The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Charlotte Moorman performing Cage's "'26'1.1499" For a String Player', Second Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York from Retrospettiva 1964-74 1975 Portfolio of three folders Photograph by Peter Moore ed. 2/15 63.6 x 50cm Purchased 1996 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery © Moore, 1975, VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney 2002. By 1964 Paik had settled in New York and had commenced working with the cellist Charlotte Moorman. He designed various video objects with this musician in mind, as well as performances with her cello. So controversial were these early performances, especially of Moorman performing nude in Paik's Opera Sextronique, that she was arrested in New York on public indecency charges in 1967. It was a classic moment in the history of performance. Paik wanted to eroticise music and to express the sexual body as part of it. He occasionally underscored these performances with a tough political humour that brought in current military references as well. In other action-music-events conceived by the artist for Moorman, he strapped small video monitors to her breasts and went on to produce the first of his 'TV cello' series comprising a vaguely cello-like construction of television sets with footage of the musician playing.• 80 APT2002 Charlotte Moorman performing Paik's 'Concerto for TV Cello and Videotape', 1971 from Retrospettiva 1964-74 1975 Portfolio of three folders Photograph by Peter Moore ed.2/15 65 x 50cm Purchased 1996 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery © Moore, 1975, VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney 2002. Paik has made variants of some of his assemblages, right up to the present. TV cello 2000 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) is one such work and revisits the infamous 1960s performances with Moorman, using archival footage in his characteristic montage style. Paik was convinced that 'the nature of environment is much more on TV than on fi lm or painting. In fact, TV (its random movement of tiny electrons) is the environment of today'. 5 He turned this entertainment/ information device into a site which reflects both the diversity of spectacle and late twentieth-century life. In doing so, Paik also paid tribute to other avant-garde talents, such as John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham and Allen Ginsberg, through footage of them in performance and in conversation. This is evident in the 1973 video Global groove (Queensland Art Gallery Collection), wherein Paik first used image sequences and fast edit techniques. Serendipitous juxtapositions of sound and visuals were montaged to match the work's opening statement, which is read by straight man Russell Conor: 'This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book'. It was a prescient introduction to the future of electronic communication from an artist who could see how it would affect the lives of millions of people around the globe.