Nam June Paik

We will never know which cave dweller was the first to discover that mineral pastes and charcoal could be smeared on a rock wall to make a painting. But we do know who first recognized that television could be made into art. And we don’t mean the art of making television programs. We mean art created from TV sets, TV tubes, TV cabinets and TV signals. The founding father of video art, which by now ranks as one of the museum world’s serious growth sectors, was the Korean-born provocateur Nam June Paik.

In the early 1960s, while studying music at a series of universities in Germany, Paik became involved with the international art movement Fluxus, a loose affiliation of anarchic talents that included Yoko Ono and the avant-garde composer John Cage. Taking the anti-art aesthetic of Dadaism as their inspiration, they were devoted to various kinds of madcap public performance (once, in the middle of performing his own Etude for Pianoforte, Paik suddenly leapt into the audience where Cage was sitting and scissored off the composer’s necktie) and to found materials — the artist’s term for whatever happens to be at hand. Paik’s breakthrough came when he realized that television — with signals flowing everywhere and receivers in almost every home — was a universal found material. As he once explained: “I knew there was something to be done in television and nobody else was doing it, so I said why not make it my job?”

So, in 1963, he set to work dismantling 13 old black-and-white TV sets and figuring out ways to distort their pictures with magnets, microphones and other means. He displayed the results that year in a gallery in Wuppertal, Germany. It was the world’s first exhibition of video art. When Sony produced the first portable video camera in 1965, Paik was also the first to make art with that, using scenes he filmed of a papal visit to New York.

Paik, who died in January at age 73, thought humor was a natural ingredient of art. Works like Video Fish — 52 working monitors, each covered by an aquarium stocked with fish — are deliberately comic. After moving to New York in 1964 he also began his long collaboration with Charlotte Moorman, a gifted cellist and a very good sport who colluded in Paik’s forays into what you might call soft-core classical, including his Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only, in which she shed her clothing while playing Bach’s C Major Sonata. Paik took his art seriously. But he produced it with a smile.