The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

AN INTRODUCTION THE MOVING IMAGE The impact of the moving image on contemporary art has been compelling and challenging - compelling because the vernacular forms of television and cinema reach mass audiences, and challenging because these media have opened up exceptional expressive potential to visual artists. Nam June Paik is a pioneer in incorporating the moving image into the vocabulary of visual practice. His energy in cultivating an iconoclastic position was fuel led by his early work in music and performance in Korea and the United States. Essentially Paik occupies the shifting ground between music, performance, electronic technology and art. With the Fluxus group in the 1960s these interests were taken to extremes; collaborations between artists and musicians ensured a volatile environment of experiment and invention, underpinned by idealistic beliefs in the transformative power of radical action. Electronic sound and image, the twin pulses of video, were one axis for innovation. When not involved in collaborations, Paik developed his practice as a triumphant exploration of the immense communicative possibilities that video and information technology offer. How better to embrace this vast, rapidly changing platform than to mobilise its very material to form an art practice? In early works such as TV Buddha 1976, Paik used the television set, the quintessential contemporary object, to create an installation dependent on multiple parts. TV Buddha ponders the complex relationships between object and image, between the real and the manufactured. A seated Buddha contemplates his projection on the television screen - thus the modern facility of a film loop revitalises age-old concerns about affinities between the material and immaterial. Paik's practice is humorous and irreverent, underscored by an optimism that creative endeavours can alter existing ways of seeing. Keenly aware of the distinctions between film and video, Paik reassembles an array of elements to produce works that redraw the boundaries of contemporary visual art. As Lars Movin has observed about the artist: He constantly transcends borders, between East and West, art and technology, order and chaos; and the prevalent image of Paik in the last 10-15 years is one of an eternal traveller; a nomad in permanent dialogue with several cultures and art genres; a modest prophet who invites other artists to engage in dialogue and collaboration and whose own works invite the public to explore a universe collated from a wealth of different sources; a true citizen of the world who jumps from continent to continent, constantly attentive in an idealistic sort of way, engaging in a mission that can never end. 1 The Waka Collective Aotearoa New Zealand Installation view The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1996 Courtesy The artists Photograph: Richard Stringer Nam June Paik South Korea/United States b.1932 TV cello (details) 2000 Electronic sculpture 232.2 x 75 x 55cm (overall) The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Purchased 2002 with funds from The Myer Foundation A project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999 Gift through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery In Retrospettiva 1964-74 1975 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) Paik's partnerships with cellist Charlotte Moorman and composer John Cage are documented in a series of photographs featuring his elaborate sound-image assemblages. In the scu lpture TV cello 2000 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) one set of television monitors shows footage from the performance events of the 1960s and 1970s, including Moorman 'playing' an early version of aTV cello. Paik's characteristically snappy editing style reveals Moorman scraping her bow across a 'practice bomb', with parallel images on other screens displaying scenes of sexuality and desire. This was an intensely topical work during the Cold War, when bellicose superpowers were busily stockpiling nuclear weapons. Paik's intention was to inject a sense of the transgressive into political debates, using humourous and erotic subject matter. 11