Beyond Cage: Nam June Paik
By: Liviu Tanasoaica
Tags: Video Art, Art History, Art, Music

The object of this essay is the analysis of the artistic connection between American composer and thinker John Cage and the Korean artist Nam June Paik. My aim is to highlight the influence that Cage had on Paik’s work and to demonstrate that Paik reacted to Cagean thought and furthered its conclusions it in an attempt to step out of its shadow and adventure into new realms of media experimentation and philosophical inquiry. I started thinking about their relationship as a result of the research I conducted as an intern for the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, in preparation for the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival exhibition Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds.

The Meeting of Two Minds

Nam June Paik, John Cage and David Tudor after the Concert «Kompositionen» at Atelier Mary Bauermeister, Cologne, 6 October 1960, Photo: Klaus Barisch, Courtesy Galerie Schüppenhauer

Biographically, the two men shared a lifelong friendship that spans from their first meeting in 1958 to the death of John Cage in 1992. Although 20 years older than Paik, Cage’s respect for the younger artist and intellectual was manifest in their correspondence. A number of collaborations and homages linked the two artistically, including Paik’s first public appearance in Hommage à John Cage (1959), the score Gala Music for John Cage’s 50th Birthday (1962), the videotape A tribute to John Cage (1973) featuring Cage himself, the sound piece Empty Telephones (1987), and the 1990 video sculpture Cage from Family of Robots and Cage in Cage (1993), following his death.

A shared cultural context is the common ground for the development of their ideas. Cage was Zen Buddhist in spiritual outlook and was attracted to Oriental philosophy in an attempt to escape the philosophical hermeticism of Western thought. Paik was born in Korea in 1932 and arrived in Germany after studying history of art, music and aesthetics in Tokyo. In Europe, he came into contact with a vibrant art scene. The Westerner with Eastern sensibilities and the Easterner fascinated by the cultural history of the West met in Germany. The seeds of Fluxus, the Neo-Avant-Garde movement of the 1960s, had been planted by John Cage during a series of lectures he gave at the New School of Social Research in New York City (1957-1958) in which he introduced the notions of indeterminacy and chance operation in art praxis – the former extracted from Zen teachings, the latter drawn from Marcel Duchamp’s example. These classes were attended by La Monte Young and George Brecht, two important figures of the movement. Prior to this lecture series, a string of “happenings” staged by Yoko Ono had prefigured Fluxus, in parallel to a number of concerts involving Nam June Paik and Cage himself through 1960-61 in the studio of Mary Bauermeister in Cologne. Since its inception, Paik was situated at the very heart of the international movement by virtue of his close relationships with founders Cage and George Manciunas, as well as his unique intellectual preoccupations. Fluxus developed an aesthetic that was very similar in scope with the Dada movement of decades earlier. It sought to destabilize traditional modes of art production, presentation, interaction and institutionalization. It was distinctly anti-commercial, employing comic irony in its critique of the establishment. Throughout his career, Paik made crossovers from high to popular art and back. However, his work always had a powerful philosophical core, inspired by Fluxus, that held his executions together. Living in the Rhineland, an experimental region for the arts at the time, Paik was at the main hub of a vast network of individuals that exchanged artistic ideas with great ease. The historical backdrop — the Cold War, its ideological implications in politics and the stability that followed the “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1950s — is also relevant, as it provided Fluxus artists with a platform for activistic engagement in their socio-political context.

Transferring Paradigms Between Music and the Visual Arts. Paik Beyond Cage

As a reference point in the structural analysis of the respective oeuvres of Cage and Paik, Marcel Duchamp is particularly important because the concepts he employed influenced both artists. Duchamp’s artistic approach varied between spontaneity and elaboration. His readymades were unintentional; as he himself declared, the “creation” of them is reduced to choosing one object over another. The Large Glass, in contrast, necessitated careful planning and meticulous work. But the two needed not be mutually exclusive: he devised a complicated chance method in selecting notes for his (only) musical piece, Erratum Musical (1913).

In the 1950s, working with chance factors was a characteristic of New Music, a movement represented by composers such as John Cage, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. Cage’s seminal 1952 piece 4'33" featured a silence that lasted four minutes and thirty three seconds. Cage sought to foreground the unexpected elements in the environment over the expectancy of sound in the piece according to his dicta of indeterminacy. The work of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was crucial in Cage’s conceptual arrival at his landmark score, as Schoenberg had managed to equalize the value of pitches in musical strips using his influential twelve-tone technique. Post-Schoenberg music was atonal, in which serialism dominated and emphasis on certain pitches was removed. Cage took this idea further and posited that all sounds, not just tones, were equal class citizens in a musical score. In doing so, he extended the concept of music to include the ostensibly aberrational or unwanted category of “noise,” and ultimately to swallow silence itself. Silence in Cagean thought is not, however, the complete absence of sound but rather an empty space that can be filled by life’s limitless noises. 4'33"’s contents depend on the environment of the receiver. Cage himself realised in 1951 after a visit to Harvard University’ anechoic laboratory that there was no such thing as absolute silence – that even internal sounds such as his heart beating could disrupt apparent silence. Cage thus fulfilled the requirements of both Duchampian chance procedure and Zen indeterminacy, famously declaring that he does not discriminate between intention and non-intention.

Like Duchamp before him, Cage was also meticulous in execution. Cage’s Williams Mix is a prime example of his processual scruple: his first audiotape composition, its four-minute runtime reveals thousands of pieces of audiotape assembled to play in parallel on multiple soundtracks.

Poster for

Exposition of Music — Electronic Television Courtesy Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels, Cologne

This dualism of chance/meticulous assemblage exists in Paik’s work with television sets as well. Paik spent months learning the intricacies of electrical engineering in secret to prepare his landmark exhibition of 1963, Exposition of Music — Electronic Television, which featured twelve variously modified TV sets. In the Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television, Paik states that “Indeterminism and variability is the very underdeveloped parameter in the optical art, although this has been the central problem in music in the last ten years.” He pays homage to both Duchamp and Cage and at the same time declares the intention of going beyond them. With the Electronic Television segment of his 1963 exhibition he aimed to study the indeterminism of television sets. When an unexpected accident occurred (one of the TV sets broke, thus displaying a mere horizontal line on the screen), Paik integrated it into his exhibition, naming it Zen for TV. The exhibition was a participatory event that involved all the senses of the viewer and could be regarded as the forerunner of both video art and interactive art. What Duchamp had managed to achieve with his concept of an open artwork governed by chance and variability, Cage and New Music had duly responded with the notion of an open work in music, in turn prompting a response from Paik in a video-based form of visual art. Thus, the chain of conceptual influence runs from Duchamp and the historical avant-garde to Cage and then to Nam June Paik.

Zen for TV (1963-1975), Courtesy of Estate of Nam June Paik, Seoul. Photo: MUMOK, Vienna

But for Paik, a mere translation of the indeterminism prefigured by Duchamp and co-opted by Cage from music to optical art was insufficient. Paik understood that he needed to push the idea of inserting chance elements into the artwork beyond the sonic realm. His first departure from Cage in this sense was his different treatment of “prepared pianos.” Cage prepared his pianos for a practical reason: while composing for performances, he observed that the space is only big enough to accommodate a single piano and had to compress in one instrument the sounds native to the keyboard alongside the thuds, crashes, and jingles of percussive apparatus. To variate, he inserted various objects to the strings in the piano that would make different sounds in the action of playing. Thus, his pianos could return to normal functional ones. In their modified state, they evoked the idea of randomness, surprising the audience.

Paik’s pianos could not return to their initial state. Once modified or destroyed they remained permanently so. Nam June first used a piano in his Hommage à John Cage of 1959, where he tore off ten of the piano’s strings and played it first as a stringed instrument and then as a percussive one before finally destroying it. In his solo show Exposition of Music — Electronic Television, 1963, Paik prepared six pianos in various stages of destruction and modification. He attached a blow drier to one of them, Klavier Integral, that could be triggered by a key press, a bra and barbed wire making it threatening and tabooing for the audience. In doing so, Paik offered a different sensory experience, beyond that of sound, that assumed a tactile and visual nature as well. Phenomenologically, his piece assumed a synesthetic character. Paik’s grand plan was that of extending the boundary of music into a sort of “integral art” that would encompass both the visual and the performative/theatrical as well as the sculptural, and, through the use of the interior of the villa which housed the exhibition, even the architectural, generating meaning through layout. Summarising his intentions, even before his manifesto of 1963, Paik declared in 1959: ‘Schoenberg wrote ‘atonal’. John Cage has written ‘a-composition’. Me, I write ‘a-music’.’

In his quest for an integral art, video art as outputted by TV sets proved to be the perfect multisensory experience. A flow of electrons that could be manipulated infinitely, the moving image was the texture of this integral art. But at the time, the television, just like the radio, was broadcasting preset sensory data. Paik’s conversion of the TV from a reproductive machine displaying pre-determined pieces to an open, productive one can also be linked to Cage and the influence chain that I have mentioned. With Imaginary Landscape No. 4, Cage had for the first time introduced the idea of discarding predetermined scores. The “site specific” and “live” attributes of the performance were a consequence of using the material that the radio stations beamed and not prepared pieces by Cage himself (incorporating randomness). As early as the 1920s, the idea of using traditional reproductive instruments for productive purposes (converting them) was traversing Western European creative circles. Cage’s piece corresponds to this concept but only as regards reception. Cage’s prepared piano alters the sound, Paik’s prepared pianos for the 1963 Exposition of Music event triggered events in the environment when keys are operated: a transistor radio would play, a key would shut down the lights in the room, and so on. Like the pianos, and like Cage’s radios, the TVs were not instrumental in reproducing a pre-established piece but were production tools in their own rights. And like Cage’s radios, the material they used relied on broadcasts from local stations. The whole set-up was an “open artwork,” and the audience was the main performer. To put it simply, Paik stripped away the original function of the TV (which is to reproduce) in order to convert it, exciting the visitors (and their instinctual need to play and touch) into making never-before-seen images, as productive machines.

Assimilating McLuhan: On Media as Extension of Perception. Correctives to Attention Deficits Induced by Media Culture

Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 consisted in twenty-four performers working with twelve radios and a conductor operating them, modifying the station, the pitch and the volume. The piece was site specific and “live,” playing with indeterminacy, as we have seen, as the performers only operated with sounds that depended on the station. It also introduced silence as a compositional element one year before 4'33". The follow-up piece, 0'00" was a third that used this element. Germane to this piece was the observation that in a media information soaked world, attention is a scarce resource. The pieces were minutes long exercises in heightened sensibility of perception. Cage specifically thought of media as ‘expansion to man’, expansion of perception. Radio as extension to man is an idea that can be traced around the same time to Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian media communications philosopher. McLuhan was highly influential to both Cage and Paik. In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan creates a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary media culture. His premise is that all technology is in essence an extension of human abilities and senses. The printed book, the radio, TV and even clothing are all extending what humans can do. Because of this, technology destabilizes the natural balance of our senses and in turn affects the sensibility of society. In a subliminal way, the invention of new media was, according to McLuhan, the main factor for cultural shifts in the West. The effects of media change, in essence, the structure of the world in which we live in. His famous idea ‘the medium is the message’ is a consequence of this: because we don’t make a conscious decision to participate in the dialogue that a medium opens, we permit the medium to impose its own assumptions upon us and thus transform it into the actual message as it shapes our world in the process. Any medium that heightens one sense to the detriment of the other four leads to individuation: phonetic language and then the movable type, invented in the 15th century, delved us into a world characterized by the primacy of vision above all other senses and in which individuals could detach themselves from a body of society that was less and less tribal. The advent of the electronic age, however, starting with the telegraph restored a certain balance to the senses and reconnected us into a global neural network, exteriorizing the human nervous system and bombarding it with an abundance of information.

But because media creates its own environment, just as ‘electric light is pure information’, ‘a medium without a message’ whose content is anything it shines on (the perfect McLuhanian metaphor), some are beneficial to certain messages while others are not. More exactly, media themselves can be hot or cool, depending on the participation of the audience.

‘A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. (…) Hot media are therefore low in participation and cool media are high in participation and completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.’

Radio is seen as hot because it broadcasts continuously and offers all information in a straightforward way. TV is cool because it is immersive. ‘Radio will serve as background- sound (…) TV will no work as background, it engages you. You have to be with it.’ It is low definition and breaks away from uni-sensory experience by employing both sound and vision. Because of this it is the perfect gateway into the neural network.

Cage was the first to take control of the stream of media information through his modified radio transmissions and sounds. As the media information became more abundant, the pieces enabled the listener, through silence, to be more attentive. Silence enables reflection on perception itself and on corporeality and attention. It heightens ones sense but by breaking the mode of broadcasting where the ear is subjugated by the transmission, it ‘cools down’ the media, in McLuhanian terms.

In Zen for Film (an eight-minute-long white screen of Fluxus noiseless content), Paik referenced Cage’s silence. He invited Cage and Cunningham to watch an hour long film. As Cage thought about the similarities between their works, he stated:

“Offhand, you might say that all three actions are the same. But they are quite different. The Rauschenberg paintings [White Paintings]… become airports for particles of dust and shadows that are in the environment. My piece 4'33" becomes in performances the sounds of the environment. Now, in the music, the sounds of the environment remain, so to speak, where they are, whereas in the case of the Rauschenberg paintings the dust and shadows, the changes in light and so forth, don’t remain where they are but come to the painting. In the case of the Nam June Paik film that has no images on it [Zen for Film]…, the focus is more intense. The nature of the environment is more on the film, different from the dust and the shadows that are the environment falling on the painting, and thus less free.’”

Paik replied three years later:

‘N.B. Dear John, The nature of the environment is much more on TV than on film and painting. In fact, TV (its random movement of electrons) IS the environment of today.’

The McLuhian concept of the medium being the message is present here, although phrased differently. In his quest of blurring the roles between producer, performer and audience, Paik seemed to have noticed that the coolness of the TV promotes audience participation much more than all other mediums. McLuhan noticed this in 1964: ‘The cool TV medium promotes depth structures in art and entertainment alike, and creates audience involvement in depth as well.’

The Age of TV is the advent of the exhibition of art as a multi-sensory, deep experience that stimulates the non-visual senses as well. Paik understood this and was pursuing it with his ‘integral art’ as early as 1963.

Random Access. The Experiencer Free in Time and Space

In a truly immersive, integral art, audience participation had to be total. The degree of freedom of the experiencer of the artistic performance must be absolute. In a text from 1963, About the Exposition of Music, he observed that in most indeterminate music, the composer gives freedom to the interpreter but not to the audience. This held true for Cage’s work as well. The listeners had the option of listening or abstaining from it and this binary choice system was the same as it was for classical music. Moreover, the flow of time was in one direction just as the playing was from beginning to end. He explains further:

“The audience cannot distinguish the undetermined time or sounds of the interpreter… The problem becomes more confused if the interpreter has a ’rehearsal’…, or if the interpreter plays it many times as his favourite ‘repertoire’… this is the prostitution of the freedom… if the interpreter rehearses even only once, the degree and the character of the indeterminacy becomes the same as in classical, if not baroque, if not Renaissance, if not medieval music. This is why I have not composed any undetermined music, or graphical music, despite my high respect for Cage and his friends.”

His plan for Symphony for 20 Rooms was an attempt to remediate this problem. The listeners could move freely from one room to another, from one auditory experience to another. When Paik said ‘I am tired of renewing the form of music – serial or aleatoric, graphic or five lines, instrumental or bellcanto, screaming or action, tape or live… I hope must renew the ontological form of music…’ he was referring to these problems.

This brings us to the ideas of random access and variability which are central to Paik’s video art. Listeners (any kind of experiencer for that matter) had to have phenomenological options for the events they were presented. His Random Access (sticking bits of audio tape on the wall and then using the needle of a player to read them in any order the listener wants) is a direct translation of that principle.

Random Access (1963/2000) Photo: Erika Barahona Ede Courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York & Nam June Paik Estate, Seoul

Paik also adopted Cage’s idea that “music is a chronology.” He referred to his art as TIME art. His 1963 exhibition put equal weight on the TV and the objects sonores and Zen objects. He made it clear that the second part of the show was going to be on electronic art (Electronic Television) rather late in the planning stages. He kept his work on TVs secret and taught himself electronics to understand the technical principles he was working with. The objective was to convert the TV into a self-referential form and also deal with the phenomenological state of the experiencer. He defined freedom in terms of time, saying that all musical experiences are essentially strips of time. The purpose of time art was thus to liberate the experiencer from unidirectional time. He realized this in different ways. One is the simultaneous perception of images from thirteen independent TVs in the Wuppertal 1963 show. The experiencer has the possibility of choosing independent flows of information and experience and thus different chronologies. Time is also in a direct relationship with space, so another way to translate this experiment is to give the experiencer freedom to pursue spatiality as he wishes. This is his project in Symphony for 20 Rooms. The idea is that different paths in space yield different chronological sequences of sound.

A transnational artist, Nam June Paik is the embodiment of the Electronic Age from a rich multicultural perspective. An artist of the wave and the electron, his experiments with various media paved the way for an entire generation of manipulators of sound and image. John Cage’s influence on his thought is almost impossible to quantify. It seems that for every intuition that Cage had regarding the nature of artistic intention and production, Nam June Paik reacted with passionate dedication. Cage’s role was to push boundaries with thirsty curiosity. Paik’s was to explore their outer regions with wild imagination. Their enduring friendship produced a fruitful intellectual dialogue, both directly through collaborations and indirectly through the enormous provocation that Cagean thought posed to Paik, challenging him to escape its cage. Their beautiful relationship stands as a testament to the collaborative power of men, ever rising the scaffolding of human spirit.