.
The works Paik created speak to his immense ambition and will to experiment with the potentialities offered by then little-explored electronic media
Nam June Paik installeert TV Buddha in het Stedelijk Museum. Foto: Rene Block
Paik ranged widely in his selection of materials and the interdisciplinarity of his activities. He challenged the common understanding of an artwork as a physical object and how an artist might relinquish uniqueness and singularity in favor of producing many versions of his works. Among Paik’s greatest innovations—and among the greatest challenges to traditional collecting, conservation, and presentation—was his rejection of the singular authentic object, in support of which he habitually released work in numerous versions, variations, and clones. Moreover, Paik’s open-ended creative process allowed for modifications and interventions long after his artworks began their life as part of a museum collection—an issue that became increasingly familiar, if not problematic, to the custodians of the so-called “new media.”
Reading through Paik’s collected writings, one gets a chance to interpret his works on display in a new light. For instance, Paik’s instructions and scores reprinted in this volume render their realization—the physical manifestations of his artworks—repeatable by liberating them from the obligation to persist in one ongoing, unique manifestation. At least two installations on view at the Stedelijk follow this logic: TV Garden, 1974 (a techno-ecological garden featuring a video Global Groove) and TVBuddha, 1974 (a minimalistic, sculptural ensemble including a Buddha statue gazing at its televisual image displayed in real-time on a monitor via a closed-circuit video). A reading of certain media installations in light of their historical-ontological proximity to conceptual art allows to build a parallel between these conceptual tendencies, score-based works, and installation instructions. Rather than limit these artworks to the conditions of installation art—space, viewer, temporality—we can approach them as intrinsically conceptual works: based on a concept conveyed in instructions or a score and executed by others in an extension of the notion of collaboration. This “execution by the others” imposes a new challenge on conservation and curation. Whereas curators appear to enjoy increasing interpretative freedom in executing these works—for instance, making the curatorial decision to reinstall TV Garden along the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum or in a more confined, rectangular space of K21 in Düsseldorf—conservators often remain trapped in the convention of fidelity to the material and its initial occurrence. Strikingly, TVBuddha, which was to be replaced by a similar, less antique statue and a monitor during a renovation at the Stedelijk, had to remain in its physical form as a material “original.” On the other side of this spectrum, the recent manifestation of Paik’s multimedia work Sistine Chapel, 1993, at Tate Modern functions today as a free curatorial interpretation rather than a genuine reconstruction (that is, one that follows the reliance on the sameness of materials, technologies and the parameters of time and space).
Nam June Paik, Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn, 1984. Collectie Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Foto: Peter Tijhuis
Nam June Paik, One Candle / Candle Projection, 1989. Tentoonstellingskopie, met dank aan de Nam June Paik Estate.
The MIT volume of 445 pages extends these objectual observations to the realm of the written word (mainly in, or translated into, English—a wish allegedly expressed by Paik). The readers encounter Paik’s vivid intellect in a variety of notated formats and forms: From “speculative writings” that entail Paik’s canonical texts such as “Exposition of Music” (1963), “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television” (1963) or “Electronic Video Recorder” (1965) to less familiar haiku-style scores, work and performance instructions, scripts and plans for new projects, commentaries and letters to his friends and mentors.
The writings reveal Paik as an intensely political person. Filtered through his intellectually and geographically nomadic, always questioning and critical attitude, his commentaries on culture and politics create a fascinating picture of the time in which he was active. His modest, unassuming manner and a charismatic willingness to collaborate and share credit afforded him opportunities to realize large-dimensional projects, such as his intricate video walls and complex satellite pieces. As we move through the book, the editors offer introductions and commentaries on Paik’s projects that help contextualize the original sources.
Paik’s modest, unassuming manner and a charismatic willingness to collaborate and share credit afforded him opportunities to realize large-dimensional projects, such as his intricate video walls and complex satellite pieces
The book does not amend Paik’s often idiosyncratic formulations, his wandering between various languages and symbolic systems of language and notated music. The many pages of reprinted documents provide a fascinating insight into Paik’s restless spirit, his preferred modes of inscription and annotation, his circling around concepts and their active reworking on the page often marked by endless amendments.
Although the volume credits other sources, such as, among others, the archives Sohm and Beuys and the papers of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, it largely—and successfully—builds upon materials drawn from Nam June Paik Papers. Since 2009 housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a gift of the Nam June Paik Estate, this collection is notably the richest source of archival materials spanning almost the entirety of Paik’s oeuvre. Working through Paik Papers in the fall of 2019 somewhat simultaneously with the appearance of Paik’s collected writings, I glimpsed a world of his creative process shaped by a restless mind. Instructions, plans, screenplays, scripts, invoices, and endless lists presented a vast realm of Paik’s activities impossible to order in any representable, finished register. One of the benefits that comes from the great effort of selective ordering such idiosyncratic, versatile life project like Paik’s into a collected volume is that it offers an apparently complete, even if only momentary, overview of his intellectual effort. This non-definite, assembled result is an attempt to “mount a few new antennae on the tower of Paik’s oeuvre as signals to others,” as Zinman aptly puts it. The editors master this task in an elegant manner providing the reader with an unprecedented opportunity to delve into Paik’s scripted cosmos.
Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, 1974. Collectie Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Foto Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Zaaloverzicht Nam June Paik – The Future is Now, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (14 maart t/m 23 augustus 2020). Foto: Peter Tijhuis
Zaaloverzicht Nam June Paik – The Future is Now, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (14 maart t/m 23 augustus 2020). Foto: Peter Tijhuis
Writings based on archival sources, their selection, assemblage and ordering from the chaos of multiple spaces and loci, are never objective, impartial or unbiased. Like an interpreter of a musical score, a scholar, curator or for that matter any activator of these materials actualizes the archive according to his or her interests, background, education and knowledge. The archive is never neutral; it not only reflects the episteme of the times of its activation, but it also further determines it. The archive—understood here as a totality of materials left behind by an artist—conceals as much as it reveals. Certain areas of knowledge cannot be activated for political, social or economic reasons. Various realms of the archive remain unavailable due to geographical or personal constraints.
In We Are in Open Circuits, certain motifs in Paik’s writings reflect earlier thoughts or act as “protentions” (in Husserlian sense) to those yet to be explored. This logic of activating and working through the concepts by using what is already given is also intrinsic to artworks such as TV Buddha, nota bene the first of Paik’s work to enter a public collection – the Stedelijk. Paik initially conceived TV Buddha to fill a gap in one of his exhibitions at the Bonino Gallery in New York. When the Stedelijk museum acquired it, the former director of the museum Edy de Wilde asked that the piece be unique. “I have too many new ideas to devote my time for the repetition of an old work,” Paik responded. In the end, TV Buddha spawned perhaps the largest series of works in Paik’s oeuvre. We don’t mind—one simply can’t get enough.
DEZE TEKST IS GEPUBLICEERD IN METROPOLIS M NR 1-2020 SENSORY. STEUN METROPOLIS M, NEEM EEN ABONNEMENT. ALS JE NU EEN JAARABONNEMENT AFSLUIT STUREN WE JE HET NIEUWSTE NUMMER GRATIS TOE. MAIL JE NAAM EN ADRES NAAR karolien@metropolism.com
NAM JUNE PAIK: THE FUTURE IS NOW is at view at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam until August 23, 2020. The museum will re-open on June 1.
We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik,edited by John G. Hanhardt, Gregory Zinman and Edith Decker-Phillips, The MIT Press 2019
Metropolis M has just published my review of the new edited volume We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik, edited by Gregory Zinamn, John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips. The review includes insights into the Paik’s traveling exhibition, Nam Juen Paik: The Future is Now, soon to be open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
The essay, titled “Archiefactiveringen” (Engl. Archival Activations) discusses what does it mean to work across media and genres utilizing cutting edge technologies to produce artistic work? What does it mean to compose works “unusually” rather than to follow a pre-imagined ideal? Can assembling the world from found materials, embracing chance and error, and tinkering with what is already given become an alternative to the conventional modes of creation?
An excerpt from the publication is attached below. English version will follow this summer online at Metropolis M.
Wat betekent het om artistiek werk te maken in verschillende media en genres, en met geavanceerde technologieën? Wat betekent het om werken op een ‘ongewone’ manier te componeren in plaats van een vooraf ingebeeld ideaal te volgen? Kan het samenstellen van de wereld uit gevonden materialen, het omarmen van toeval en falen, en knutselen met dat wat gegeven is, een alternatief zijn voor de conventionele vormen van creatie?
Nam
June Paik wordt terecht gezien als een pionier in het gebruik van nieuwe
technologieën om werken te maken die ons begrip van wat een kunstwerk is, wat
het doet en hoe het de tand des tijds doorstaat ondanks technologische transformaties,
heeft uitgebreid. In zijn vroege jaren was hij vooral een performer en experimenteerde
hij met televisie. Zijn opkomende crossmediale praktijk had veel te danken aan
zijn muzikale en artistieke studies in Japan en München, evenals aan zijn betrokkenheid
bij de avant-gardistische en elektronische muziek, en Fluxus in Duitsland. Paik
bracht het grootste deel van zijn tijd door in New York om de taal van video en
televisie in te zetten als artistiek medium. De kunstwerken die hij maakte
en de schetsen, aantekeningen en visuele mock-ups uit archieven tonen zijn
immense ambitie en behoefte om te experimenteren met de mogelijkheden die de toen
nog weinig toegepaste elektronische media te bieden hadden.
Paik gebruikte een brede selectie aan materialen en artistieke disciplines. Hij daagde het algemene begrip van een kunstwerk als een fysiek object uit en onderzocht hoe een kunstenaar afstand kan doen van uniciteit en singulariteit door het produceren van meerdere versies van een werk. Eén van de grootste innovaties van Paik – en één van de grootste uitdagingen voor de traditionele manier van verzamelen, conserveren en presenteren – was zijn afwijzing van het unieke authentieke object; hij maakte gewoonlijk werk in talloze versies, variaties en kopieën. Bovendien stond Paiks open creatieve proces wijzigingen en ingrepen toe lang nadat zijn kunstwerken hun leven begonnen als onderdeel van een museumcollectie; een kwestie die de beheerders van de zogenaamde ‘nieuwe media’ steeds vertrouwder werd, maar daarom niet minder problematisch was.
De publicatie We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (2019) werpt nieuw licht op Paiks artistiek-filosofische project en brengt een einde aan een lange publicatiestilte van primaire bronnen over zijn werk. Het boek is bijzonder actueel vanwege de reizende tentoonstelling Nam June Paik: The Future is Now, die tot voor kort te zien was in Tate Modern in Londen, straks opent in het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam en later doorreist naar instellingen in Chicago, San Francisco en Singapore.
Hanna B. Hölling, “Archiefactiveringen,” Metropolis M, 44, 1 (2020): 42-45
Join us on Thursday, February 13, 2020, at the annual College Art Association Conference in Chicago, for an exciting panel “Feedback and Feedforth: New Approaches to Nam June Paik,” organized by Gregory Zinman, Georgia Institute of Technology, and featuring presentations by Marina Isgro, Johanna Gosse, and Gregory Zinman. Remarks by Hanna Hölling.
I am thrilled about the publication of three new reviews of my recent monograph, Paik’s Virtual Archive: Time, Change and Materiality in Media Art (University of California Press, 2017) in the Kunstchronik (by Anna Schäffler, January 2020, in German), Visual Studies (by Daniel Kayes, November 2019, in English) and in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (by Jonathan Kemp, October 2019, in English). At an earlier stage, the book has been also endorsed by scholars of media and critical studies, and art history as well as media artists – see the “book” section of this website. These endorsements as well as the reviews published in 2018–Andrea Gyorody’s review incaa.review (2018) and Gregory Zinmann’s review in Art Bulletin(2018)–form an invaluable body of critical reflection on the book’s imperatives and aims, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank their authors for their time, thoughtfulness and intellect.
A year ago, I accepted the invitation to work on an edited book Landscape, whichis the first in the new series that offers a discursive contestation with the topic of artistic engagement with landscape. The book entails several contributions by established scholars of Land art and Environmental art, along with quotations of canonical writings on landscape and examples of artistic interventions. On the one hand, the project builds on a rich tradition of landscape writings, while, on the other, it simultaneously attempts at a reorientation of the category of Land art. Landscape accompanies the outdoor biennial Art Safiental and the international summer school Alps Art Academy in the Swiss Alps that explore art in the peripheral, rural and alpine regions. A detailed, visually compelling catalog of artistic projects conducted during the 2016 and 2018 biennials can be found in the final part of the book.
Next to the introduction co-authored with Johannes M. Hedinger, the book features my essay “The Lands of Art: On Land (Art) and its Shifting Grounds” that offers a historical overview of the origins of Land Art and a selection of canonized works and positions, as well as newer ways of using and interpreting the environment. Issues of temporal and spatial remoteness, decay, entropy, mediatization and documentation are analyzed against the backdrop of land interpretation.
Editors:Johannes M. Hedinger, Hanna B. Hölling Series: Documents of Land and Environmental Art, volume 1
Essays by: Aufdi Aufdermauer, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, William L. Fox, Johannes M. Hedinger, Hanna B. Hölling, Mattli Hunger, Sibylle Omlin, Janis Osolin, Lukas Ott, Jano Felice Pajarola, Jolanda Rechsteiner, Emily Eliza Scott, Chris Taylor, Lucie Tuma.
English and German, 288 pages, 114 images
Publication date: 1 December 2019
ISBN: 978 3 909090 94 5
Order: Vexer Verlag St. Gallen/Berlin
The anthology of essays, titled The Explicit Material: On the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation Cultures, has just arrived in hardcover, solidly and beautifully done! Many thanks to Brill Publishers!
I wish to thank the series editor, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, my amazing co-editors Francesca Bewer and Katharina Ammann, Brill editors and our brilliant authors and contributors to the volume, in alphabetical order: Katharina Ammann, Francesca Bewer, Judit Bodor, Thea Burns, Birgit Cleppe, Paul Eggert, David Lowenthal, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Elisabeth Pye, Dawn Rogala, and Anna Schäffler.
I am thrilled to be joining the incoming cohort of Smithsonian Fellows in Residence, 2019-2020, to pursue my Fluxus research with the support of Terra Foundation for American Art!
Der Vortrag beschäftig sich mit der Charakteristik der Performance als zeitbasierte Kunst und der Notwendigkeit diese aus eine multidisziplinären Perspektive anzugehen. Folgende Fragen stehen zur Debatte: Welche Formen des Nachlebens (Leben nach dem Akt) gibt es in Performance-basierten Kunst? Wie kann man Performance aus Sicht der Konservierung konzipieren? Und welche Konsequenzen hat die Konservierung für eine ephemere, kurzlebige Natur einer Performance? Der Vortrag bietet eine Einführung in die Problematik im Umgang mit Performance und analysiert die Position der Konservirungswissentschaft in den bereits existierenden geisteswissenschaftlichen Diskurs. Dem Referat folgt ein Künstlergespräch, das ein Beispiel performancebasierter Kunst in einem dialogischen Gespräch präsentiert.
