An East-West Nomad Secluded in the Global Net
Especially in our era of advanced-technology robots that are supposed to lighten humans’ load not only at work but also in private life, this humanoid Robot K-456, like Jean Tinguely’s machines from the same period, expresses an ironic nostalgia for preindustrial technology that we can control but which is not possible any more. Expressing Visions Paik’s writings, statements, maxims and essays, and (starting from the early 1960s) his actionistic Fluxus poetry have been at least as influential as his visual works. Symphonie Nr. 5 (1964/65) ends with the following largo: count the waves on the rhine (if the rhine still exists), and in the instructions to Read-Music – Do It Yourself – Answers to La Monte Young (1962) we find the sentence: See your right eye with your left eye. This sentence seems at first to to be a dadaistic sort of joke, but at the same time Paik is emphasizing the necessity of discourse on the way things are represented and the truth of each genuine reflection; he is also asking which really represents reality: the reverse reflection offered by a mirror, or the true image that electronic media provide but to which we haven’t become accustomed. Paik’s war cry television has attacked us all our lives – now we’re hitting back! influenced the discussion of media that was going on circa 1970, encompassing all sorts of utopian ideas: free access to cable TV, minorities striving for political influence, global exchange and communication through video cassettes, along with Paik’s consistent policy that viewer involvement was an essential element of video art. As early as the mid-60s (!) Paik was, in his brochures, postulating a monthly publication devoted to video cassettes. His texts for journals and exhibition catalogs range far beyond the context of art, describing often utopian-sounding projects and ideas, or seemingly peripheral facts like the need for a solution to one of the most pressing problems of prosperous societies: parking for an excessive number of private cars. His statement from the 1960s that someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins & junk, is now among those most frequently quoted, and within ten years had certainly become one of his most obvious ideas. In 1968 Paik published Expanded Education for the Paperless Society (The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), warning intellectuals that underestimating the significance of television for social and political development would have terrible consequences. His prediciton of an electronic superhighway was published in 1974 in his text Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society (which he wrote for the Rockefeller Foundation and published in German in a 1976 Cologne Kunstverein catalog), has very nearly come true. And it also meant that in the 1993 Venice Biennale catalog he could ironically note that Bill Clinton’s election campaign had stolen his idea! Shaping Time Paik was one of the first artists who put TV sets in new contexts (laying them on the floor, standing them amid plants in TV-Garden in 1974, or hanging them in the air in Fish Flies on the Sky in 1975), and who used them to create figurative compositions like Kölner Dom (for Sony, at the 1985 Photokina trade fair) or the prolific Family of Robot
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