ABSTRACT
B orn in Korea in 1932, Nam June Paik (pronounced Pike,like the fish) went to high school in Hong Kong before studying music at universities in Japan and then in Germany, where his work earned early support from both John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen at a time when the two titans were more predisposed to agree than disagree. The latter, no pushover for enthusiasm, published this recollection of a Paik performance in the early 1960s:
At another performance, in a Cologne “atelier” belonging to Stockhausen’s wife-to-be-then, Mary Baumeister, Paik leaped from the stage into the audience to cut John Cage’s tie with scissors and smear both the composer and his associate, the pianist David Tudor, with his favorite stuff: shaving cream. In New York, at George Maciunas’s modest Canal Street loft (ironically called Fluxhall after Kunsthalle), Paik presented Zen for Film (1962-1964), a memorable masterpiece of minimalist/conceptual moviemaking-approximately 1,000 feet of clear 16mm film projected onto a screen for thirty minutes. “Without images or sound, Paik’s film became a tabula rasa for the viewer’s free assocations,” writes Michael Rush. “With each additional screening of the film, scratches, dust, and other chance events of film projection inevitably occurred, thus rendering the film new, in a certain way, each time.”
