Hi all,

My name is Eleanor Clayton and I'm Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool.
I worked with Sook-Kyung Lee on the Paik exhibition and I'm really
pleased that  this sort of discussion is taking place around it.

The comments Jon made below are especially interesting to me today as I
have just given a tour to some students, during which exactly these
issues on the display of Random Access were brought up. We were
discussing 'Random Access: Record Shishkebab', 1963, an 'original' in
the sense that it is the first one and was displayed in 1963 at Paik's
first solo exhibition (Exposition of Music - Electronic Television, at
Galerie Parnass). Visitors to the exhibition in 1963 could move the
pick-up needle from record to record, creating their own compositions,
although for conservation reasons, and as Sarah notes, these objects are
no longer able to be interacted with.

The students discussed the possibility of re-creating another work using
the same specifications but with new(ish) materials that people could
interact with in the same way as the original. Using newer materials,
and the work not being created by Paik nor included in his first solo
show, this would not have the same historical and art historical value,
so wouldn't have the same premium placed on its preservation. A couple
of issues were raised with this approach. 

Firstly, some felt that it disregarded the aesthetics of the original
piece. It is arguable how much Paik took these into consideration, as
Jon's account below attests. However, it can't be asserted with
conviction that Paik made no choices; from the colour on the record
inlays to the style of the speaker used, any number of artistic choices
made the work visually what it is. This discussion can also be applied
to 'Magnet TV', which is also presented at Tate and which has clear
visual impact in both what is shown on the screen and the material of
the television, but which viewers can no longer interact with as they
could originally, again for conservation reasons.  

One solution to this issue would be to show the original work and a
modern version as well, so people can also experience the interactive
element but not lose the visual. This suggestion divided the group - for
some it was the best of both worlds, and for others it made a rigid
separation between the visual and the participative aspects of this work
which they felt went against the inclusivity of Paik's practice. The
current display presents the historic artwork alongside an account of
how it would have been interacted with, including in the case of 'Random
Access' some photos of the piece in action at the 1963 exhibition. 

There are many other examples of works in the exhibition that this
debate, or a slightly different iteration of this debate, could be
about. What I find interesting is this idea that the original has no
particular value, and that any equipment could be used to create the
artwork. It reminds me of Sol LeWitt's wall-based drawing works - that
these works can be reduced to instructions of how to make them. Looking
at some of the works in the exhibition, I'm struck by how much the
physical materials shape the work, not just in what they can do
technically but in the look of them. On that note, works that were
re-fabricated, such as TV Garden (under the instruction of Jon Huffman,
mentioned below), were done so with CRT monitors which are generally no
longer manufactured or sold, rather than with more modern LCD monitors
which would provide the function just as well. This suggests to me that,
with Paik's work at least, the materials used are not only chosen for
their function but also contribute to the work in a visual way.

I would be keen to hear more about what new media artists have to say
about this issue, most notably whether there are those who would place
value on the physical object as an 'original', or whether the majority
feel that the value of the artwork would be solely in the concept and
able to recreated using whatever materials best fulfilled the concept
from the contemporary society. Or maybe there would be some who would
consider both the preservation of the original and the possibility of
re-fabrication with updated materials to be equally important. I imagine
that there will be a multitude of different opinions on this, but maybe
there's a general consensus?

Best wishes,

Eleanor

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jon Ippolito
Sent: 19 January 2011 11:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] December/January theme on CRUMB: Nam
June Paik

I was happy to read in Sarah's account of the Paik show at the Tate the
lingering after-effects of Paik's wacky and winning persona, especially
the fact that "everyone thought they were his best friend." Her anecdote
about staff removing dead fish from the Video Fish tank reminded me of
one of my favorite Paik performances, where he handed out dried fish
bought in Chinatown at the 7th New York Avant-Garde Festival with
instructions to "return the fish" to the water by throwing it in the
Hudson.

Caroline Langill mentioned Sarah Resnick's DOCAM presentation on
conserving a Paik modified TV. The "TV Repair Man" she referred to (love
that Pythonesque phrase) is "CT Lui," a Chinese immigrant with an
equipment supply store on Murray Street and a keen eye for ancient
electronics. When I last visited Lui's place, it was a small shop chock
full of electronic junk, so I was surprised to learn from Google that
Lui has a Web site; evidently he's quite proud of his Chinese military
lineage:

http://www.ctlny.com/about/about.html

I was also glad to learn that the Tate exhibited Random Access, which is
perhaps my favorite work of media art:

On Jan 5, 2011, Sarah wrote:
> At Tate the show is, of course, geared towards the museum object - 
> none of his interactive works are recreated, so it is the original 
> objects we have on display to look at and not touch. I wished that I 
> could have played with the magnets on a recreated Magnet TV or run a 
> tape head across Random Access to hear a sound, but I expected this 
> and do feel delight in seeing 'the original'.

To create Random Access, Paik ripped a playback head out of a
reel-to-reel audio player, affixed it to a wand, and wired the wand to
speakers. He then cut the audio tape into segments and stuck them on a
nearby wall. Visitors could run the wand across the various segments in
whatever direction or speed they liked. The work's participatory
aesthetic and web-like installation anticipated countless new media
tropes, including audio remix, random-access memory, DIY media, and
hypermedia. Manfred Montwe took some nice photos of the original 1963
installation:

http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/overview_ippolito.html

Resnick quoted Paik's studio lead, Jon Huffman, as saying the appearance
of the television set for Untitled (1968) was less important than its
construction--something I would think is self-evident for Random Access
as well. In fact, for The Worlds of Nam June Paik in 2000, Jon Huffman
and CT Lui worked with the Guggenheim's John Hanhardt, Paul Kuranko, and
me to build *two* versions of Random Access for the exhibition. The idea
was that if one died while visitors were using it, we could swap out it
out for the second while the first was being repaired. (We left the same
tape on the wall for convenience.)

It's not unheard of to create a copy of a work for exhibition, but what
may surprise some people in the context of Sarah's remarks above is the
fact that the two versions of the Random Access apparatus on the
pedastal looked completely different. If memory serves, they were
different sizes, and one had a black and brown finish, the other a gray
or white exterior. (They were basically whatever Lui could dig out of
his shelves from the period of reel-to-reel decks with a certain type of
playback head--and that still worked!) In other words, for the artist
and the curators of this exhibition, the operation of the work was more
important than its looks--and to judge from their reaction, the audience
concurred.

So I'm sorry to hear that we now "expect" not to be able to touch works
that were originally all about participation, and that indeed we still
think in terms of "the original" when it comes to media art. I'll bet
dollars to donuts that the "original" at the Tate isn't one we showed at
the Guggenheim or the one in Montwe's photos, but a "new" original.

Sure, there will eventually come a sad day when CT Lui shutters his
shop, and voltage differences or equipment degradation prevent anyone
from reinstalling Random Access using reel-to-reel audio with a
detachable playback head. But I don't think we're there yet, and even
when we are, we can choose to augment our display of inert vintage
hardware with creative approaches like reinterpretation.

A couple years after the Worlds of Nam June Paik, Dawn Steeves and
Justin Tayler, two undergrads in my New Media department, asked if they
could reinterpret Random Access using contempory hardware--a CD boombox.
I knew that solid-state components can't be wrangled like analog decks,
but I didn't want to discourage them. So I said, sure, give it a try.
They came back a week later to tell me that they never managed to
recover function of the laser diode after prying it out of the box, but
they did accidentally discover an unexpected effect: when one of them
received a call from the other with two mobile phones near the device,
the signal briefly activated the drive motor and spun the disk a turn or
two. So for their final project, they outfitted the CD drive with a
hammer and bell, and repeatedly triggered orbits of the disk by calling
each other on speed dial according to a certain "score." The result was
chamber music for two cell phones and a ruined boombox.

I knew somewhere Nam June was smiling.

jon