Korean artist Nam June Paik’s intersecting practice of experimental tape recorder composition, performance and post-modern philosophy was directly informed by ‘his friendships with composer John Cage, Fluxus founder George Maciunas, and Joseph Beuys’ (Hanhardt, pp. 21)[1] As part of the Fluxus collective, Paik helped usher in their radically alternative, entirely new approach to art making and practices.
His 1960 piece, Etude for Piano is a tape collage that was staged in Gallerie 22, Düsseldorf, in combination with live performance art. Assertive, contortionist interpolations or samples of western classical standards like Beethoven’s ‘5th Symphony in C Minor’ burst in and out of view, intercut with wailing and cries, both those of the artist’s and ‘twenty distressed virgins'[2], power tools and in the ultimate finale, Paik destroying the piano itself. It’s a jagged, abrasive composition, and entirely post-modern in its construction and audience interaction.
As John G. Hanhardt states, ‘Paik’s interest in performance… reflected his desire to emancipate the viewer from the tyranny of one-way communication. He sought to create a community of shared expression that could alter the way art is consumed’ (Hanhardt, pp. 21)[1]
Like the name Fluxus suggests, the collective shared a fundamentally fluid and indeterminate artistic process. Despite Maciunas’ manifestos, not adhering to a form, style, or even a group, was an intrinsic aspect of the Fluxus collective, and by extension, Paik’s work in this era. Paik’s collage-like approach to the piece demonstrates how the post-modern ‘impossibility of control… became the ultimate incentive for Paik’s art and the foundation for… electronic music. In his view, electronic music exhibited a “fixed, determined tendency both in its serial compositional method and in its ontological form (that of tape recordings destined for repetition).”‘ (Ammer, pp. 70)[3]
Highly collaborative and porous in sharing influence, ‘the most important artists to Paik were Joseph Beuys in Germany, whom he met early on and who took an axe to the “prepared pianos” in Paik’s seminal 1963 exhibition, and John Cage, whom he also met in Germany, in the late 1950s.’ (Hanhardt, pp.43)[1]. Etude for Piano itself was dedicated to John Cage, “Hommage à John Cage, Music for Tapes and Piano“.
A key tenet of postmodernist theory is the intentional destabilisation of epistemic meaning and certainty, a disharmonic acknowledgement of the fragmentary nature of life in the modern (or now postmodern) world. The fragmentary, wildly composed work of Nam June Paik closely aligns with the ethos of postmodernist thought.
Learning about Paik’s, and Fluxus’, work during this era was both interesting and challenging. The core philosophy of postmodern thought is a deliberately upending of the perceived forward progression of society; a challenge to the assumption that ‘we’ll all be ok and we’ll never stop improving’. The uncertain worlds of the late 1950s and early 1960s and today have a lot in common. We could either turn one way, into abject nightmarish chaos, or course correct and create a new way to live, marginally freer of generational debts and violence. To me, Fluxus is a deliberately ill-defined acceptance, and response to, this possibility of change. This ill-definition makes it difficult for me to draw connection between the raw melting pot of a performance with any deliberate thematic elements, unless, of course, the chaos itself acts as the postmodern response. Fluxus as a self-referential framework to support Paik’s work feels like a very cross-pollinated group; Etude for Piano being informed almost more by Paik’s own experience within that collective, than a direct impetus. It’s hard to say, it’s an elusive work. I’m torn by Fluxus and this work, it’s evasion of direct meaning, but I admire the brazen insanity of the performance. It’s a dynamic combination of multiple rounds of diverse movements. Its innervated unpredictability, the surprising, confrontational audience participation is what excites me.
As Paik himself stated, ‘the beauty of moving theatre lies in this “surprise a priori,” because almost all the audience in uninvited, not knowing what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer – or better speaking – organizer, composer, player.’ (Paik, unpaginated)[4] The chaos theatre of Etude for Piano, and its revolving number of collaborators, contributors and iterations in the early 1960s, brings Paik and the Fluxus movement into idealogical alignment with postmodern theory’s fragmentary worldview.
Finding documentation of these elusive performances was not easy. The report of one piece containing ‘the cries of twenty distressed virgins’ disturbed me. When the piece is abject chaos, I find myself doubting if Paik had any sensitive reasoning behind this inclusion, and was just appropriating pain; shearing off its weight and meaning to exist as just another shocking noise among many in his destructive, masculine performance. This aspect of noise and sound art troubles me: The potential for, predominantly male, artists to exploit real-world horrors, stripping them of context and using them as cheapened Halloween sonic props in their egoist stage work. Of course, I could be wrong. The documentation is limited. Artists have always explored subjects of death, murder and sexual violence. But in the midst of his unfocused-on-purpose creation, insane volleys of poetry, tape collage, Fluxus peer worship, breaking things, the cries of distressed virgins, Paik places himself as the centre. It raises questions about how he sourced those sounds. Are they real? Did he survey people, elicit these sounds from them? Or, most likely, did he create them himself, as creepy roleplay? Every possibility is disturbing. If they’re real, he’s silenced the victims by turning their pain into noise for his art project. If they’re performed, he’s worn their skin, stolen their experiences. All for a minor cameo in an avant-garde variety act, untethered to any other point. The omnipotence of the artist is as much a responsibility as it is a freedom.
- Hanhardt, J. G. (2015) Nam June Paik: The Late Style. Hong Kong: Gagosian Hong Kong, pp. 21
- http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/etude-for-piano/
- Ammer, M. (2009)’In engineering there is always the other – The Other’, Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music Electronic Television (Revisited). Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, pp. 70
- Paik, N. J. (1974) ‘Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television’ Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004, ed. John G. Hanhardt and Caitlin Jones New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004, unpaginated. Originally published in Nam June Paik Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959-1973, ed. Judson Rosebush, exh. cat. Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974
- Photo by Manfred Leve, sourced from https://ggc.ggcf.kr/en/p/5ada1be96275b54b4591e0d8