The Off-the-Wall Zaniness of Nam June Paik's Action Music

In the 1960s, South Korean multimedia artist Nam June Paik (1932 - 2006) became the progenitor of video as a novel approach to artistic expression, to which he rightfully earned the title of “the father of video art”. He readily discerned that video could serve as a visual arts medium and a core element within a larger body of work. Concurrently, he found that television also demonstrated a potentially viable source for creativity - specifically, the physicality of television sets and the images presented on their screens. This openness to alternative media as visual and aural art tools manifested into decades of works that fused traditional and modern techniques and mediums: video sculptures, site-specific installations, and video collages.

However, his orchestrated performance pieces of the late-1950s and early-1960s are among the most memorable and influential facets of his illustrious career, particularly for their combination of sound experimentation, Neo-Dadaist disdain for reason and logic, and theatrical spontaneity.?

Paik was born into a wealthy family in Seoul, South Korea in 1932 and received formal training in his younger years to become a Classical pianist. The Korean War forced him to relocate to Japan, where he later graduated from The University of Tokyo in 1956 with a degree in Aesthetics. During his university years, Paik jointly studied Music and Art History, and he wrote his thesis on the Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951).

Shortly after his graduation, an interest in avant-garde musical composition led to Paik’s departure from Japan and subsequent move to West Germany. Paik traveled extensively within the country and expanded his knowledge of music history, composition, and theory under the tutelage of Greek musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades (1907 - 1977) at the University of Munich and German composer Wolfgang Fortner (1907 - 1987) at the International Music College in Freiburg. His 1957 visit to the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt brought him into contact with the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007).

In 1958, Paik continued his independent musical studies and simultaneously put his education into practice as an electronics employee at the West German Broadcasting studio. Within this period, Paik’s encounters and friendships with a group of experimental musicians and artists marked a pivotal moment that soon came through in his first musical works. A few figures who left an indelible impression on Paik’s artistry include John Cage (1912 - 1992), George Maciunas (1931 - 1978), Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968), and Joseph Beuys (1921 - 1986). Cage’s espousal of chance, randomness, and transformation of the piano into a percussive instrument especially impacted Paik’s art.?

After listening to Cage’s music, Paik emphatically proclaimed that he became “a new man” and expressed admiration for Cage’s rejection of seriousness and classical traditions of music composition. From there, Paik decided to merge experimental compositions with bodily performances that completely defied the strictures of traditional music arrangements. Paik developed action music, a mode of musical expression that features a mix of live and pre-recorded sounds, instruments and non-musical found objects, and participatory involvement of both the artist and the audience.

As one of his first examples of action music, Paik created a tribute piece in honor of his friend and mentor, John Cage. Located at Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf, Paik staged his Hommage in the same space where Cage performed his Music Walk in the previous year.?

During the performance, the German poet Hans Helms was seated atop a ladder as he read aloud the musical scores from a toilet paper roll. A grouping of instruments and non-musical items were strewn all over the space. A description of the disparate and seemingly unrelated objects included in Paik’s Hommage makes it sound like an odd amalgamation of an instrumental arrangement, storage inventory, and grocery list: two pianos (one of which had no keys), tape recorders, tin cans filled with stones, a plastic train, a toy car, an egg, a pane of glass, and a music box.?

After he produced a series of sounds from the aforementioned objects in an aurally disconnected one-person faux-orchestra, the performance dramatically concluded when Paik ran around the venue in a state of frenzy before he slashed the keys of the functioning piano with a kitchen knife and tipped it over. One critic remarked in his review of Hommage: “Pianoforte est morte. The applause was never-ending”. Over the next few years, Paik recreated this performance to great acclaim.

Paik performed his Etude for Pianoforte in Cologne at the Atelier of Mary Baumeister in 1960. The concert initially appeared to be in line with the orderliness of classical music as Paik played a rendition of the Romantic composer Chopin's sonatas. This abruptly changed direction in mood and tone as Paik wept and hurled his body onto the remains of a nearby ruined piano that were displayed on the stage.?

John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the experimental pianist David Tudor (1926 - 1996) were among the attendees, and they sat in the front row. Paik first approached Cage, where he then removed his suit jacket and cut off his necktie with a large pair of scissors before he poured shampoo all over his head. Paik gave the same shampoo treatment to Tudor, but as Stockhausen attempted to extricate himself from the surrealistic happening, Paik shouted, “Not for you!”. Although the rest of the audience was shocked at the scene that transpired, Cage responded with raucous laughter as Paik swiftly departed from the venue. Still stunned, the audience’s surprise was further heightened when Paik phoned the venue to declare the completion of the performance.?

Originale was a collaborative form of experimental theater directed by Karlheinz Stockhausen and was staged multiple times over several years, beginning in Cologne, Germany in 1961. As one of the original performers, Paik’s wild gesticulations entailed a series of erratic demonstrations on stage and the participation of his viewers (perhaps, more accurately, they were forcibly subsumed into his performance): throwing beans into the air and pelting them at his audience, rubbing away his tears with rolled paper and throwing the paper at the audience, smearing rice and shaving cream all over his body, banging his head against a piano’s keys, engaging in slow-motion movements. In conjunction with these performative body gestures, Paik played two tape recorders that contained a montage of sounds, from women screaming and classical instrumentation to radio news and electronic noises.??

The intent behind Originale was multifold, as Paik’s performance, along with that of his artistic compatriots, was meant to disrupt a viewer’s expectations of the traditional theater environment. In the case of Paik, his body became a musical instrument of sorts that violently and haphazardly interacted with the objects on stage, which then became projectiles toward the passive audience members.

At the Neo-Dada in der Musik event in Düsseldorf’s Kammerspiele, Paik’s roughly five-minute piece was primarily executed in a slow, meditative manner. Paik stood behind a table as he gingerly raised a violin into the air. This calm was rudely interrupted once Paik smashed the violin into the table in one fell swoop, leaving the instrument in pieces. This revelatory approach to music-making was a statement that a single sound could be produced as musical notation, regardless of the object in question or how it was used to generate a sound.?

As one of his landmark works in 1962, the year was also significant for Paik as this was when he became a member of Fluxus. Founded by George Maciunas, Fluxus was an international collective of artists who engaged in diverse forms of artistic performances that emphasized the primacy of the creative process in action rather than the completed product.

Around 1963, Paik began to expand his artistic pursuits into other media in return to the materiality of the visual arts. Zen for TV (1963) was one of the first works that embody the realization of this stylistic shift. A television set has become a sculptural work in that Paik altered its cathode tubing and inner machinery to produce a glowing line that bisects a blackened screen. The ability to transform the imagery on a television screen and abstract it into a completely different form led to Paik’s view that the cathode ray tube would succeed the two-dimensionality of the painted canvas.?

Although Paik’s corpus grew in scope and interwove mediums like videotapes and sculptures, his tactful action music performances continued to inform the content of his later projects and those of his contemporaries and future generations of artists and musicians.?

Joseph Beuys, a friend of Paik’s and fellow Fluxus artist, took an axe and destroyed an entire piano at a 1963 Paik exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Exposition of Music - Electronic Television. This act was greatly welcomed by Paik and the audience because moments before Beuys struck the piano, Paik encouraged the visitors to move all over the piano with their feet.

The importance of performance remained an integral element of Paik’s work, either executed by him or through collaborators. One of the most noteworthy and controversial examples occurred in New York in 1967 with Opera Sextronique, when the American cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933 - 1991) played her cello topless while wearing only a gas mask. The event ended mid-performance after police arrested Moorman for indecent exposure.?

The alternative noise rock band Sonic Youth revived the Fluxus piano experiments of George Maciunas and Nam June Paik for their 1999 album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. Band members Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore alter a piano’s ability to produce sound by nailing in its keys. Essentially, this rendered the piano devoid of any means to create music, and three other pianos were permanently damaged.

Paik perfectly embodied the tenets of Fluxus as his action music performances were jaw-droppingly enticing while they were carried out on himself, his audience members, and the objects he chose.??

As one of the strangest yet most innovative forms of creative expression, Paik successfully bridged the gap between the visual arts and musical composition and performance with his action music. Rather than treating them as isolated disciplines, Paik’s work makes a case for the inseparability of art and music. He revolutionized our understanding of how musical composition could be attained with instruments, either as they were initially designed or with physical manipulation (even if that meant destroying the instrument, as in the instance of the violin). Paik relied heavily on Cage’s chance and randomness techniques by invoking disparate physical actions and noises during performances that contributed to the sound and rhythmic flow (or lack thereof) in any given piece. The participatory involvement of spectators like Cage within Paik’s action music sessions further contributed to his dismantling of the invisible barriers within public performances.

If one found themselves in attendance at any of Paik’s musical happenings, Cage humorously cautioned attendees to be mindful of their choice of seating, let alone decide to even be within the same space as Paik and his unpredictable performativity.?

Links

Contemporary Recreation of Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo (2017)

Nam June Paik, Action Music in Berlin (1965)

Nam June Paik, Hommage á John Cage (1958 - 1959)

Nam June Paik, Global Groove (excerpt) (1973)

Nam June Paik, Piano Performance

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Stephen Vitiello, Strange Music for Nam June Paik (2013)

Sonic Youth, Piano Piece #13 (Song for Nam June Paik) (1999)

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