Four Who Brought Talent Reveling in Freedom, They Enrich the Land with Their Creative Gusto for a Video Artist: "It's Happening

By Paul Gray

Insofar as he settles anywhere on earth, Korean-born Video Artist Nam June Paik, 53, lives in Manhattan. More specifically, he inhabits the top of a converted warehouse with a rusting cast-iron facade in SoHo. Entree to Paik's aerie comes via a freight elevator, with the host himself hauling on the chain pulley that drags the motor into grumbling life. As the aging contraption shakes and shudders toward the fifth floor, Paik says in heavily accented English, "After this, everything anticlimax."

Not quite. Paik's cavernous loft resembles a Sony factory that was in the process of being ransacked by terrorists when an earthquake struck. Television sets, some dead and most of the others crying out for intensive care, are scattered everywhere, along with packing crates and snaking piles of electronic debris. Paik, a short, roundish man with close-cropped black hair, pads in his slippers through the clutter, happily and completely at home.

What does he do here? He experiments with the ramifications of an insight that came to him several decades ago. Paik was perhaps the first person to perceive the TV screen as a canvas and, ergo, the stream of electrons that creates images on the picture tube as paint. Presto, video art, which means scrambling, bending, rearranging or just generally messing around with the picture on TV sets. As practiced by Paik and his followers, this tinkering can lead to anything from vivid static and colorful snow to whimsical sculptures of the video age. When New York's Whitney Museum gave Paik's work a full-scale retrospective in 1982, viewers encountered strange things. There was a battery of television monitors, showing preprogrammed tapes, set behind a bank of aquariums, in which fish swam randomly. There was a statue of Buddha seated before a closed-circuit TV camera and, below that, a small receiver. Gallerygoers could watch an icon contemplate its own image. If Paik's art seems serendipitous, so does his journey to the U.S. His periodically prosperous family was driven out of Seoul in 1950 by the ravages of the Korean War. His father resettled first in Hong Kong and then Tokyo, where Paik earned a university degree with a major in philosophy. At that point, infatuated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Western avant-gardism in general, the young graduate might have pursued his studies in the U.S. The country, however, did not interest him. "Many middle-class Koreans go to live in America in the 1950s," he says. "But I think then there is not much culture in America, Hemingway and all that." He chose West Germany instead and stayed there eight years.

Then he met American Composer John Cage, who was visiting Germany. "He was exotic," Paik says approvingly. "I hear about Robert Rauschenberg from him, and about other artists doing new things in New York. I think, 'Slowly, slowly, America is coming up.' "

Paik had no intention of speeding this process along when he finally came to the U.S. in 1964. He merely wanted to visit Cage and his cronies. His first impression of New York City was far from favorable: "It was as dirty as Paris and as ugly as Dusseldorf." Yet Paik found himself extending his stay: "I keep saying, 'Half more year, half more year.' "

The indecision ended in 1976, when Paik became a U.S. citizen. He had grown ) comfortable with the "playfulness and childish ideas" of his newfound land. He also sees signs that his adopted country may be catching up with him. "Rock videos very interesting," he says. "Some of them are getting so good they're scaring me." And he is sure that coming to the U.S. changed his career. "America give me access to high tech," he says. "Here I get a sense of what high-tech equipment can do to sensibility. American kids have moved from Sesame Street through The Electric Company to MTV. They can see things in a frame that European kids can't." Is this mutation good, bad or what? "I don't know," Paik concedes. "But it's happening here."