WIDOK
Lars Movin
ideas at the same time, but the Paik/Abe machine was the first to be used in television broadcasting. In summer 1970, Paik was involved in a WGBH project to transmit a four-hour live program. Video Commune featured a long series of people invited in from the streets at random to improvise with the video synthesizer to music by the Beatles. In the meantime, video had become the hot new medium on the New York art scene, first and foremost because of the exhibition Television as a Creative Medium in 1969 at the Howard Wise Gallery. During that event Paik had staged his latest work Television Bra for Living Sculpture, a performance featuring Charlotte Moorman with small monitors mounted on her breasts. The early 70s saw Paik divide his time between Boston where he made programs for WGBH, and New York where he produced for Television Laboratory at the WNET/Thirteen station. At the time there was an active scene of video artists and media activists in New York. Most of these people, however, were either visual artists who made lowtech documentation of performances, people with roots in experimental film trying out the new medium or political activists who distanced themselves from the medium of television and sought to establish an alternative. Paik was the first artist who seriously tried to explore and cultivate video as a plastic medium, as a tool for creating artistic images, and who was not afraid to get involved in television broadcasting. Paik saw television as simply an extension of independent video production. The idea that artists could create images for television was largely the result of his work. Global Groove By far Paik’s most important video is Global Groove, produced for WNET/Thirteen in 1973. The 28- minute-long video – video art’s only undisputed classic – opens with the statement: This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any television station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book. Nothing could be more true. In Global Groove Paik manages to present both a positive vision of television as a global medium with room for all cultures and a universal language, and a more frightening vision of the fragmented nature of contemporary life, where MTV’s adrenaline-pumping overkill includes the zapping phenomenon as an integral part of its concept. Paik’s unexpected juxtapositions and confrontations in Global Groove create a controlled chaos, like a frenetic hallucinatory ride through global television’s multitude of channels. Television is presented as one big image processor and Paik clips in uninhibited fashion from Japanese Pepsi advertisements, classical ballet, Indian drum dances, flickering synthesized color light and features by avant-garde friends from New York: John Cage talks about a dental appointment, Allen Ginsberg chants and plays finger cymbals, Merce Cunningham dances and Charlotte Moorman plays a television-cello and says she really did go to the Juilliard School of Music. The video is full of humour, gags and vitality. Even today it retains its freshness, which is otherwise a rare thing for video art from that period.
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