Nam June Paik

“I wanted to elevate television to an art form that was as highly valued as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach,” Nam June Paik once said. Born in Korea, Paik studied twentieth-century music and composition in Japan and Germany before emerging in the early 1960s at the forefront of a critical exploration, through visual art, of the new mass medium of television. Magnet TV is one of the pioneering works Paik made utilizing manipulated television sets. In this instance he placed a strong magnet on top of the monitor, where it interferes with the electronic signal; this results in a series of abstract patterns that form on the screen as the magnet is moved. Paik thus transformed the console into a participatory object that subverts the one-way, linear flow of broadcast television.

Paik, whose prolific experimentation also encompassed closed-circuit installations and videotapes, began to create increasingly large, multimonitor sculptural installations in the 1980s. V-yramid, a ziggurat of forty television sets of decreasing size positioned atop one another, was made for the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1982. The kaleidoscopic, proto-music-video montage that plays on the monitors is recycled material from his single-channel videos Global Groove (1973) and Lake Placid ’80 (1982). This footage was produced with video effects generated by the Paik-Abe synthesizer, a video-processing machine Paik had developed with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe in 1969. In his work Paik embraced both pop culture and the artistic avant-garde; V-yramid similarly draws a visual analogy between ancient pyramidal architecture and modern media technology.