Would the TV bed get too hot and bright to sleep on? It looks so fun, one hardly cares. Several of his closest collaborators and friends were trail-blazing women such as the “naked cellist” Charlotte Moorman, who felt, like Paik, that sex was insufficiently investigated as a theme in classical music (unlike in literature and art for example) and sought to rectify this with artworks such as TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), TV Cello (1971), and TV Bed (1972). All works by Nam June Paik © Estate of Nam June Paik. Formerly the collection of Otto Piene and Elizabeth Goldring, Massachusetts. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992, Minneapolis.
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Install view, Tate Modern 2019, three cathode-ray tubes, acrylic boxes, three television casings, electronics, wiring, wood base, fan and stool. Cage, in fact, was such a significant influence on Paik that Paik referred to the year 1957 as 1 BC (Before Cage). There is a 1960 photo of a grinning John Cage, his tie cut off by Paik and shampoo poured over his head, and another of Beuys destroying one of the artist’s specially modified pianos (a spontaneous act which was met with Paik’s wholehearted approval). His role for much of this show is that of a genial host presiding over an anarchic party of avant-garde musical and artistic luminaries of his age. However, the artist’s style is affable and merry rather than ferocious. Paik was proud of his heritage and perhaps intended for his gleeful artistic offensives to be perceived in light of those original invading iconoclasts. Nam June Paik at Tate Modern, 2019, install view.
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You’ll be here to stay: visitors should budget a full afternoon-whether it’s raining or not-to enjoy the variety to the utmost. This wonderful, maze like retrospective at the Tate Modern’s Eyal Ofer galleries does a good job of recreating the playful mayhem of Korean-born artist Nam June Paik, whose genre-crossing brand of libertarianism did to TV, modern art and music what Bruegel and Bosch had once done on canvas. Knocking urgently on the glass, he exclaims contentedly: “I’m tired!” This was a live telecast across the world from Documenta 6, an innovation of broadcast history in the arts, the ensuing bedlam bookended by a nervous introduction from an anxious-looking television executive, and an intense monologue by a Joseph Beuys.
I’m looking at a dishevelled Nam June Paik wriggling inside a hollow television set, mussy hair, confused expression, tie askew. Tate Modern’s Nam June Paik retrospective is a must-see voyage of staged mayhem, as the artist, some of his famous friends, and a garden-load of TVs help the viewer to befriend technology, and revel in flickery-screened chaos.
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