Collier Carson & Carley Gramson

What makes a prestigious museum such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum so exciting is the ability to see the greatest artistic and cultural productions of an artist, a genre, and an era. These “prototype” artworks – works that are an exemplary of their type and that serve as a defining work for an artist or era – can create rich and complex conversations with the surrounding artworks as they represent the most defining moments in an artist’s’ career.

Nam Jun Paik’s video installations that we saw at the SAAM encapsulate the intention of the CCTP program. The two large scale works that we saw show us that art can be multimedia, chaotic, and still be valuable and appreciated as a work of high art. In Electronic Highway, Paik’s use light, video, and audio engage the senses in a way that is both overwhelming and anxiety provoking as well as beautiful, dramatic, and thoughtful. Paik expertly captures the tensions and juxtaposing emotions that are apart of our highly technologized and media driven world today. Paik’s work suggests that the infrastructure of superhighways that cover our country in a vast web of communications and connections do not only connect us through concrete, but also through art and media. “The superhighways offered everyone freedom” (Smithsonian).

Rauschenberg’s Reservoir, like Paik’s Superhighway, is an artwork that redefines our understanding of what constitutes art and what mediums and materials are acceptable and can be incorporated so as to communicate a particular idea. Also like Superhighway, Reservoir is a prototype, in this case for art which can be made out of everyday items. The artworks that surround Reservoir engage in a similar dialogue: for example, in the corner just to the right of Rauschenberg’s Reservoir there is an installation of a woman surrounded by found objects and everyday objects. Unlike the Rauschenberg, this piece is more literal, each object represented is acting as it would if the object were found in the world. Meanwhile, across the room there is another installation piece that is a large draped colorful canvas. This object in this piece (the canvas) is casually suspended from the ceiling, not arranged in a way that a canvas would usually be used for. Rauschenberg’s experimental approach to the production of art and his reevaluation of what his identity as an artist entailed is visible in Reservoir. Rauschenberg dismissed the notion that the brushstroke stands as a representation of the artist’s presence within the artwork. Rauschenberg rejected the approach to art of the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, and Clyfford Still; artists whose own prototypical works are included in the exhibition across the hall from Rauschenberg’s Reservoir.

This rejection of the paintery brushstroke as the authentic mark of the artist on the canvas was explored in a radically different manner in the case of Gene Davis and the other minimalist artists beginning in the 1960s. Agnes Martin is perhaps a prototypical artist to represent this shift: she was also considered a ‘minimalist’ painter, yet unlike some other artists who utilized geometric shapes at the time, Martin embraced the small flaws within her works as explorations of the personal and spiritual. Gene Davis felt that he could engage the viewer and communicate his ideas to the viewer and to the time more generally using simple but incredibly intense color and form. Davis later wrote: “During the sixties I wanted an intensity of color that almost hurt… Maybe the times called for it. It seemed to feel right… to have color that leaped right off the wall.” Davis was interested in exploring the seemingly impossible Hard line aesthetic with a “paint by eye” motto. Technically all of the stripes are uniform in shape– hard lines separating them. However, Davis’ use of color causes slight chaos; I found my eyes were having issues focusing on a given point.

How does the role of the viewer change in this shift from a work like Paik’s Superhighway to Rauschenberg’s Reservoir to Mitchell’s Landscape 2 to Davis’s minimalist stripes? What contexts do we need to know for understanding the meaning and significance of these various techniques? Unless you are researching the piece, there is probably no way you could be aware of the contexts associated with said piece. I know we have discussed this before– when creating a work of art, the artist can put their personal meaning into it, but once the art is displayed the ball is in the viewers court at this point. It is up to the viewer of the art to imply their own meaning upon the work. Davis’s work leads us to question: What are the effects of scale, color, and juxtapositions in his artworks? Barthes refers to the simplest ingredients of an ‘image’, “the reader would perceive only lines, forms, and colors” (p.157-8). I think this is interesting because Davis’ line work is a literal example of what Barthes is talking about. However, the work still leaves an impression due to its large scale (at times) and the use of these three ingredients. The bright colors that jump off of the wall contrast with the uniformity of the stripes. While looking at the paintings I felt conflicted by a sense of order and disorder.

Despite the privilege of viewing prototypical works of an art historical moment and the networks of understanding that prototypical works – more so than less acclaimed works – can afford the viewer as he/she reflects on an exhibition, we might still consider what is potentially missed. An artist’s career – even those artists who worked for a short period of time or were selective and meticulous in the production and dissemination of their works – is a complex and expansive system. In reducing an artist to a series of prototypical works that encapsulate his/her career, we run the risk of misunderstanding the artist’s intentions or oversimplifying the breadth of value and significance in the artworks. For this reason, I found Gene Davis’s retrospective a great complement to the selection from permanent collection: the retrospective offered a more diachronic method, while the exhibition a more synchronic method. Both are too simple to capture the complexities of the nodes and networks of meaning and understanding that these artworks contain embedded within the materiality of their surface, but these two methods taken together can begin to capture the greater image.

References:

Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 32–51. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.

http://americanart.si.edu/education/rs/artwork/

Martin Irvine, “Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality.”

In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15-42.

David Hopkins, “Robert Rauschenberg.” in After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford University Press, 2000.

By: Yingxin Huang and Ojas Patel

It seems as if I’ve walked through centuries of the art world in the National American Art Museum at a time. The styles of the halls and the art works are perfectly in accordance with each other. Passing through the Great Hall on the third floor, an expanded dome space filled with light warm color and lattice floor appeared – the Lincoln Gallery.

The Korean American artist Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii is one of the art works exhibited in this gallery. It is in a semi-closed dimension with three-sided walls. The continental U.S. is installed in the middle, with the states of Alaska and Hawaii on the left side and a description label on the right. One could easily get immersed in such an interface and plenty of details could be noticed in this large-scale remixed art work. When I walked into this space and stood in front of the art work, I was immediately astonished by this huge art work composed of hundreds of televisions broadcasting multifarious videos, and then I recognized the outline of the boundaries – it is the US! I was even more impressed and curious about it, then walked towards the description label on the right side. “He celebrated some states for their connections to his artistic friends and collaborator – composer John Cage in Massachusetts, performance artist Charlotte Moorman in Arkansas, and choreography Merce Cunningham in Washington.” (SAAM) This work remixed different forms of art and media, creating a more perceptible and harmonious effect to the audience, letting them echo in looking for their own states, or find some interesting videos in particular states, or just shocked by such a complete and vivid American cultural representation. “Rather, we create artifactual meanings in patterns generated from organized symbolic relations and shared knowledge at another level – networks of meaning that function like a cultural encyclopedia distributed through, and implementable across, all symbolic forms, genres, and media.” (Remix, Irvine 17) Meanwhile, when appreciating this visual art, I almost reflected Hopkins’s words, that the Electronic Superhighway also derived from the form of experimental “Happenings” and Fluxus manifestations, which “blurred the boundaries of art and life”, “favoring ‘live’ artist-audience interaction as opposed to the aesthetic closure of Greenberg’s aesthetics.” (After Modern Art, Hopkins 111) I agree. The artist-audience interaction was the most wonderful and interesting experience I’ve gained from this visual art work, so that I could stand in front of it for a long while, constantly stared at those videos and quickly memorized certain videos representing particular states without any boredom.

Reading about the biography of the Korean American artist, we will be more likely to understand why he created this visual art work, and how he remixed different art forms and made a success. Born and raised in Korea, Nam June Paik ever went to Japan and Germany to learn music and art studies. “Through his performances there, he first established himself in the European avant-garde.” (Hanhardt, 2) In 1964, he moved to New York and permanently lived there. “This constant movement linked his friendships and creative partnerships across time zones and diverse places and cultures.” (Hanhardt, 2) Among those people who had influences on him, John Cage, his great teacher, had strongly inspired him in his art making; and Paik pioneered in the Neo-Dadaism known as Fluxus during those periods. He enabled a dynamic remix of music, video art, technology and so forth, to “draw you in and give you new ways to see and experience the world.” (Hanhardt, 7) His life experience and acquaintances, had largely contributed and helped form his video art style. Moreover, with the boom of post-war cultural consuming, Paik’s predictions of the future of media markets, broadcast and television development in the world also created opportunities to the video art and related technology advancement. In this sense, we can see the dialogism of art forms within the social context, which was described in Bakhtin’s insights quoted in Irvine’s book, “every expression in a culture emerges in a living, intersubjective dialogue of speakers with identities in social and historical context.” (Grammar of Meaning Systems, Irvine 35) “Expression forms a node in a collective process with a past, present, and future…The ‘dialogic condition’, not an individual statement, is thus the foundation of living discourse and culture.” (Grammar of Meaning Systems, Irvine 35)

Dialogically, Paik’s working in a network of the avant-garde and new media. As mentioned above, he was an original member of the Neo-Dada movement known as Fluxus, and is therefore directly in dialogue with the representation of “nonsense” that the Dadaists sought to achieve in post WWI Europe. In the U.S., a country that is increasingly transferring cultural power and authority to images and new information communication technologies which harness the speed and power of electricity, the effect within Electronic Superhighway is that of overstimulation. We are overstimulated by representation, color, speed of communication, so much so that our geographic boundaries and borders, as well as our understandings of different geographic spaces, are in essence completely mediated by these technologies. This is done imagistically through advertisement, cultural iconography, food images, etc. In its overstimulation, it is directly in dialogue with Dada, an art movement that produced poetry with no comprehensible syntax (or even diction at times), non-representational sculpture, and manifestos and monologues full of contradiction. However, the creation of nonsense is not through creating a product that in itself does not contain representational meaning. The map of the U.S. in neon is a representational meaning. Within each state are representational meanings via images. However, the cluttered organization, scale, and neon bright colors of the piece create a sense of nonsense in the sheer amount of “sense” we’re supposed to be processing at the same time. And in this way, the title of the piece is dialogically related to the time period it is produced in. Artifacts always exist in a particular moment in time, and are therefore in dialogue with the culture of the time. And the electronic superhighway outside of the context of the piece itself refers to the vast network of electronically interconnected technologies that give us telephones, cable/satellite T.V., internet, etc. The piece reflects the overwhelming status of technological interconnectedness, a critical component of our contemporary world. Paik is furthermore considered to be the single most influential figure in the emergence of video art in the 60s (Hartney). In this sense, video art after Paik is always in dialogue with Paik’s work, as in a dialogic model, these works and people’s consumption of works in dialogue with Paik’s work changes Paik’s work.

For this reason, we can also take Electronic Superhighway to be a prototype of Paik’s work, and furthermore, a prototype of video art. Distinct from T.V. or film, video art can be described as, “recordings that are broadcast, viewed in galleries or other venues, or distributed as tapes or discs; sculptural installations, which may incorporate one or more television receivers or monitors, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sound; and performances in which video representations are included” (Hartney). Video art is necessarily a medium that happens within art spaces, such as art galleries, black box theaters, or even if it is in the form of a tape or disc that can be viewed at home it is still distinct from a T.V. show or movie. Electronic Superhighway acts as a prototype (a token that stands in as representative of a Peircean type) in that it uses the visual medium of video, and is a combination of materials and media: it is sculpture, it is video, it is new media, it utilizes the television set, etc. Furthermore, in that it contains fifty different combinations of video images, we can think of each set of videos as its own video piece with the greater video piece. As a prototype, we see fifty different ways video itself can be used.

References

1. Hanhardt, J. G. (2006). Nam June Paik (1932–2006). American Art, 20(2), 148–153. doi:10.1086/507506
2. Hartney, Mick. “Video art.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press.
3. Hopkins, D. S. (2000). After modern art, 1945-2000. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
4. Navas, E., Gallagher, O., & Burrough, X. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge companion to Remix studies. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
5. Smith, T. (2011). Contemporary art: World currents. Boston, MA, United States: Pearson Education (US).
6. Irvine, Martin, The Grammar of Meaning Systems: Sign Systems, Symbolic Cognition, and Semiotics, Communication, Culture & Technology Program. Georgetown University, 2017.
7. Irvine, Martin, Dialogue, Dialogic, Dialogism | Intertextuality, Intermediality | Remix, A Stuent’s Guide, Communication, Culture & Technology Program. Georgetown University, 2017.
8. Description of Electronic Superhighway in SAAM Website: http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=71478
9. Biography of Nam June Paik in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik

By: Ai-Ling Wu, Lin Ding, Mary-Cecile Gayoso

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, approx. 15 x 40 x 4 feet (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Our group took an affinity to the Paik pieces. Their size, color, and imagery is truly amazing. But why do we feel this way about the two works we saw at The Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery? And what is going on, both historically and semiotically, when we see these pieces? Our group looks at how Paik’s own history, our interpretations of his art, and historical context plays a part in how we make meaning of these artworks.

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By Shalina Chatlani, Jing Chen, and Zhihui Yu

The 1960s as an era was defined by technological innovation, The Cold War, and radicalism. At the same time that the space age was kicking off internationally, skepticism of foreign regimes developed at home. Youth began questioning violence and conflict, as well as the impact of constant media and technology throughout life. This environment of ideological dissonance manifested in a wave of contemporary art throughout the 60s to 90s that focused on pushing against the formal concerns of art and signal a removal from institutionalized thought–a deconstructionist ideology that influenced artists to not rely on traditional mediums of paint and brushes to communicate profound ideas. Artists that spearheaded this trend included people like Jackson Pollock, with his inhibited brush strokes and free form, Mark Rothko, with his bold color blocking, Willem de Kooning, with his broad stroked and undefined figures, and of course, Andy Warhol, with his iconic pop art (Baumgardner).

The styles of artwork that are highlighted during this time period includes forms like minimalism, abstract expressionism, use of industrial materials, conceptual artwork that used words, incorporation of static and performative artwork, and the blending of media through images and film. Nam June Paik, a Korean American artist, fits within this framework of contemporary artwork (Nam June Paik-artsy). In fact, he is considered the father of video art, because he pioneered the use of TVs into his representation, as a way of signifying expression and cultural exchange in music, performances, and static artwork. He was a member of a greater movement called the Fluxus movement, which was a trend in artwork throughout the 60s and 70s that renounced tradition forms of music and theater and instead incorporated experimental forms of sound and film–a way of rebellion (Fluxus artsy). Among the things he did was to address the inescapability of technology He explored the wide reach of media in his video installations, that flickered grotesque and eye-catching images of profanity and cartoons across screens–a nod to predictions of the future of technology by authors like George Orwell. Nam June Paik’s work, “Electronic Superhighway” depicts the United States as a convergence of screens. Our reaction to the sight shows just how fantastic it was: 

We were extremely impressed. The first time we saw Electronic Superhighway on the internet, we were still shocked by its scale and combinatorial order when we physically saw it with our eyes. When we entered the Lincoln Gallery and approached the Nam June Paik’s multimedia work Electronic Superhighway, we first heard the sounds which are rare in other galleries in the American Art museum. Then the giant installation caught our eyes immediately.

Electronic Superhighway made up of three hundred thirty-six televisions, fifty DVD players, and over one hundred seventy meters of neon lights. Paik is the inventor of video arts. He transformed the televisions into his canvas. The artwork itself explained why the televisions are the best medium to convey Paik’s ideas. As Irvine notes, “all forms of cultural expression have addressability and answerability built in: expressions are simultaneously a response to, and an anticipation of, ongoing dialogic meaning.” (Irvine,P22) Besides the information conveyed in the video clips, movies clips, TVs, as the interface itself represented the increasingly prevalent technology at that time. Nam used video imagery to represent each of fifty states. This installation is a great map of the United States showing video images from television shows, movies, each capturing distinctive feature of the different states.

Paik was born in South Korea and grew up in Japan. He moved to New York in 1964. As an immigrant, the choices of the videos clips reflect Paik’s own interpretations of each state which may be more unbiased than people who are born and raised in the country. This reality is reflective of how “selections of combinatorial units are motivated by how they can function dialogically in new or different contexts of meanings associated at the encyclopedic level.” [ii](Irvine, P29) Paik’s selection for each state vary as well. For some states, he used videos shot by himself such as images of his friends.  For some states, such as the Midwestern states, he showed the clips from movies like the Wizard of Oz. Images from the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior are used to represent the state of Alabama. The many bright images move very quickly in a somehow disorderly and energetic way.

Another of Nam’s work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is called “Megatron/Matrix”. It has two hundred fifteen television screens that play videos. Each television shows fast moving images of Korean folk traditions, modern dance and the nineteen eighty-eight Olympic games in Seoul. Nam’s work may seem disordered when you see it in certain distance, while when you get closer, larger moving images and videos flow across the screens of each television, creating a magical effect.

He expressed his understandings of these states with “the words of others.” The installation shows how media images defined its cultural expressions. Meanwhile, we began to comprehend Paik’s messages of American culture with our own encyclopedic background. 

Art seems to be “beauty of nihility”, dialogic way of doing arts can make art more accessible to the audience and make the audience introspect themselves. Nam June Paik is well known for his huge, complex video works that involve many televisions. Harry Cooper, the head of the National Gallery of Arts’ modern and contemporary art department, said that an important part of the artist’s message was to reject the blind acceptance of television and its images, and Nam June Paik wanted people to take an active role in the media that is so much a part of modern life. Nam combined selected video clips and presented them in certain order to create “resonate” with its audience, living in the age of information, we accept too many junk messages every day, and we even sometimes forget to regard and consider what we gained or what we actually lost.

Televisions, DVD players, neon lights, these are “daily essentials” we know for life. This kind of combinatorial expression and magical effect make us reconsider about what called originality. We always get use to what we owned and tend to neglect the beauty and passion behind them.

We see Nam’s work and realize what we already know and resonate with him. What we called imagination and creation basically comes from what we already know, or what we never think of mixed together. Mix and recombined daily objects that we are used to trigger our inspiration and make ‘things’ sparkle.

Works Referenced:

Photo: http://newsdesk.si.edu/sites/default/files/photos/Paik_Super_Highway.jpg

“Fluxus.” Artsy. Artsy, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

“Name June Paik.” Artsy. Artsy, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

Julie Baumgardner. “How the 1960’s Most Iconic Artists Made Art Contemporary.” Artsy. Artsy, Aug 4, 2015. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

Martin Irvine, “Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15-42.

Martin Irvine, “Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15-42.