ANALOG DAYS
The Nam Jun Paik retrospective at the Asia Society, Becoming Robot, is a bright blast of 80’s nostalgia. The video and robotics technologies that were available to the artist then, when he completed his best known works, are now obsolete. The CRT monitors he incorporated in so many installations and performances – his trademark – are deeper than they are wide, and even the smallest ones require remote adapters and transformers, and bundles of cables to tie them together. The technologies are mechanical rather than digital, and imposing physically as well as conceptually. There’s a wonderful photograph of Paik from 1990 in one of the galleries that shows him sprawled, ecstatically, on a studio floor, surrounded by a mess of televisions, cords and plugs. These elements give his work, when seen today, a sweet low-fi, high-tech, Radio Shack kind of aesthetic.
Paik’s videos also have distinct 80’s stylings. The resolution is grainy and the lighting is clouded. Colors are acid-tinged, as if we’re watching through an infrared lamp. Shots dissolve into one another slowly and are held for uncomfortably long stretches of time, as if they were edited by stoners. These videos remind me of very early programming on MTV and Nightflight. And they remind me of amateur Super 8 footage, with shots slipping in and out of focus, frames drifting unintentionally downwards, and everything hovering slightly off-center.
Despite these formal limits, Paik’s videos are jarring and often deeply funny. One shows him dressed in a tuxedo playing a piano, while a naked cohort, Charlotte Moorman, sits on top of it and keeps time by tapping his head with her foot. Another shows him crashing a five-foot high robot – a delicate jumble of metal angles and wire – with a white sports car on Madison Avenue. Today just about every smartphone is equipped with software to record, edit and distribute high-quality video. We’re inundated with clips, but rarely find ones that surprise or move us. The technology has moved forward, but for what?