Media Art

In March 1963, Nam June Paik held a solo show at a small gallery in Wuppertal, West Germany. Thirteen modified televisions, a doctored piano, Zen instruments. It was the moment a cathode-ray tube became a paintbrush. There's a famous story attached to him: in 1965, Paik supposedly bought one of the first portable Sony video cameras the day it went on sale, filmed the Pope's motorcade from the back of a taxi, and screened the footage that same night — told as “the day video art was born.” Look closer, though, and that year's cameras weren't battery-powered yet; the equipment weighed 22 kilograms and needed a power outlet. None of it would have fit in a taxi. The better story seems to have been tidied up after the fact. Paik's own path matters just as much to this map. He fled the Korean War to Japan, studied music, art history, and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, and graduated in 1956 with a thesis on Schoenberg. He later built devices that warped television images like paint on a canvas — developed jointly with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe. Technology and concept were passing back and forth the whole time. Around the same period in Japan, Gutai and Mono-ha were running on a parallel track.