Video out of performance art

Nam June Paik (American, b. Seoul, Korea, 1932 - 2006)Zen for Head, Fluxus performance, 1962

Nam June Paik, 1961 Fluxus Festival of New Music, Weisbaden, German

Shigeko Kubota (American b. Japan, 1937) performing her Vagina Painting,taken July 4th, 1965, New York City during Perpetual Fluxus Festival

(paint brush attached to crotch)

Nam June Paik and John Cage in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage Video by Shigeko Kubota, 1972 [still]

Paik, (left) Zen for TV, 1963(right) TV Buddha, 1974

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media, first published in 1964

The period after World War-II in the US is considered the last and final birth of television.  The explosion of sets into the American marketplace occurred in 1948-1949.

Paik (left) began interfering with television imagesin the early 1960s; (right) TV Magnet, 1965

“Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.” Paik

Paik, (left) TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969; (right) Opera Sextronique with Charlotte Moorman (US 1931-1991), 1969

(left) Mooreman, Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus Action, 1966; (left) with Yoko Ono and John Lennon (1971); (right, below) Moorman performing Paik's Concerto for TV Cello

and Videotapes (1971) at Galeria Bonino, New York, November 23, 1971;

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/

Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1974; Paik in studio of WGBH, which broadcast Global Groove

'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.'

- Paik

Paik, Video Fish, 1975, Three channel video installation with aquariums, water, 45 live Japanese fish, Pompidou Center (Paris) collection, 7 of 15 monitors

Video Flag, (1985-1996)70 video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and

metal housing on rubber wheels, 94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in.

Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard, Paul Garrin, David Hartnett, and Stephen Vitiello, Modulation in Sync, 2000. Three-channel video and stereo sound

installation with 100 monitors, seven projectors, two lasers, water, mirrors, projection screens, and metal structure, variable dimensions

Laurie Anderson (US b. 1947)Duets on Ice, performance inNew York City and Genoa, Italy, 1973-4, playing Bach while wearing ice skates embedded in ice. When ice melted the performance ended.

Compare Edouard ManetThe Old Musician, 1862, artistas wanderer, ragpicker, outcast

Laurie Anderson, performance-multimedia spectacle, United States Part II, 1980Single from the performance recording, “O Superman” hit #2 on the UK pop charts.

The Orpheum, New York; (right) album covers United States I-IV, 1984

Anderson, United States Part I, 980, Orpheum TheaterMultiple disjunctive narratives. Voice through the harmonizer shifts from “voice of

authority (deep, masculine) to female (her own). The woman repeatedly asks “Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” The response is “You can read the signs.”

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3307780879243212776&q=laurie+anderson&ei=tJUiSK36FYSIqgP2mpW2AQ

Anderson’s United States Part I opens with her modified voice-of-authority reading:

A certain American religious sect has been looking at conditions of the world during the Flood. According to their calculations, during the Flood the winds, tides and currents were in an overall southeasterly direction. This would mean that in order for Noah's Ark to have ended up on Mount Ararat, it would have to have started out several thousand miles to the west. This would then locate pre-Flood civilization somewhere in the area of Upstate New York, and the Garden of Eden roughly in New York City.

Now, in order to get from one place to another, something must move. No one in New York remembers moving, and there are no traces of Biblical history in the Upstate New York area. So we are led to the only available conclusion in this time warp, and that is that the Ark has simply not left yet.

(below right) Poster from Anderson’s The End of the Moon, 2005, BAM performance(top) at NASA as the agency’s first artist-in-residence, 2004

Video performance: Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968,

60 minutes (excerpt, 5 minutes)

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 2: “Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light”

Video performance: 1977

Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained38 minutes

“I did my best to interrupt voyeurism by having a long shot – a stationary shot that fatigues the viewer and diminishes aspects of the character’s presence on

the screen. It becomes boring to look at something without camera mobility and without reaction shots. (Rosler, 1981)

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 4: Gendered Confrontations

Video performance: 1978

Nam June Paik, Merce by Merce by Paik28 minutes

A tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel DuchampVideo was choreographed for 2-D monitor screen by Cunningham. Audio

includes voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns. Part 2 is by Paik and Shigeko Kubota and includes montage-interview with Marcel Duchamp and meeting

between Cunningham and Leo Castelli.

“I think I understand time better than the video artists who came from painting-sculpture. Music is the manipulation of time. All music forms have different structures and buildup. As painters understand abstract space, I understand

abstract time. Nam June Paik, 1974

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 5: Performance of Video-Imaging Tools