Page 115 - The Pioneers, November 26, 2016 Hong Kong

Fig. 1 Score for the third movement of String
product of capitalism that can never occupy a place in the
great hall of true art. However, Paik makes an observation
of an entirely different kind, believing that it is precisely
television's openness, its centrality in our lives, and its
constant, uninterrupted trickle of broadcast information that
gives it even greater potential in developing art and culture. temporal elements. Linking the art world and the media,
The message emphasized in Paik's work is that as long as
technology such as television and computers are used in
a humanistic way for our own advancement, it can create
an ideal blend of technology and art that will bring greater
diversity and richness to our culture. The creative intent
behind Enlightenment 78 RPMs, its source and aesthetic
grounding, embody the same vein of thought, which in the
work achieves a mature and incisive realization. In this work
a TV monitor, broadcasting the Buddha on the Victrola,
replaces books, which are supposedly displayed in the stand
and symbolize knowledge and enlightenment. Enlightenment
78 RPMs reminds us of Paik's interview with a magazine in
1969, "The real issue implied in 'Art and Technology' is not
to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the
technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing
rapidly. We will demonstrate the human use of technology,
and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but
stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and
humanistic ways of using our technology."
Though Paik is perhaps most widely recognized for his
prodigious body of video sculptures like Enlightenment 78
RPMs, his experiments with satellite technology, which
began in 1977 at Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, where
he collaborated on a live telecast with Joseph Beuys and
Quartet, an original composition by Paik,
written in Tokyo and Munich, 1955-1957.
圖1 《弦樂四重奏》第三章樂譜，白南準於1955 年
至 1957年於東京與慕尼黑填寫的原創音樂作品
Douglas Davis, are significant trials as well to employ
new technologies of the era. His live international satellite
broadcasts of the 1980s, including Good Morning Mr. Orwell,
Bye Bye Kipling, and Wrap Around the World are global video
installations that conjoin disparate spatial, contextual and
pop culture and the avant-garde, technology and philosophy,
Paik's works resonate with an irreverent humour and
subversive brilliance that have influenced contemporary art,
video and television. Despite a stroke that debilitated Paik
in 1996, he continued his artistic invention of new media
such as laser and computer. His last retrospective exhibition,
“The World of Nam June Paik,” which announced the new
millennium at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New
York in February 2000, was the result of his restless effort
to experiment with new mediums (Fig. 3). The splendid
retrospective proved that Paik Nam-June wrote an entirely
new page in the development of modern art, one that was
aesthetically significant and historically pioneering. For that
reason it influenced the following generations of subsequent
artists, encouraging them to adopt non-traditional expressive
media to present and interpret their visions of modern
society and to explore even broader artistic spaces. Paik's
work has deepened the artistic substance of Asian art with
its uniqueness and rich cultural implications, but in terms
of media art, and the development of modern art in general,
he also examined issues that were international in nature
and of broad humanistic concern, which made Paik a great
20th century artist, one of the few to achieve truly global
influence.
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