Where’s Charlotte Moorman and her cello?
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Ho hum. I hope the lights in the dark space to the left are part of this piece, but it looks like they are in the other room. We used to say in art school, "happy accident".
Mechanical clap trap is all this is.
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Nam June Paik was light years ahead of his time as an artist who used television monitors as his canvas and algorithms to produce his imagery, decades before the advent of personal computers. His grid arrangement of monitors shows images on individual screens so the effect is like a shimmery textile pattern, but an image can suddenly break out and spread as one unit over an entire mass of screens.
There is also a subtle sense of humor in Paik's work, such as a giant eye that occasionally peers at the viewer in his monumental installation situated under a giant oculus - the eye from above is an eye looking at you (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea).
Though I haven't seen the Whitney installation, what strikes me is the interior that houses it - it's dark and the ceiling is low. I don't think Paik's video sculptures were meant to be seen in a darkened room because the screens may become jarringly bright and any subtlety or humor may become lost. And his sculptures look better when there is space above it; it feels like they need more room to breathe.
But the fact that Paik's work is on view in New York is wonderful. How I wish there could be a retrospective of Paik's work at a major US museum - it would be fantastic to see glimpses of electronic and video art before the digital age, both from a historical point and as a source of inspiration!
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It is just as well that the artist created the work for display in a museum. If he had attempted anything similar for presentation on YouTube he would have immediately had dozens of copyright strikes against the posting and would have lost any revenue generated, regardless of the fact that use of the audio/video material almost certainly falls under the "fair use" exception to copyright law.
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