Paik's Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art 9780520356146

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PAIK’S VIRTUAL ARCHIVE

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the ben and a. jess shenson endowment fund in visual and performing arts of the university of california press foundation, made possible by fred m. levin and nancy livingston, the shenson foundation.

PAIK’S VIRTUAL ARCHIVE Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art Hanna B. Hölling

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hölling, Hanna, author. Title: Paik's virtual archive : time, change, and materiality in media art / Hanna B. Hölling. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045252 | ISBN 9780520288904 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Paik, Nam June, 1932–2006—Criticism and interpretation. | Video art—Themes, motives. | Video art—Conservation and restoration. | Multimedia (Art)—Themes, motives. | Multimedia (Art)—Conservation and restoration. Classification: LCC N6498.V53 H65 2017 | DDC 700.92—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045252 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Revisiting the Object PART I. CONCEPT AND MATERIALITY

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Zen for Film 63 Changeability and Multimedia Art 76 Time and Conservation 93 Heterotemporalities: Film Time, Video Time, and Paik Time •

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PART 3. ARCHIVE AND IDENTITY

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Two Works 17 Conceptual and Material Aspects of Media Art 30 Musical Roots of Performed and Performative Media PART 2. TIME AND CHANGEABILITY

4. 5. 6. 7.

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The Material and the Immaterial Archive 141 Archival Implications 154 Conclusion: The Many Archai of Conservation and Curation •

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Notes 171 Bibliography Index 233 •

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ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Nam June Paik, Canopus (1989). Documentation of the damage, December 8, 2008 • 2 2. Nam June Paik, Canopus (1989). Detail of the damaged hubcap

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3. Nam June Paik, Arche Noah (1989). View during the test re-installation at the ZKM in 2008 • 21 4. Modification of the interior structure of Nam June Paik’s Arche Noah (1989) 5. Peter Moore, Installation view at Gallery Bonino, New York, 1974

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6. Nam June Paik, Paik hinter Pflanzen mit TVs (Paik behind the plants and TVs), undated • 25 7. Nam June Paik, TV Garden (1974). Installation view at Tate Liverpool, 2010–11 • 28 8. Paik’s drawings—quasi-instructions—for Brandenbruger Tor, undated

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9. Mark Pattsfall, Instructions for preparation of TV Clock, undated, presumably 1991 • 34 10. Nam June Paik performing Zen for Head, 1962

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11. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the Museum Ostwall, 2010–11 • 65

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12. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at Tate Liverpool, 2010–11 • 66 13. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the Guggenheim Museum, 2009 • 66 14. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film and three Zen for Film Fluxkit editions 15. Nam June Paik, Zen for TV (1963–75)

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16. Peter Moore, Nam June Paik with Magnet TV (October 15, 1965)

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17. Nam June Paik, Manfred Montwé, Peter Brötzmann Demonstrates “Random Access” (1963) • 83 18. Nam June Paik, Manfred Montwé, Visitor at “Record Schaschlik” (1963)

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19. Nam June Paik, TV Clock (1989). Installation view at the Guggenheim Museum, 2000 • 89 20. Diagram after Bergson’s cone of memory illustrating the coexistence of temporalities in the present • 103 21. Étienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotograph (1894)

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22. Eadweard Muybridge, Album on decomposition of movement: “Animal Locomotion.” The Parrot Flying • 107 23. Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) 24. Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages (1914)

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P L AT E S follow page 122

1. Nam June Paik, Canopus (1989) 2. Nam June Paik, Arche Noah (1989). Installation view at the Weisses Haus Hamburg, 1989 3. Nam June Paik, Arche Noah (1989). Installation view of MultiMediale 2, Opel Factory, Karlsruhe, 1991 4. Nam June Paik, Arche Noah (1989). Installation view at the EnBW Karlsruhe, 2008–9 5. Jochen Saueracker, drawing for the modification of Nam June Paik’s Arche Noah 6. Nam June Paik, TV Garden (1974). Installation view at Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999–2000 7. Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974). Installation view, 1982 8. Nam June Paik, TV Garden (1974). Installation view at the Guggenheim Museum, 2000 9. Nam June Paik, TV Garden (1974). Installation view at the Guggenheim Museum, 2002–2003

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10. Mark Patsfall, Mock-up for Chang Yongsil Robot (1989) 11. Mark Patsfall, Mock-up for Mercury (1990) 12. Nam June Paik, Aunt and Uncle (from the series Family of Robots, 1986). Installation view at the Tate Liverpool, 2010–11 13. Mark Patsfall, Steve Shuttle working on Celtic Memory (Stonehenge), 1991 14. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2015–16 15. Peter Moore, Nam June Paik casting his shadow on his projection of Zen for Film, 1965 16. Nam June Paik, Zen for TV (1963/1976) 17. Nam June Paik, Moon is the Oldest TV (1965, 2000 version). Installation view at the Nam June Paik Art Center, 2012 18. Nam June Paik, Random Access, re-executed by Paik (1975) 19. Nam June Paik, TV Buddha (1974) 20. Nam June Paik, Rembrandt Automatic (1963–76) 21. Nam June Paik, Something Pacific (1986) 22. Nam June Paik, Something Pacific (1986) 23. Nam June Paik, Untitled (1993) 24. Nam June Paik, Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn (1984). Installation view at Temporary Stedelijk, 2010–11

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because I was born in 1975, I missed the heyday of Fluxus and other new artistic forms of expression that developed in the 1960s and 1970s. When I realized that I had a strong desire to make art myself and, later, to become a conservator of art, I began an academic pilgrimage that took me to art academies and universities in Warsaw, Rome, Cologne, and Amsterdam. Although I first encountered Nam June Paik’s work in the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, sometime in the 1990s, transfixed on that day by his TV Buddha, I became a “Paikian” much later, in the first decade of this century, when I began working at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, with its stunning collection of media art. And it was there that I learned of Paik’s death, on January 29, 2006. When I read the news on my computer screen, I remember thinking that an era had come to an end. Nam June Paik, although I never met him, guided me through the world of his media, which I desperately wished to comprehend. I want to acknowledge here the role he played in my life, bringing about, even if unknowingly, my meetings with his friends and collaborators, whom I interviewed and came to know in their ateliers, labs, workshops, and homes on three continents. Nam June’s spirit, inspiration, and stamina, which seemed always present in these relationships, strengthened my sense that in them I encountered the artist himself. This book originated in Amsterdam, where, from 2009 to 2013, with the support of a doctoral fellowship, I studied at the Department of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).

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During the three years that followed, I revised the manuscript, moving from Amsterdam to New York, to Zurich, and then to London. When I submitted the manuscript to the University of California Press, I received invaluable editorial support, first from Karen Levine (now at Getty Publications), and subsequently from Nadine Little as well as from Jack Young and Rachel Berchten, who made the book production process a pleasure. I am indebted to all of them. I express my great, great gratitude to the editors: Stephanie Fay, who edited the manuscript for the University of California Press, for her patient and scrupulous attention, to my colleague Allison Stielau at UCL, and to the independent editors Thomas Fredrickson and Clare Donald, who helped edit it in its earlier stages. I am grateful too to Martha Buskirk, Pip Laurenson, Christiane Paul, and another, anonymous, reviewer of the manuscript for their constructive criticism. Deborah Cherry, of the University of Amsterdam, and Glenn Wharton, of New York University, supported this project in its formative stages with their advice, enthusiasm, and criticism, which was always constructive. The same goes for Michael Newman of Goldsmiths in London, whose intellectual power and infectious motivation have sustained me. My research group New Strategies in the Conservation of Contemporary Art, at the University of Amsterdam, Maastricht University, and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, generously contributed to this book with their discussion, and I am deeply appreciative. Renée van de Vall (of Maastricht University) was the leader of the group, whose members included Ijsbrand Hummelen, Tatja Scholte, Sanneke Stigter, Vivian van Saaze, and—at a later stage—Annet Dekker, Paolo Martore, and Angela Matyssek. At the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), I received strong support from Christoph Lindner and Wanda Strauven, both former directors, as well as from the managing director, Eloe Kingma. Julia Noordegraaf, Kitty Zijmans, Joost Bolten, and Pip Laurenson contributed as members of my doctoral committee. My visiting professorship at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, from 2013 to 2015 has given me the critical distance and stimulus I needed to revise and refine the book. At the Bard, on one of the topics of this book, I curated an exhibition, Revisions—Zen for Film (Bard Graduate Center Gallery, September 17, 2015–February 21, 2016), published an eponymous catalogue, and organized a symposium, “Revisions: Object–Event– Performance since the 1960s” (September 22, 2015). I thank Dean Peter N. Miller of the Bard Graduate Center for his support of my research, and my faculty colleagues for their constructive criticism. My classes and students at Bard provided me with a responsive forum for trying out my ideas. At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, during my fellowship in fall 2015, Sven Dupré gave me invaluable help in broadening the horizon of my research. The Getty Foundation in Los Angeles awarded me a Getty Residency in 2016– 17 that enabled me to continue my research on the “Object in Flux,” focusing on the afterlives of Fluxus objects, events, and ephemera. And in London, which has been my academic home since 2016, I have found an inspiring and challenging intellectual environment among my colleagues in the Department of History of Art at University

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College London, and give special thanks to Tamar Garb, Frederic Schwartz, and Alison Wright. The book would have never been realized without generous funding: The Dutch Scientific Organization (NWO) funded my research from 2009 to 2013, enabling me to travel, collect materials, and write. The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) provided additional funding for my research travels and materials for this project. At the Bard Graduate Center, where my position was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I was able to pursue further research and hone my manuscript. The Department of History of Art at University College London enabled the realization of the book in its final stages. I appreciate all the support I received from my closest family and friends, who allowed me to live in their homes and use their resources and who helped me ship my books to distant locations. This book would not have been possible without their goodness. From 2010 to 2015, supported by the foundations I have named above, I was able to do research for this book at museums and institutions worldwide. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2010, Carol Stringari (deputy director and chief conservator) and Joanna Phillips (conservator) were especially supportive of my research on TV Garden. Jim Coddington (chief conservator) and Glenn Wharton (former conservator) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York facilitated my research on works from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. At the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, in Düsseldorf, the former chief conservator Werner Müller gave me insight into the archives of the conservation department. I had a most rewarding research experience at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin in 2012 with the help of Manu Park, Seong Eun Kim, and Sang Ae Park. At the Stuart Collection of the University of California, San Diego, the director, Mary L. Beebe, and the curator Mathieu Gregoire were unfailingly helpful as I researched the works in the collection by Paik. The conservators Zeeyoung Chin and Nani Lew from the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, and the director Etsuko Watari and her team from Watari-Um, Tokyo, warmly welcomed me when I visited those institutions in 2012. At the ZKM, in discussions with its director, Peter Weibel; the curator Bernhard Serexhe; the former curators Andreas Beitin and Gregor Jansen; the chief technician Martin Haeberle; and those who had been my colleagues in the conservation department there, I learned how to manage the countless challenges of contemporary installations. I am grateful to all of them for their help and their interest in my work. Shigeko Kubota, Paik’s widow, has shared her time with me and has given me her friendship on my research trips to New York; it has been a privilege and an honor to know her. To Paik’s collaborators all over the world, Shuya Abe in Tokyo; Glenn Downing, Paul Garrin, and John J. Godfrey in New York; Jon Huffmann in Los Angeles; and Jochen Saueracker in Düsseldorf, I owe a debt of gratitude. And to Carl Solway and Mark Patsfall in Cincinnati I offer my deepest thanks for opening their archives and being amazing hosts. I could not have written this book without the gracious cooperation of the many individuals whom I interviewed or who willingly and even enthusiastically discussed with me my thinking about Nam June Paik and his art and supported the development of my

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ideas. The long list of these individuals includes Paik’s curators Wulf Herzogenrath, in Germany, and John Hanhardt, in the United States, and also those who were witnesses of, and are experts in, this period and media: Bazon Brock, Jon Hendricks, and Barbara London. Those who discussed my research with me and helped nurture my evolving ideas on the continuity and afterlives of media arts include Simon Anderson, Cory Arcangel, Leah Churner, Eleanor Clayton, Harald Falckenberg, Jonathan Furmanski, Ingvild Goetz, Christoph Grau, Mark Harris, Gunnar Heydenreich, Larissa Hilbig, Sabine Himmelsbach, Jodi (Dirk Paesmans), Caitlin Jones, Philipp Kaiser, Alison Knowles, Doris Krystof, Paul Kuranko, C. T. Lui, Werner Nekes, Glenn Phillips, Susanne Rennert, Raphaele Shirley, Cameron Trowbridge, Thomas Wegner, Charles Woodman, Jud Yalkut, and Lori Zippay. I am grateful to them all. The librarians and libraries essential to my research include the following: Cameron Trowbridge and Sheila Cummins at the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute Library, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles; Roland Huguenin from the Library of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands in Amsterdam; the MoMA Research Library in New York; the British Library in London; the University College London Science Library; the Library of the Institute of Art History at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum; the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago; Zentralbibliothek Zurich; Zurich Kunsthaus Library; and the Libraries of the University of Amsterdam. Ken Hakuta, the executor of the Nam June Paik Estate, aided my efforts to secure permission to reproduce the images of this book’s art program. I am indebted to him for his support. I thank all the institutions and private individuals that generously enabled me to publish photographic materials, and I am grateful to Marcus Gossolt, of the Com&Com and Alltag Agency, for his and his team’s help in processing the images. Teresa and Antoni Domañscy and Mariusz Domañski and his family, Ewka, Malgocha, and Paula, encouraged and supported me through many years of research and writing and life lived in many places. Kasia Cupial was a steadfast friend. I am grateful to them—and to Bernd Hölling for Melania and all, all the rest. And to Johannes M. Hedinger, for his bright shining star—his creativity, inspiration, dreams, sorrows, and disruptions. Hanna B. Hölling London, May 2016

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INTRODUCTION Revisiting the Object

At seven o’clock on a cold morning in early December 2008, while I was working as chief conservator at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), I received an unexpected phone call from a colleague in the technical department. He told me that Nam June Paik’s video installation Canopus (1989) had fallen from the wall and was heavily damaged. That morning at 5:10 the night guard at an external gallery that featured the exhibition of Paik’s works from the ZKM collection had been startled by a loud crash. When he investigated, he found Paik’s work lying face down on the floor, surrounded by scattered glass, the aluminum frame that held the monitors exposed, and loose electric cables hanging from the wall. Named for the brightest star in the southern constellation of Carina and Argo Navis and the second-brightest star in the nighttime sky (the brightest is Sirius), Canopus is one of a series of works by Paik representing celestial bodies (plate 1).1 It consists of six smallformat (eight-inch) Sony monitors playing a one-channel video; they are arranged symmetrically around a chromed Oldsmobile hubcap from the 1970s, inscribed with Korean calligraphy and Paik’s signature. I was devastated by the news. When my colleagues from the conservation department and I examined the scene and turned the installation face up, we noted damage to almost all its elements: every vacuum tube of the six cathode-ray-tube (CRT) monitors had imploded, its plastic case shattered, and the hubcap was severely dented and deformed (figs. 1 and 2). Although the video data for the work were safely stored on a digital carrier

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FIGURE 1 Nam June Paik, Canopus (1989). Collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Documentation of the damage that occurred on December 8, 2008. Photograph by Hanna Hölling © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

(compact flash media player) and the supporting structure remained stable, Canopus presented a lamentable picture. The conservation staff soon initiated in-depth discussions and consultations with representatives from other departments of the museum about the future of Canopus— whether and to what extent the installation should be restored. When we determined that the consensus was to restore the work, we investigated the second-hand market in audiovisual equipment in Europe and the United States and found that we could purchase used intact tubes and electronic boards to repair the monitors. Because the design of the new monitor cases differed from that of the originals, however, we also looked into the feasibility of restoring the damaged cases; one of the ZKM’s assistant conservators specialized in plastics. The museum’s curatorial and conservation staff approved these efforts to remove from Canopus any traces of material damage.

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FIGURE 2 Nam June Paik, Canopus (1989). Collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Detail of the damaged hubcap. Photograph by Hanna Hölling © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

In consultation with a specialist in the conservation of metal artifacts, I had determined that the original hubcap was not restorable: the chrome coating would flake off with even the slightest attempt to smooth out the dents in its surface. Because I was convinced that the damage to the hubcap diminished the visual appreciation of the installation as a whole (given that this series of Paik’s installations did not thematize decay or damage), I proposed replacing the original hubcap, now dented, with a secondhand hubcap of exactly the same make and model, which I was able to acquire after a time-consuming search on eBay. I left open the question of reproducing the Korean calligraphy and Paik’s signature on the hubcap (although I was convinced, as a traditionally trained conservator with skills in replication, that it was feasible technically). I proposed reinstalling Canopus with restored monitors and the “new” hubcap in an effort to replicate its initial occurrence as precisely as possible; the original hubcap would be preserved in storage at the museum; and a new display of Canopus would be accompanied by a wall text or a brochure that would recount the history of the installation, explain the conservators’ decisions about restoration, and provide technical information about the reproduced elements. This solution seemed best to me because it acknowledged the damage the work

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had suffered while allowing viewers to experience the installation as initially intended—a radiant Canopus with twinkling electronic images—rather than one marked by traces of its fall. Most of my colleagues, however, were confused by and strongly disapproved of my strategy for the hubcap, and considered it too radical a reconstruction—one that, in reproducing Paik’s signature and calligraphy, might have been seen as an attempt at fraud. It is clear in retrospect why my proposal was rejected. The prevailing understanding of the artwork’s “authenticity” derived from its signature and handwritten inscriptions: once a work is “signed,” it carries a trace of the artist, providing evidence of his or her activity and in effect stamping the piece as an untouchable “original.” Like other artworks addressed in this book, Canopus incorporates video images, along with the technology required to display them, as well as what might be seen as more a traditional signed sculpture, the inscribed hubcap. In the field of conservation, the signature or inscription by an artist authenticates the work whereas the technological elements that play back video images are accepted as variable and therefore more readily exchangeable. The challenge of Canopus lay in recognizing the proportionate value of its elements and understanding how the installation functions so as to sustain its appearance for future audiences. The damage to Canopus, though unfortunate, led to one of the most compelling discussions that I have participated in in an institutional context. Addressing the issues both practically and theoretically, it confirmed the value of discussing the conservation of media works and strengthened my own commitment to the field. My encounter with Canopus taught me that when conservation and museum professionals consider multimedia artworks, they work within the conceptual framework that has long governed their approach to traditional artifacts, oriented toward safeguarding their physical condition. On the other hand, they are inclined to allow changes to the technological elements of these artworks. If controlled change is permitted in playback and display equipment, why impose restrictions on other components of artworks? And if change is allowed, how much is permitted before the work becomes a different piece? In other words, how much modification can an artwork tolerate and still retain its own identity or authenticity, and at what point does the modification of an artwork obscure its identity or undermine its authenticity? What if an artwork, built with short-lived components or based on a score or instruction invites change by its very nature? And what does change tell us about the identity of the artwork? How can change in artworks be better understood in its relation to time? How does what we know about artworks originate from, and contribute to, archival knowledge and thus suggest an engagement with a dynamic, evolving, and expanding archive, which in its new conception harbors the identity of artworks, both physically and virtually? Since its inception, and even until today, art conservation has been concerned largely with the physical constituents of an artwork, the meaning derived from them, and their preservation into the future.2 More broadly, in art-theoretical discourse, this concern is related to the conception of a static object defined by its physical, enduring constituents

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before art, beginning in the late 1950s, became linked with ideas of temporality and duration. These ideas were manifest in short durational, performed, and processual artworks such as events, performances, and processes.3 The emergence of new artistic forms—the happening, installation art, conceptual art, and media art—in the 1960s and 1970s, turned the attention of museums to the presentation and conservation of contemporary art and multimedia installations and thus to changeable artworks. Changeability—the capacity of an artwork to change or be changed—is a fundamental characteristic of the multimedia installations discussed in this book. It manifests itself in technological obsolescence, decay, alteration, and manipulation during the processes of disseminating, exhibiting, and conserving such works. Because of these alterations, their shifting physical appearance urges us to expand our traditional understanding of conservation. Just as the art world has accommodated the new forms of artistic expression, so art conservation must also accommodate the inherent dynamism and changeability of these artworks, turning from the standards that fixed the museum as a repository of static material objects to a new understanding of its role vis-à-vis changeable art and its conservation. This shift from static to dynamic artworks challenges both the curatorial practices of museums and the traditional ethos of conservation. In the current discourse, critical questions about the changeable nature of artworks have forced a rethinking of presumptions about an object and the utopian search for its ideal condition. The answers to these questions can be found only at the place where professional fields and academic disciplines intersect, and it is precisely at these junctures that this book has developed. This book poses questions about “conservation objects” and how we understand an artwork and its function in and after a certain historical moment. It also considers how the transformation of multimedia artworks affects their nature and how we engage with them. Beyond issues of conservation and presentation, and looking through the prism of the history of techniques, material culture studies, and my professional background as a conservator, I pose the following questions about multimedia artwork and installation in this book: what is such an artwork in relation to the change it experiences, and how do changes in it affect our understanding of the time in which the change occurs. To address these questions I relate time in conservation to changeable “objects” and reconsider the concept of the archive in relation to multimedia artworks—their final destination but also their beginning, a source of the identity of the artwork.

N A M J U N E PA I K : TO WA R D U N I V E R S A L Q U E S T I O N S

This book addresses philosophical issues that inform selected multimedia works by Nam June Paik (1932–2006)—works that illustrate particular problems or challenges in this art. This is a consciously bottom-up approach; I encourage readers to draw conclusions beyond those suggested by Paik’s works, about artworks in general. Paik ranged more widely that most other media artists, in his selection of materials, his readiness to implement new technologies, and the interdisciplinarity of his activities.

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His oeuvre encompasses global communication systems and combines elements of obsolescence and chance with the most sophisticated technical solutions of his time. His works pose challenges at the place where curation and conservation intersect, and the lessons we learn from those works apply to media works in both private and public collections. As a representative of “proto-new media,” Paik raises universal questions about hybrid artworks—questions of presentation, maintenance, and conservation of media art in the institutional domain.4 At the time of this writing, only a few works by Paik remained in their original form and condition, and almost none of Paik’s works that still function are displayed with their original playback equipment. Technology-based media are subject to rapid cycles of obsolescence, and their reinstallations often employ components in updated formats and involve the emulation and migration of data and carriers—challenges common to all media installations in private and public collections.5 Moreover, given the phases of preproduction, production, and, later, maintenance of these works and the interdisciplinary networks of collaborators, fabricators, and mentors involved in them, Paik’s art is bound up in social relations, exemplifying how people can engage with material culture and how artifacts mediate social relationships.6 Paik’s legacy in the history of twentieth-century art rests on his introduction of the television and video as artistic media in the 1960s. Part 1 of this book considers his achievement in light of the subsequent emergence of new forms of media art. Paik was born in Korea in 1932 and grew up in a wealthy family. In 1950 he and his father fled Korea, at the beginning of the Korean War, moving first to Hong Kong and later to Japan. After finishing his studies in music, art history, and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo, Paik moved to Germany in 1956 and continued to study composition and Western music at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg. In the late 1950s, he traveled to Cologne to pursue his interest in electronic music and to Darmstadt, for New Music. In 1957 he met Karlheinz Stockhausen and, a year later, John Cage—perhaps the most significant encounters of Paik’s artistic career and connections that were essential to the relationship between media art and music. In 1964 he moved to New York, where he remained for more than forty years.7 Among Paik’s greatest innovations—and among the greatest challenges to traditional collecting, conservation, and presentation—was his rejection of the singular authentic object, in support of which he habitually released work in numerous versions, variations, and clones. Moreover, Paik’s open-ended creative process allowed for modifications and interventions long after his artworks began their life as part of a museum collection. Paik’s art illustrates both how new technologies, because they are transitory, challenge the common understanding of an artwork as a physical object and how an artist might relinquish uniqueness and singularity in favor of producing many versions of a multitude of objects. At stake in the conservation and preservation of such works is the acknowledgment of the process of change and the preservation of the intrinsic fluidity of artworks according to the limits of their identity. The artworks Paik left as his legacy

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offer the museum curators and conservators whose task it is to present and conserve his legacy some leeway in their interpretation. This great possibility of choices and lack of rules regarding the preservation of his legacy renders the retracing of Paik’s artistic footsteps simultaneously fascinating and challenging.

A P P R O A C H I N G T H E I D E N T I T Y O F A RT W O R K S

I have constructed three conceptual frameworks—concept and materiality, time and changeability, and archive and identity—for my analysis of Paik’s multimedia installations. Here, too, my involvement in his oeuvre and my perspective on multimedia installations signals the potential for a broader discussion of the so-called new media and artworks created since the 1960s. Accordingly, the first section of the book analyzes what is at stake when we observe the creation and reinstallation of two of Paik’s most dissimilar works: TV Garden (1974) and Arche Noah (Noah’s Ark, 1989). In Chapter 1, tracing the diverse embodiments and incarnations of these artworks, I relate their identity to the processes of transformation they undergo. The novel element in my approach to these artworks lies in my reconsideration of the materiality of complex media installations from the perspective of their continuation. Materiality, rather than remain fixed and static, emerges as an ever-evolving process of transformation and transition, a constant flux difficult to conceptualize in the framework of traditional conservation. Chapter 2 notes commonalities in conceptual art of the 1960s to 1970s and the media installations of the 1960s to 1990s, which have received little attention in the literature. Among these commonalities are the importance of the pure idea; the presence of an instruction, score, and/or certificate; the delegation of the material realization (fabrication) of the artwork; and the simultaneous existence of a number of physical realizations of a concept. In tracing Paik’s extensive network of fabricators, collaborators, and, later, custodians of his legacy, I revisit the concept of the studio and test the applicability of film theory to his collaborative practices suggested by Paik’s own understanding of his practice. This book considers multimedia installations, in their changeability, as complex entities that embody different stances in relation to space and time; they are—according to Umberto Eco’s concept of Open Work—works in progress, committed to an everlasting process of becoming. They behave much like musical performances and reject the common notions of nominal authenticity that apply to traditional visual arts. In Chapter 3, still pursuing the analogy to music, this time with reference to Richard Taruskin’s critique of authenticity in musical performance, I examine how historic instrumentation (the use of period instruments) in musical performance relates to the notion of authenticity in artworks based on a score and instructions and how higher and lower intentions might play a role in this process. Making use of the theory of symbols, I delve into the notion of allographic and autographic art and test its applicability to Paik’s multimedia works. But rather than adopt these notions uncritically, I propose a different approach to

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multimedia installations—as allographic works experiencing autographic moments— that is, as iterant artworks with sculptural elements marked by the hand of the artist. These associations with music as a temporal form of art and the concept of indeterminism propagated in New Music point us to changeability in multimedia installations as a phenomenon occurring in connection with time. Chapter 4, which begins Part 2 of the book, describes three encounters with Zen for Film (1962–64) and addresses the changeability of the artwork, including its potential to undergo a fundamental change evident in a historical practice. As an event, performance, process, and object, Zen for Film challenges the idea of a work as unchanging and exposes the intrinsic temporalities of artworks. Zen for Film’s existence in disparate forms and changing shapes calls into question the singular understanding of an artwork characterized by both its diachronic development and its synchronic ontologies. Chapter 5 presents a discussion of extrinsic and intrinsic change in multimedia installations, describing forms of changeability that depend on spatial context; processes of migration, emulation, and reinterpretation; stabilization of participatory works in the form of relics in museum displays; and an artwork’s further development. While examining these variants, I explore the limits of changeability and the moment when the work can become something else. Changeability, which is necessarily bound up with time, relates time to objects and their changing condition—and allow us to consider how conservation handles the physical and conceptual alteration of artworks. Time—a subject given surprisingly little attention in museological and conservation literature—is a key concept in this book, with reference both to conservation and to what I call the temporal materiality of artworks. Chapter 6 addresses the notion of time in conservation, which deals perforce with the effects of time on the material surface of an artwork and on its conceptual element. Conservation also understands time in several ways. From the perspective of media installations, time seems to reject the conventional chronologies, in which time is synonymous with its measurement. The chapter contrasts that conventional understanding of time with the understanding of time in other, durational dimensions. Although I do not dismiss the linear progress of aging and decay, the Bergsonian theory of duration—and its continuation in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze—is more helpful in rethinking the temporalities of artworks that counter the linearity, continuity, and permanence inherent in the assumptions of conservation. I examine the notion of time that has implicitly underpinned conservation—that of time as manifest in the singular condition of a “conservation object,” which is characterized by reversibility, minimal intervention, and the freeze paradigm (locking an artwork in time). I conclude this critique of conservation by considering the “captive moment” of the registration record. In Chapter 7, I base my analysis of the temporality of TV, film, video, and multimedia artworks on Bergson’s idea of the coexistence of various temporalities. In that chapter I acknowledge the heterotemporal nature of multimedia and contrast time in the object, and produced by it, with time outside it. I demonstrate how artworks undergo change more or less rapidly and how they respond, passively or actively, to time. I contextualize

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INTRODUCTION

multimedia installations as artworks that actively respond to time, rather than as artworks that are about decay and aging, which, like technological ruins, respond to time outside themselves. My discussion of the conservation narrative that connects the temporalities in multimedia artworks depends on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory. Pursuing the idea of the temporal materiality of multimedia installations, I explore how time governs not only objects but also their archive, thus moving my argument into Part 3 of the book. In Chapters 8 and 9, I propose an archive that encompasses both time and material—an index of evolving attitudes toward objects and subjects, the contingency of time, discourse, and culture. The archive participates in creating the identity, and maintaining the continuity, of works of art. In its physical form, it documents the work’s past manifestations—in reports, instructions, scores, contracts, correspondence, and manuals. I trace loci of archival information and sketch a decentralized, dispersed image of an archive both in the museum and beyond its walls. In this book, the archive also has a nonphysical dimension, as tacit knowledge, memory, skill, and metadata related to its own functionality. Understood in this way, the archive preserves the artwork’s identity and resolves the conflict between concept and material (with which this book begins), which led to the uncertain status of artworks extant somewhere between them. Following different theories of the persistence of identity through time, the archive allows the persistence of identity in a multimedia installation despite whatever change it might experience.

T E R M S A N D TA XO N O M I E S

For the sake of clarity, when I use the word conservation, even in the narrow sense of an engagement with contemporary art, I acknowledge its dependence on culture and context. So what I call the culture of conservation—shaped by geography, language, institution, training, and even personal skill and competence—affects the theory and practice of conservation. It also shapes the intellectual project of this book. I refer in the pages that follow to traditional conservation or traditional conservation theory—sometimes in contrast to the “new” thinking such phrasing frequently implies. It might be said of traditional conservation theory that it was established in the context of restoring artworks conceived as unique objects (often in a singular medium), created by an artist-as-genius (beginning with Vasari and culminating in Romanticism), and linked with that intentionality.8 (An artist creates a work intentionally; the intention involved in that act is regarded as sacrosanct and therefore, according to traditional conservation, it has to be followed by conservation professionals during all the processes of altering and manipulating this work.) The crystallization of conservation theories related to the fine arts was preceded by the theories of architectural restoration that EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc laid out in France (as restoration “in the style of,” informed by an interest in the ongoing utility of a building), theories opposed in Britain by John Ruskin and William Morris (who favored historical preservation) and elsewhere by Alois

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Riegl (in his theory of differing values assigned to monuments) and Camillo Boito (in his writings on philological conservation honoring the lacuna within the preserved object as documentary).9 Although new theoretical voices have entered the field in the past century—Georg Dehio, Umberto Baldini, Alessandro Conti, Paul Philippot—the Italian art critic and historian Cesare Brandi, in 1963, gave the historical and aesthetic dimension of restoration its foremost expression.10 And in 2005 Salvador Muñoz Viñas articulated the distinction between traditional and contemporary conservation.11 In this book I build on the contributions of these newer voices (as well as the older ones), continuing and expanding them. Rather than dismiss the old, I contextualize both the scientific approach (which supports the need to study materials) and the Brandian humanistic heritage—if only to acknowledge the complex relations in artworks rather than just the hard facts that seem to dominate the scientific discourse of conservation and to understand conservation as a “methodological moment,” that is, to recognize a work of art in its aesthetic and physical being.12 In this book, multimedia installations are theorized as objects comprising heterogeneous elements: technology-based and organic media, photographs, sculptural components, and painting. I distinguish multimedia installations from installation art, whose site shapes the experience of the viewer (as in minimal art, earthwork, and environmental art) and I highlight the cyclical principle of multimedia installations, which dematerialize and rematerialize—a process that marks their different phases.13 Although they acknowledge the perimeter of the space they reconfigure, the multimedia installations discussed in this book are primarily hybrid, heterotemporal assemblages of materials that are installed and reinstalled on the basis of the archive.14 I propose the term multimedia installations as an alternative to such formulations as “technology-based installation art” and “time-based media installations” and acknowledge that such artworks are multifaceted, characterized by both the performance and the physical objects that constitute them.15 The notion of “time-based” media, which encompasses how media respond to time in general, may have implications for all artworks. Although the construction of the identity of multimedia artworks must happen in relation to time, what I mean here by time differs from the common understanding of time passing, which is often conflated with the mode of its measurement on a clock. In particular, I test the use of the Bergsonian durée as a supplement to the sense of decay and aging in artworks. Moreover, time, as I discuss it, is inherent in artworks and their constitutive media and allows for the conception of a temporal materiality of media. The term archive as used throughout this book involves, yet goes beyond, a physical domain as a repository of documents and materials. Here, the archive implies an engagement with both archival materials and the virtual sphere—encompassing physical documents as well as tacit knowledge and memory. These elements help explain how multimedia artworks acquire their identity. Finally, the term conservation object refers to an artwork that is subjected to the research and practices of conservation. In traditional conservation, the object to be

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INTRODUCTION

conserved has often been one associated with the Enlightenment—and thus considered an object of scientific analysis, discernible as being the sum of its parts and dissectible into those constitutive parts.16 In this book, however, I use the term to emphasize how the context of conservation conceptualizes the artwork—as a product of a conservator’s intentional activity. In using this term, however, I also intend to criticize the objectification of such an artwork—which echoes the situation of a traditional artwork as a static “museum object,” reduced to a particular “state” or “condition” for observation, measurement, and analysis17—rather than to offer it for comprehension in a system of relations. Artworks are more than just “objects.” They are products of humans and their culture; they are dynamic entities, whose materiality can be defined only in a network of relations that includes social and temporal aspects.

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PART 1

CONCEPT AND MATERIALITY

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Presenting and conserving a multimedia work of art raise the problem of its simultaneous existence as a concept and a material object. Often, during the process of reinstalling such a work for an exhibition, it is rematerialized and new technical elements and other components are added. This fluidity is often explained by pointing to the “conceptual” character of such works. But what exactly does it mean that a multimedia artwork exists as a concept? And how does that concept character relate to the materialization of the artwork? In this fluid zone, definitions can fall flat. Whereas the material manifestations of a multimedia artwork are clearly identifiable and can be translated into documentation, instructions, or a script, its concept can often seem coded or enigmatic. Unless and until a pure idea is materialized, it contains potentially inexhaustible possibilities—fleeting potentialities in the artist’s mind to which no one else has access. Moreover, the realization of an idea does not prevent its further development, as expressed in changing manifestations of a work that its maker intended. The idea, itself in a state of transformation, can contain a “manual” for the properties that define a work—a significant portion of the constitution of the artwork. It is a mistake, however, to insist on a strict opposition of concept and material, for once a concept-based artwork becomes materialized, its existence as a concept can be questioned. As the art critic and media theorist Boris Groys has put it, “Every art is material and can be only material.”1

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1 TWO WORKS

ARCHE NOAH

Arche Noah (Noah’s Ark) (plates 2, 3, 4; fig. 3) consists of a wooden vessel, about 3.5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide, constructed according to the principles of boatbuilding. The hull is made of overlapping slats of wood that were initially stained dark brown and later decorated with painted symbols of a ship. The vessel rests on a base decorated with largescale black-and-white panoramic photographs of Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark is believed to have landed once the floodwaters receded. These photographs, visible to early spectators, were later partly hidden when plants were added to the work. Because the stern of the vessel is open and unfinished, the installation is considered, not a freestanding sculpture, but rather a construction that must be affixed to the gallery wall. Colorfully painted papier-mâché figures (two flamingos, two iguanas, a dog, a giraffe, a pig, and a snake) are integral to the installation. The deck was originally decorated with a colored banner, seen only in the earliest photograph of the installation and never reinstalled. Twenty-nine Panasonic CRT monitors are arranged in a double layer on the deck of the boat, and a single layer skirts its base, with a varying number of monitors visible in photographs of the installation. The monitors around the base face upward; they, too, were partly obscured when plants were added to the work. The three-channel video was originally operated by laser disc, like many of Paik’s artworks at the time; having migrated to the latest technology, however, the video playback now runs from three flash media players. The video is repeated at regular intervals. As in almost all Paik’s installations, the

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video consists of a playful assemblage of random fragments of moving images whose varying graphic forms and compositional artfulness exert a visual pull on spectators. The installation has no auditory element. Paik, when he created Arche Noah, was interested in the interaction between technology, nature, and humans. In 1976 he said, “Video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate ‘time-structure.’ ”1 Arche Noah relates to archaic and biblical themes and the four elements (fire, water, earth, and air)—interests the artist also pursued in Passage (1986) and the Planets series (1980s–90s).2 The installation can also be seen, from another perspective, as emphasizing the role of technology in saving humanity from the Flood. In his characteristic mix of languages, Paik explains: “Why now Arche Noah? . . . Treibhauseffekt [the greenhouse effect] is clear and [it] will force us to think about the first Sintflut [flood].”3 Peter Weibel, the chairman of the ZKM, noted that Noah’s Ark depicts “the first storage of information, the first human hard drive—a kind of first-ever database.”4 The idea of salvation inscribed in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark gains another, reciprocal meaning: technology-based media, owing to their progressive obsolescence and the enormous difficulty of preserving them, are liable to vanish rapidly. After the ZKM acquired Arche Noah, it exhibited the work only twice—each time in a different form in a different venue; otherwise the work lay in museum storage for about sixteen years. Only recently has it been rediscovered and reinstalled in a form that varies slightly from its previous three incarnations. Arche Noah, a poorly documented piece that a few decades ago might have been considered uncollectible, is now one of the many examples of changeable contemporary artworks that can be encountered in museum galleries. Documentation of the installation was scarce until 2009, and only a few records of Arche Noah‘s exhibition exist in the museum’s archives. That absence can be explained by the ZKM’s lack of either a conservation department or an established archival structure during its early years of existence. (Founded in 1989, the museum was established in its current location in 1997.) More broadly, the infrastructure for technology-based media installations in both European and American institutional collections was inadequate, and documentation of such works was meager.5 Paik’s assistant and fabricator in Germany, Jochen Saueracker, assembled Arche Noah for the 1989 opening of Hamburg’s Weisses Haus, the first exhibition space in Germany designed for video, sound, and light installations (plate 2).6 Photographs of this venue and accounts by Saueracker, the gallery owner Thomas Wegner, and Wulf Herzogenrath (Paik’s curator in Bremen and Cologne and the man who suggested to Wegner that he exhibit Paik) reveal how Arche Noah began its unsettled life. The Weisses Haus photographs of Arche Noah reveal a boat stained dark brown and an arrangement of TV sets that has remained almost unchanged to this day.7 The upper monitors played a two-channel video of short cuts of images related to ancient and modern civilizations.8 In this initial installation, however, the video showed—in a closedcircuit mode—the Alster river that flows beside the Weisses Haus.9 In the gallery, viewers perceived the ark as drifting on the water, televised on the lower monitors, on which,

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occasionally, accidental canoeists appeared. This site-specific character, for which Wegner takes credit—it would have been omitted in subsequent reinstallations—reflected Arche Noah‘s relationship with its immediate surroundings as well as with Hamburg as a harbor.10 Colorful papier-mâché animals and brightly colored banners lent the installation a vivid, joyful character. According to Herzogenrath, the ordinary, almost naive character of these figures embodies Paik’s habit of providing elements that contrast with the seriousness of “hard” technology. That a local art teacher, Christoph Grau, with his fourteen-year-old pupils created the animals in improvised after-hours art workshops helps explain why some of the creatures lack mates.11 Heinrich Klotz, the founding director of the ZKM, acquired the installation for the museum shortly after its debut at the Weisses Haus. In 1991 it was presented in MultiMediale 2 at the Opel Factory in Karlsruhe (plate 3).12 Images from this venue show Arche Noah in a confined gallery space and reveal a number of changes. The banners seemed to have vanished, and it is unclear whether the video showing the river has been retained (in the form of a recording). The animals have been repositioned slightly: the pair of flamingos stand at the rear of the vessel, the snakes to the right, and the pig to the left. Under magnification the photos reveal another change: paintings and inscriptions in green, red, yellow, and white paint (most probably acrylic)13 on the hull of Arche Noah and numerous paint drippings on the TV sets and on the floor around the ark. The paintings depict small-scale pictograms of ships and fish, the artist’s signature, and the title of the work, with some corrections. The inscriptions are in Chinese and Korean: ‫ػ‬তᄷ (Paik, Nam June); 노아 (Noah); ֱۣ (squared ship); and 함 (battleship).14 Given this documentation, it is likely that the painted additions originated in Karlsruhe and that the actual painting took place on location just before—or even during—the exhibition of the work; they may be the only record of the artist’s direct involvement in the installation.15 According to the ZKM’s records, the installation was loaned to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in June 1992 as part of the show Electronic Art (July 1–September 2, 1992). But no documentation of it at that venue exists. Saueracker recalled that at this stage Paik had decided to rethink the spatial setting of Arche Noah. And as a result, he modified the relation of the artwork to the exhibition space, adding a large number of local plants around the base of the work.16

THE AFTERLIFE OF ARCHE NOAH

In October 2006, when I joined the conservation department of the ZKM, I became involved in moving the museum’s off-site storage to a new location. This project gave me insight into the conservation of some pivotal works from the early history of multimedia art. That was when I first encountered Arche Noah, assessing, documenting, and recording its elements for the conservation file. The work was in poor condition—or rather its elements were. Having no instructions or documentation at hand, I found it impossible to determine whether the underlying structure of the work and the painted slats of the

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hull constituted the complete work. The playback equipment was stored in another facility, and I later learned that it was occasionally used in other installations. Members of the conservation department were groping in the dark as they tried to determine what actually constituted Arche Noah and how each constituent part contributed to the whole. After a thorough inventory, the conservators cleaned the elements of Arche Noah and repaired tears and cracks that endangered the stability of the work. Frames were built to support some of the fragile animals, making it possible to relocate them without risking damage. At that time, neither reinstallation of the work nor further research on it was feasible; it was to remain in the new storage facility until resources allowed its reinstallation in the ZKM. Consequently, in 2006 the artwork remained disassembled and deactivated. The reinstallation of Arche Noah took place two years later, in 2008—nearly sixteen years after its preceding presentation and two years after the relocation of the ZKM storage facility. With the prospect of an upcoming exhibition on the premises of Energie Baden–Württemberg (EnBW), Karlsruhe, the ZKM technical and conservation team set up a test installation to complete the inventory and to facilitate the conservators’ documentation of the work in its finished form. In my role as conservator in charge, supported by my departmental colleagues, I completed the documentation of the installation and monitored its assembly, consulting Saueracker on the reconstruction of the work. The conservators made sketches and photographs, and the technical team inspected the electronic equipment. Owing to the fragility of the original laser disc player and reflecting the ZKM’s preservation policy, we digitized the video data, storing it on and playing it from a flash media player. The lower monitors played a video that differed from the closed-circuit images of the Alster River shown at Arche Noah‘s initial installation in Hamburg; this new compilation of video images must have been created during the course of the Barcelona installation in 1992. Photographs taken during the 2008 test installation and later published in the EnBW exhibition catalogue reveal that neither the animals nor the plants were included in the installation (fig. 3).17 On the occasion of the EnBW exhibition Nam June Paik: Werke aus der Sammlung des ZKM (Nam June Paik: Artworks from the ZKM Collection; October 23, 2008–January 18, 2009), Arche Noah was displayed for the first time since 1992 (plate 4). Because it had been impossible to perform conservation work on the papier-mâché animals before the show, in accordance with a curatorial decision, they were missing from this installation. The team handling the artworks, in consultation with Saueracker, arranged more than forty white flowerpots containing different plants. Lacking any account of how to arrange them, conservators re-created an earlier arrangement, from Paik’s installation TV Garden (1974); indeed, I had the impression as I observed the video images flashing between the green plants of this installation of Arche Noah, that I was seeing a fragment of TV Garden‘s electronic jungle. At this time the team realized that Arche Noah could not be kept in its original form. It was too large and fragile to move back to the ZKM for display, let alone to lend to other institutions. Our aim in rebuilding the structure was to prevent the irreversible damage

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FIGURE 3 Nam June Paik, Arche Noah (1989). View during the test re-installation at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, in 2008. Photograph by Steffen Harms © EnBW AG, Germany, and Steffen Harms © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

that would inevitably result from arranging the slats of the vessel anew each time it was reinstalled. Saueracker, in cooperation with the ZKM’s conservation and technical staff, made the necessary modifications in June 2009 (fig.4 and plate 5). The interior frame of Arche Noah was replaced with one designed to allow the vessel to be dismantled and moved without disassembling the planking. The reconfigured work consisted of a vessel that breaks down into two self-contained transportable elements and a base. The disassembled structure of the original was held in storage as a record of the work’s initial construction. Meanwhile, a specialist in paper conservation restored the four large-scale photographs of Mount Ararat that wrap around the base of Arche Noah. These had been torn and had suffered other damage. Because the restored photos, being near the plants, would continue to be exposed to humidity and organic dyes, the conservation team also considered longer-term preservation solutions. In discussing these, we contemplated storing the original photographs and displaying replicas (a plan that was executed some years later). In June 2009 Arche Noah was returned to the ZKM storage facility, awaiting its next incarnation in a familiar but also somewhat new form. Given Arche Noah‘s various past manifestations, it occurs to me that—aside from the painted vessel—all elements can be either replaced, replicated, migrated, or emulated.

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FIGURE 4 Modification of the interior structure of Nam June Paik’s Arche Noah (1989). The ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Photograph by Hanna Hölling.

Certainly the animals would have remained stable sculptural elements if they were adequately conserved. Arche Noah thus exists in a form somewhere between a conceptual and a physical entity, one dictated by conservation policies, the ephemeral status of its technological components, and the cyclical character of the plant ensemble.18

M U S E A L I Z AT I O N

In light of the decisions to digitize the video data and modify the structure, what actually happened to Arche Noah in 2008–9 can be called its musealization. The word, coined by the Czech museologist Zbynek Stránský, names the process of transforming an object from its original context into a museological context.19 As it relates to Arche Noah and other works by Paik discussed in this book, musealization denotes an adaptation of a work of art to the demands and policies of the institution housing it; it is a domestication of sorts.20 Muzealization recalls the term afterlife, in the sense used by the German philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor Adorno, who saw works that had entered the museum as works deprived of their original vitality.21 Whereas Adorno believed art was

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ultimately revived in the museum context, the American philosopher John Dewey understood that relegating art to the museum separated it from the experiences of everyday life.22 The art historian Deborah Cherry, coming to the term afterlife from a different perspective, shifts its meaning to the “promise of survival, of living-on, through change.”23 Arche Noah’s afterlife began with its 2008–9 modification. Before that, like many other artifacts, it lay in the silence of a museum storage facility, awaiting rediscovery. That rediscovery, in 2008, however, led to the damage (which occurred with the repeated adjustment of the planks) that instigated the structural modification required if the museum were to satisfy its obligation to exhibit the work. As in many other cases of installation and multimedia art, Arche Noah’s afterlife brought with it modification, adaptation, and change. Such changes to Arche Noah, however, also problematized the museum’s role in safeguarding ephemeral and evolving artworks. Does withdrawing endangered artworks from display safeguard their legacy? Or would that legacy be better ensured by allowing the artworks’ lives to continue? Do institutional custodians take a risk by trying to force dynamic artworks into static structures—creating a mausoleum rather than developing a new concept of the museum? Further, are conservators obliged to follow institutional and professional policies? What if such policies for these evolving works do not yet exist? I propose answers to these questions as I develop my argument. Arche Noah is a successor to Paik’s TV Garden, and in both works Paik ably balances the material and the conceptual, the technological and the organic. In Arche Noah Paik implemented, on the one hand, the idea of a loose sculptural arrangement of physical objects, and, on the other, an entirely ephemeral composition that includes fugitive materials—plants and TV sets—freed from any rigidly prescribed materialization.

TV GARDEN

TV Garden came into being in 1974 as TV Sea or, alternatively, Garden. Twenty monitors presented a rush of split and synthesized images from an earlier video, Global Groove, of 1973, by Paik and John J. Godfrey (fig. 5).24 TV Garden was created for Paik’s final show at the gallery owned by Fernanda Bonino, the artist’s first dealer in the United States. In addition to prizing Paik as an artist, Bonino hoped to generate publicity for her newly opened uptown gallery space in New York.25 Although his works did not sell, Bonino recalls, the gallery received the attention it needed by hosting lively and talented young artists like Paik and the German artist Mary Bauermeister (the partner of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom Paik knew from Cologne) and Paik’s downtown avant-garde friends: Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Allen Ginsberg. The art historian Edith Decker-Phillips says that the first version of TV Garden lacked plants because Paik could not afford to purchase them at the time.26 TV Garden was shown again, in Syracuse and Philadelphia, among other cities, before its most significant presentation, at documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, in 1977. It was

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FIGURE 5 Peter Moore, Installation view at the exhibition Nam June Paik: TV Sea: Electronic Art IV, Gallery Bonino, New York, 1974. © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Paik’s first large-scale installation, employing some thirty monitors lying face up on the floor in a dense ensemble of tropical plants (fig. 6).27 Paik himself installed these first manifestations of TV Garden. Herzogenrat maintains that the documenta 6 materialization of Paik’s concept, unlike the reduced version shown by Bonino in 1974, fully embraced its spatial qualities.28 A dark gallery space is ideal for viewers of TV Garden. Generic CRT monitors broadcast a pulsing rhythm of changing images from Global Groove. The soundtrack of Global Groove—music, acoustic effects, and voices—which Paik liked when it was played loud, is a dominant element of the work. The symbiosis of technology and nature on the track, however, sounds less than harmonic. The organic exuberance of plants seems sometimes to overwhelm the installation, to edge out the artificial shining of the screens. Now and again, however, the geometric, sculptural presence of cubical television sets— illuminated by their own electronic light—interrupts the entropic greenness. But if the viewer is struck at first by the plants that seem to dominate the space,29 after a while the insistent pulse of successive electronic images, related both to the aesthetic, visual experience of the installation and to the experience of its time, suppresses that response. Organic time and media time coexist in TV Garden, and viewers encounter them simultaneously. Plants follow the biological processes of growth and decay—the photo-

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FIGURE 6 Nam June Paik, Paik hinter Pflanzen mit TVs (Paik behind the plants and TVs), undated, MD 169/0. Photograph © Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, gift of Joachim Diederichs, 2007 © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

synthetic life cycle—and have neither a certain date of expiration nor a guarantee of longevity. The video footage presents a mixture of both free-flowing and edited time— time compressed to a finite succession of recorded images, displayed with the accuracy of controlled sequencing and a scheduled point of death and rebirth, stop and start. The combination of organic natural time and the technological time of progress suggests that Paik’s garden is a naturalization of technology, a representation of an ideological “second nature.”30 This technological and organic assemblage in Paik’s TV Garden seems to be heading toward an unexpected end, marked as much by the obsolescence of media as by the death of the plants and the pending moment when these elements will be replaced, in a cycle that repeats continually. The core element of TV Garden—the video Global Groove—begins with the following announcement: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan

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telephone book.” Paik’s statement of 1973 was visionary, for in the video’s compositional principle and message, he anticipated the development of global channel surfing. The website Media Art Net describes TV Garden as follows: “The furiously edited ‘Global Groove’ video playing on the screens of the TV sets flickers and flashes through the mesh of green. Ambiguous like most of Paik’s works, this one leaves open the question of whether we are dealing with a symbiosis of nature and technology, or whether the new media are leading us back into the jungle with their disordered mass of rampant images.” In the light of the technological developments of the past fifty years, this video encapsulates a fascinating picture of the 1970s. In such a work, as the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst puts it, viewers are “dealing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory.”31 According to Herzogenrath, the key feature of TV Garden, an extraordinarily playful work, is the perspective from which the audience experiences it: they look down “from above,” standing on an elevated ramp, as at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1999 (plate 6).32 Unlike other installations transmitting moving images or light, TV Garden, when it is not playing, is on standby status. A single-channel video—any video by anyone—once unplugged, disappears, leaving only the body of its playback device; its continuity is disrupted. This also happens to Dan Flavin’s fluorescent bulbs, whose haunting beauty vanishes when they are unplugged, leaving only the static structure of plain mechanics; like the video content of TV Garden, Flavin’s work, unplugged, ceases to exist aesthetically. Flavin, well aware of the abrupt transition from vibrant art to lifeless apparatus, noted the “ironic humor of temporal monuments.”33 The temporal monument of the unplugged TV Garden, however, insinuates its living status among the plants, resisting the extinction that comes with the interruption of the electric current. The persistence of the plants as living elements locates the work between the sculptural presence of its monitors—sunk in darkness—and the green of the plants, which discreetly disseminate their delicate scent through the room. Sound and light are shut off, but life continues. Because of their changeability, installations often lack boundaries. TV Garden, since its exhibition at documenta 6 in 1977, has become a popular instance of electronic media mixed with plants—a playful symbiosis of techno-ecological garden—and has traveled to exhibitions around the globe. In the course of its numerous reinstallations, the number of monitors has increased to as many as 120 and the number of plants to 600. The version of TV Garden shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982, curated by John Hanhardt, embedded twenty-eight TV sets in a nest of about a hundred plants, in an amorphous yet balanced composition (plate 7). At the Whitney, viewers observed the installation from an elevated L-shaped platform. A year later, in 1983, Laurent Busin curated a Belgian installation, following only a rough sketch by Paik. Busin, responding to the limited space of the gallery, designed a self-contained form resembling a ziggurat from which visitors could view the ensemble. Although TV Garden was originally conceived as a one-channel video installation, Paik authorized a second video

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channel featuring his video Oriental Paintings (date unknown) when the work comprised over forty monitors.34 Given the different versions that have appeared, one might ask how TV Garden became divorced from a single defined materialization. The answer can be traced back to 1996, when Paik—who was not on-site—instructed Brazilian curators to install TV Garden, TV Fish (1975), and TV Buddha (1974).35 According to Stephen Vitiello, another of Paik’s assistants—who tried to pin down how Paik wanted the Garden to be constructed—the artist encouraged the Brazilian curators to “get their own plants, their own fish, their own Brazilian Buddha.”36 Despite instructions indicating that at least thirty TVs should be used, Paik urged Vitiello to use his own judgment about the number. As is evident here, the logic of reinstantiating an artwork on the basis of instructions resembles the process by which conceptual art is given physical form.37 The museological life of TV Garden began in 2000, when it entered the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The museum, before acquiring the work, exhibited it in The Worlds of Nam June Paik, from February 11 to April 26, 2000, in the rotunda (plate 8). Photographs of the exhibition reveal that in this setting TV Garden was not presented as it had been; the elevated ramp for viewers was no longer present.38 Further, Paik allowed the addition of a second video channel to the Guggenheim exhibition, as he had done when the work was installed in Wellington in 1996.39 The Guggenheim reinstallation of TV Garden, adapted to meet the constraints of the Frank Lloyd Wright building, sparked a debate about the extent to which the work could be modified and whether the physical characteristics of the Guggenheim legitimated such modifications. Did the active involvement of the artist sanction any and all modifications? What are the limits of the agency of intention? From June 28, 2002, to January 12, 2003, a smaller display of TV Garden at the Guggenheim (plate 9) was presented in a more confined space in the museum. Although controversy had surrounded the work’s installation in the open space of the rotunda, the later display apparently pleased neither viewers nor the staff of the museum; they generally expressed dissatisfaction with the presentation of the work. To many, the space allotted it seemed too small and the work seemed stuck there.40 In 2002 TV Garden entered the collection of K21 Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Düsseldorf, Paik’s adoptive home. The comprehensive documentation that the collection’s conservation department produced in the years that followed records the monitors, plants, and maintenance procedures the work required.41 This version of TV Garden, created by Saueracker and approved by Paik, was permanently installed in a dark rectangular room, where it could be viewed only from a platform placed at the front. Because of the enormous difficulty of maintaining the living plants in a permanent display, the traditional plants and pots were replaced by hydroponic plants and a plant-care company was hired to maintain them. On the occasion of Paik’s retrospective at Tate Liverpool (December 17, 2010–March 13, 2011), TV Garden was shown for the first time in Great Britain (fig. 7).42 Although the

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FIGURE 7 Nam June Paik, TV Garden (1974). Installation view at the Tate Liverpool exhibition Nam June Paik: Video Artist, Performance Artist, Composer and Visionary, December 17, 2010–March 13, 2011. Photograph © 2015 Tate, London © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

installation was officially “borrowed” from K21 Ständehaus in Düsseldorf, the shipment from Germany consisted of only an instruction sheet and a digital carrier of the video Global Groove. Jon Huffman, the curator and technician of the Paik estate, supervised the installation, which used newly acquired elements from local suppliers.43 But even more curious, after the exhibition ended, the playback and display equipment the Tate had acquired from a local supplier was shipped to the Nam June Paik estate in the United States and stored there for future reinstallations. In 2008, following the acquisition of the work by the Guggenheim and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, a city in the larger region surrounding Seoul, South Korea, installed its own permanent version of TV Garden. The former artistic director of the center, Young Cheol Lee, created this installation, in cooperation with the landscape architect Sang Su Ahn and (in an advisory role) the Japanese video artist Keigo Yamamoto, on the occasion of the festival Now Jump, celebrating the opening of the center in October 2008.44 Here the TVs and plants are arranged in an enclosed gallery that admits natural light to enter through its window shades. The plants in Yongin differ from those in other locations: they are planted in soil, not pots—like a real garden—and some of the plants are very large, reaching almost to the ceiling of the gallery. Ultraviolet lights nourish the plants at night. It is understood that if

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the plants die, they can be replaced by the same species.45 The viewer can walk around the garden on a slightly elevated path and observe the installation from all angles but can also view it from a balcony, where it unfolds impressively below the observer. In Yongin, the sculpturally relevant cases of the CRTs are supplemented by new flat-screen TVs. The archive of the center holds a certificate that authorizes the installation.46

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It is difficult to determine exactly how many instances of TV Garden have been realized; my account is not exhaustive. I know of three installations in museum collections (New York, Düsseldorf, and Yongin), though only two of these (Düsseldorf and Yongin) are permanent. Besides these physical manifestations, however, embodiments of TV Garden have appeared as simultaneously existing “exhibition copies”—a term used, paradoxically, to designate a quasi-conceptual work that can exist in an iteration exibited, even at the same time, in different locations. TV Garden illustrates how a work of art can reappear, again and again, adapted and adapting to changing gallery spaces and technical and social circumstances and executed from (sometimes less-than-specific) instructions. And that history poses a question: How much can an artwork change while maintaining its identity? The “becoming” of the installation—the recurring reenactments of its materialization—creates a chain of processes: assemblage and dismantling, spatial remediation, technical modification. This cycle of reinterpretation is documented, thus providing a posteriori knowledge of the work’s condition and shape at each reinstallation, building a record of institutional acquisitions and loans. TV Garden seems to materialize anew each time it is reinstalled, relegating its previous materializations to the archive. Yet the archive also anticipates future manifestations of a work. The work is simultaneously a creation of and a contributor to the archive. Henceforth no iteration of TV Garden is a return to a past original state—that was the goal of traditional conservation; each one is instead the product of an archive that anticipates its future iterations. In sum, like many artworks that subscribe to a similar logic, TV Garden is both object and nonobject; it exists in a dematerialized form and recurs in distinct material iterations. What, then, makes a particular installation of TV Garden a true TV Garden? We must answer this question if we wish to understand an installation’s identity in light of its changes. The chapters that follow develop an answer.

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2 CONCEPTUAL AND MATERIAL ASPECTS OF MEDIA ART

TV Garden acquired its quasi-conceptual character at the moment Paik declared that the work could be loaned to a Brazilian exhibition and arranged according to his remote instructions. It became then an artwork based on instructions, and it shared features with early conceptual art—notably its binary view of an artwork, as concept and materialization. (Other installations by Paik—TV Buddha, TV Fish, TV Clock [1963–89], and Moon Is the Oldest TV [1965]—also became, in retrospect, quasi-conceptual.) It is impossible, in fact, to isolate Paik’s media art from the conceptual art whose tendencies permeated the world in which the artist was active. But rather than claim that some of Paik’s media art is conceptual art, I suggest that his media works and conceptual art both reflect the ontological shift in art—in what art can be—in the post-Cagean era.1 Both respond to the same conditions, yet they remain distinct projects. And they raise similar questions about presentation and conservation, especially the repeatability of materialization that makes the physical preservation of their elements a relative matter rather than an absolute.2

R E W R I T I N G T H E A RT W O R K : S C O R E S , I N S T R U C T I O N S , C E RT I F I C AT E S

Paik’s former assistant Stephen Vitiello pins down the confusion about the presentation and reinstallation of multimedia in the passage that follows: “I really see TV Garden as a conceptual work. And I don’t know that he [Paik] ever wrote it down, but there’s basically an implied score, which is: Place Global Groove on multiple monitors in a room; monitors

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are facing up and there’s plants surrounding, and there’s sound.”3 Paik conceived his installations as conceptual artworks, with a clear division between the concept as conveyed in a score or set of instructions—whether those were given in written form or not—and its materialization. But Paik’s TV Garden exhibits both similarities to conceptual art and differences from it. According to Peter Osborne, the score or set of instructions is a significant contribution of modernist music to conceptual art.4 Osborne maintains that John Cage extended the idea of the score to include elements of performance beyond musical notation. This expanded definition was essential to George Brecht’s event scores, which Osborne calls “generalized” instructions “transposed into the medium of language.”5 One of the first forms conceptual art took was that of the instruction piece. Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings (AG Gallery, New York, July 1961) and Instructions for Paintings (Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, May 1962), for example, are both performance-based works whose instructions “summarize the painting-events in a way that makes them repeatable.”6 The resulting variety of paintings has a parallel in the many versions of Paik’s TV Garden. Although Ono’s instruction works and Paik’s TV Garden involve the viewer in different ways, they are similar in their relative lack of concern with preserving their material embodiment. According to the art historian Camiel van Winkel, instructions in conceptual art are meant to translate the “concept” of the artwork into “information.”7 In this view, the roots of such instructions reach back to László Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings of 1922, which involved his ordering five paintings in porcelain enamel from a sign factory. This understanding of instructions—as conveying the concept of a work in the form of information communicated by means of a modern technological medium—establishes a further link between media art and early conceptual art, evident in such exhibitions as Art by Telephone (Chicago, 1969) and Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York, 1970).8 This period also witnessed the first exhibitions of audiovisual artworks by Paik, Wolf Vostell, Jean Tinguely, and César as well as Paik’s first solo show, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963.9 The analogy between Paik’s media art and the tenets of early conceptual art is intriguing, especially given the existence of instructions in Paik’s works and those of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.10 As I noted in the preceding chapter, Paik’s TV Garden can be executed with a new set of plants and TV sets so long as the TV sets number at least thirty, and if it increases to forty or more, a second video channel may be added.11 The interpreter of TV Garden—a curator, conservator, or assistant—thus has great freedom in re-creating this piece. Similarly, LeWitt’s assistant, Saul Ostrow, sees the possibility of almost infinite variations for distributing the pencil lines in the artist’s Wall Drawings (1967–2007).12 Another feature common to TV Garden and the Wall Drawings is that both works rely on documents that certify their authenticity. A certificate confirming the artist’s final “approval” and documenting the authenticity of a work executed by others accompanies LeWitt’s drawings. The “Letter of Authenticity” for TV Garden in the collection of the

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Nam June Paik Art Center plays a similar role in a more distinct way.13 For in addition to authenticating the center’s version of the work, the certificate includes a diagram showing the distribution of the plants and the monitors in a rectangular frame. Thus, the authenticating certificate for TV Garden includes instructions. The certificates for a number of LeWitt’s wall drawings (for instance, Wall Drawing No. 728, 1993) also included a diagram and a manual for the execution of the work, strengthening the analogy between Paik’s media and conceptual art. TV Garden is not the only example of an artwork by Paik generated according to instructions. On multiple occasions TV Fish, TV Clock, and, from time to time, Moon Is the Oldest TV have all been executed from verbal or written instructions. The “conceptual” status of such works is subject to change. For instance, TV Buddha was initially a loosely described work: a Buddha contemplating his own image on a TV screen. The material realization of the work became fixed only when the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam asked the artist’s estate for permission to replace the Buddha during a construction and renovation project that would affect the gallery’s climate control. The estate denied this request, arguing that the sculpture was an essential element of the work that grants it physical authenticity.14 The number of manifestations of Zen for TV (1963) was similarly limited during the course of its life. How did instructions for Paik’s works come into being? Ambiguity surrounds this question. Paik was known for his reluctance to create conventional scores or instructions.15 According to the curator Susanne Neuburger, this hesitancy stemmed from his reluctance ever to restage his performances without making some changes: “Paik often varied his own works and frequently permitted variations to them. . . . [H]is works did not have scores.”16 Contravening this assertion, however, his unrealized project Symphony for 20 Rooms (1961) is known solely from a diagram that resembles a score, and Paik also wrote Fluxus scores.17 Most of the instructions for Paik’s installations that actually had them existed initially only in spoken form, with the written instructions produced after the fact. This feature distinguishes Paik’s practice from that of conceptual artists like LeWitt, whose instructions (in the case of his Wall Drawings) have a certain autonomous character. Paik’s are purely pragmatic; he formulated them, not as a conceptual act, but to enable the physical materialization of a work. I propose that the translation of Paik’s verbal instructions into written form is actually a rewriting of the artwork, performed by collaborators and museum personnel in the course of what the art historian Ariane Noël de Tilly calls the “socialization” of the work.18 The process of rewriting begins with the artwork’s execution by the artist, the artist’s assistants, and collaborators (either when the artist is alive or posthumously); the next step involves a conservator and the musealizing of the work (see Chapter 1). By engaging with multimedia artworks—more precisely, with their documentation—conservators of those works of art routinely interpret and formulate (and reformulate) instructions for future installations. Collaborators’ and assistants’ firsthand experience, tacit knowledge, and memory provide the basis for, and shape the initial recording of, instructions, whereas the conservator’s

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FIGURE 8 Paik’s drawings—quasi-instructions—for Brandenburger Tor, undated. Archive Jochen Saueracker © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

reformulation of those instructions is necessarily secondhand. The reformulated instructions are drawn from the archive, which contains all known information about the artwork, and they re-enter and enrich that archive to shape subsequent materializations of the work. The score, instructions, and records of previous performances of a work become the archive, and this information—together with the artist’s concept of the work and the tacit knowledge and memory of all persons involved—guides its future realizations. Some of Paik’s quasiinstructions exist only on scraps of paper—like the restaurant and café napkins on which the artist created the drawings for Brandenburger Tor (1992) (fig. 8) and Zen for TV. These instructions were arbitrary, and their execution required a highly developed knowledge of and expertise in Paik’s habits and production processes. The artist’s tone in these instructions could suggest otherwise, however. His notes for Zen for TV (version 4/12), in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, are written in a characteristic quasi-legible style and purport to illustrate steps to follow in manipulating the vertical deflection of a CRT tube: 4/12 can be done—redone—in any new TV set. . . . [unreadable] as follows. Cut off vertical deflection unit and turn TV set 90 degree, dial on the bottom. There are two ways to cut off vertical unit 1. Take off vertical output tube (jump the heater pins) OR 2. Keep all tubes and buy a similar deflection coil and connect the original deflection line to the new coil and waste the power there. 3. Anyway . . . [unreadable] PAIK.19

These instructions can also be said to translate the concept of the work into technical operability. Some instructions were produced over time by the artist’s assistants, fabricators and collaborators. The archive of Carl Solway reveals a number of such records, including a

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FIGURE 9 Instructions for preparation of TV Clock, drawn by Mark Patsfall for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, undated, presumably 1991. Archive of Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

handmade book, entitled Installation Bible, that provides instructions for works fabricated by Paik’s team in Cincinnati.20 Another example is “TV Clock Instructions” (undated, presumably 1991) from the archives of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which features detailed technical descriptions and suggestions that have served as a valuable resource for reinstalling Paik’s work to this day (fig. 9).21 Paik’s letters certifying the authenticity of his works can also serve as instructions for maintaining them. (In the 1990s, Solway, responding to the difficulties some collectors had with the playback equipment in Paik’s installations, designed a certificate that authorized future modifications and distributed it to the collectors.) If the instructions provided by Paik or by his assistants for the curators and conservators are helpful in reinstalling his works, the instructions themselves are also changeable. This was the case for John Cage’s instructions-score for 4′33″ (1952), which evolved during the life of the artwork; the changes influenced its subsequent interpretations.22 In this sense, the changeability of works based on instructions is reciprocal: instructions render the work changeable, and the changeable work can prompt changes in the instructions for installations or re-executions that follow.

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In sum, instructions for an artwork introduce the potential for various interpretations. Instead of fixing a work to a specific material realization, instructions establish an artwork’s potential for change. In other words, instructions indicate a priori that an artwork is changeable, thus allowing the exploration of physical manifestations of the work that need not resemble one another according to the sequence of their realizations. Instructions also suggest an openness to incorporating chance, contingency, and improvisation into the materialized realm of these artworks. As a pencil and a wall support constitute the only essential elements in LeWitt’s Wall Drawings, TV sets and plants are similarly the only elements of TV Garden that are essential to it. The lack of a “preservable” artifact divorces the artwork from the gravity of its material. Or as Paik once said, “In the future the only artwork that will survive will have no gravity at all.”23

F R O M D E L E G AT E D L A B O R TO E X T E N D E D C O L L A B O R AT I O N

Many of Paik’s multimedia artworks, especially those created from the 1980s on, relied on delegated labor and collaboration that affect how we comprehend his oeuvre—created by many contributors rather than one individual. Although this delegation of labor clearly descends from the Duchampian concept of the readymade, it also raises questions about the distinction between the labor of installing a physical work and the labor that turns an installation into work of art.24 Collaboration is intrinsic to Paik’s artistic practice. The technological complexities of the media Paik employed in his early work demanded some collaboration. With the establishment of his studios in New York and Cincinnati in the mid-1980s, Paik’s collaborative approach reached its zenith. Thus Paik himself did most of the installation of TV Garden’s first materializations, as TV Sea at the Bonino Gallery in New York in 1974 and as TV Garden at documenta 6 in 1977, with some help from others.25 An organized network of curators, collaborators, and assistants completed later reinstallations. The ultimate—by no means only—example of delegation of labor is Arche Noah. Jochen Saueracker assembled the entire work and was also involved in its later reinstallations. Indeed, such delegation characterizes post-studio practice, in which the artist is engaged in creating ideas (and later situations), leaving the physical execution of the works to others. A distinction can be drawn in Paik’s production process between the function of a collaborator (who influences the conception and the realization of an entire work) and a fabricator (who is involved only in its physical manifestation).26 In fact, it is difficult to draw sharp lines between the many individuals who assisted Paik in his creative process, influenced his thinking, and participated in the physical component of his work. A number of his closest collaborators—Saueracker, Solway, Paul Garrin, Mark Patsfall— were certainly engaged in generating new ideas with Paik; but it is likely that further collaborators and people close to Paik—Glenn Downing, Jon Huffman, Blair Truman, Stephen Vitiello, and Paik’s wife, Shigeko Kubota, were also involved. After Paik’s death some of them would become the executors of his works, providing knowledge and

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serving as a repository, a “living memory” of Paik’s activity, authorizing his works in numerous reinstallations, in private and institutional settings, and greatly influencing their identity. Paik’s collaborators became ambassadors of his work and keepers of unwritten instructions—conduits to the immaterial sphere of the archive. Conservators pursuing instructions and information on techniques and technologies in their keeping had to track down multiple sources in their efforts to locate them. Paik, following the tendency in conceptualism to separate concept from execution and believing himself a “techno-idiot,” delegated much of the labor and expertise to skilled assistants.27 The American sociologist Howard Becker, in his book Art Worlds (2008 [1982]), describes the recruitment of suitable collaborators as a process of “mobilizing resources” comparable to Eleanor Lyon’s “pool of resources,” which grows in relation to the demand.28 In a formulation directly related to Paik’s social interactions and art production, Becker extends his definition to include “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that the art world is noted for.”29 From the 1960s on, Paik recruited collaborators, fabricators, and assistants from his entourage—and into it. In Germany, Günther Schmitz’s manipulation of vertical and horizontal deflections in television sets in 1962 became, in turn, the basis for Shuya Abe’s manipulation of images in Tokyo (beginning in 1963) using the video synthesizer.30 In 1964 Charlotte Moorman reintroduced Paik to the performing arts—when his performances in Germany of the late 1950s were classified as “destructive art,” he decided to devote himself to the making “objects”—and influenced the resulting works, which included TV Cello (1971), TV Bra (1969), and Opera Sextronique (1967).31 In the 1970s John J. Godfrey contributed to the assemblage of such videos as Paik’s Global Groove and Allan ‘n’ Allen’s Complaint (1982), by Paik and Shigeko Kubota. In 1982 Paul Garrin, a Cooper Union student with a “strange talent” that Paik had noticed, entered the artist’s studio, where he became an irreplaceable co-creator and co-author of Paik’s videos. “My collaboration with Paul Garrin is like an improvisation of a four man Jazz ensemble. . . . The first tenor is a new machine, the first soprano is Paul Garrin.”32 Paik makes a similar comparison between producing media art and filmmaking. He has asserted that Hollywood movies have dominated the European cinema of Godard and Herzog because filmmaking in the United States is more collaborative; Donald Duck was the product of a committee rather than the individual “Mr. Disney.”33 This view suggests the character of Paik’s collaborations and recalls the social practices reflected in film theory. The “auteur theory” of filmmakers was associated with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard of the French New Wave and with the periodical Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951. Andrew Sarris’s essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” helped film theory gain broad attention.34 According to the auteur theory, the classic Hollywood model of motion picture production (as the collaborative work of the director, screenplay writer, producer, actors) was superseded by a model emphasizing the role of a director. Despite the often industrial nature of

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filmmaking, the person holding the caméra-stylo (camera-pen, a term coined by Alexandre Astruc, who developed his first theory of film in the 1940s) gives the film its distinctive character, voice, and creative vision. According to Sarris, the director must be technically competent, and his or her personal style and work should evoke “internal meaning,” which Sarris extrapolates from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. Paik, in criticizing these hieratic (European) production models, associated his own work with the open structures of Hollywood that had been dominant before emphasis shifted to the auteur-director. His collaborative efforts nonetheless produced artworks with a distinct personality that shines though all interference of the styles intrinsic to his collaborators, joint studio labor, and collective processes. As a result, his work calls into question the idea that the labor of a single artist, working in isolation, brings the artwork into being.

K E Y C O L L A B O R ATO R S

How did Paik select his collaborators? Kubota emphasizes his extraordinary ability to select the right people.35 She said Paik was able to realize the ideas he conceived by choosing precisely the collaborator whose demonstrated skills were most appropriate to the project. For instance, Jon Huffman often executed Paik’s paintings in the artist’s New York studios, whereas Glenn Downing carried out the metalwork, welding, and fabrication of a large number of robots both in New York and in Downing’s own studio in Waco, Texas.36 Another collaborator, Mark Patsfall, says that all installations by Paik carry a trace of the handyman’s methods, skills, and abilities, and recognizing them is just a matter of connoisseurship.37 Some interpreters of Paik’s works assumed that his collaborators were not full creative partners but simply followed the artist’s instructions. But what if, as I note earlier in this chapter, the fabricator himself produced the instructions? In works that involve close collaboration, where trust among those working together and their ability to rely on one another are essential—as was the case at Paik’s factory in Cincinnati—issues of authorship can become problematic.38 Paik himself—repeatedly acknowledging each person involved in the “creative complicity” of producing his installations—disarmed the potential for misinterpretation of the value of his collaborators in creating his works by modestly summing up his own part in them as follows: “What is my role?? This old man is nothing but a cheerleader who brings in fat cheesecakes at midnight and diet soda with double espresso at 3 am.”39 However modest this statement might sound, Paik in fact maintains control—even if sometimes only limited control—over his works. Here, he follows van Winkel in assigning to the conceptual artist the role of both manager and designer, who supervises and controls his or her production.40 In the mid-1980s Paik developed a special relationship with Mark Patsfall, an artist and printmaker in Cincinnati who soon became Paik’s “shadow warrior.”41 The relationship— something between the creative collaboration of mentors and co-artists and the more technical work of execution assigned to fabricators—lasted nearly twenty years. When I visited Patsfall’s workshop in December 2010, evidence of Paik was almost everywhere.

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Patsfall’s drawers were filled with mock-ups, props, and leftovers from Paik’s works that Patsfall had created. In one of the studios I noted a pyramidal installation assembled from numerous electronic chassis and built-in monitors that occupied the first floor and the basement. I was convinced that I was looking at an installation of Paik’s. To my surprise, Patsfall assured me that he had created it and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago had commissioned it. When I visited Chicago in April and May 2012, I went to see the work. I thought that there was no discernible difference between a Paik and a Patsfall. It seemed to me that the Paik-Patsfall collaboration had far-reaching implications: the ideas of these two artists merged in the great number of artworks created in Cincinnati, in an amalgamation that was barely separable.42 Two days after my visit to Patsfall’s studio, as we sat in a car and watched the snow blanket the suburbs of Cincinnati, Patsfall said: “Once Nam June told me these works are so good that it doesn’t matter who made them. It is just about making the technology and art closer to people.”43 It was a magical moment. Here was someone who made Paik’s art and participated in many of his exhibition projects, drew hundreds of mock-ups and installation plans, yet seemed, like Paik, joyful about doing that work out of the limelight (plates 10 and 11). Paik’s creative exchange with the Cincinnati gallery owner Carl Solway went beyond the conventional relation of artist and gallery owner to realize Paik’s ideas about humanizing technology in a series of robots. Although Paik collaborated with Shuya Abe in building his first robot, K456, in 1964,44 Paik’s best-known robots and perhaps the epitome of video sculpture per se were produced in the 1986 series Family of Robots (plate 12). Solway recalls that he conceived the idea of constructing anthropomorphic shapes from existing elements as he played with his children’s wooden building blocks.45 The shapes that appeared inspired him to discuss with Paik the possibility of creating robots using antique TV cabinets. Later, during the production process, they were equipped with functioning monitors playing video footage. The first robots, Grandmother, Grandfather, Mother, Father, and Children, exhibited at Solway’s gallery in Cincinnati in 1986, were soon followed by a large number of other robots that represented personalities from cultural and political life.46 Mark Patsfall’s archive reveals that Patsfall himself made innumerable drawings and mock-ups in preparation for these works, and Paik also left mainly to Patsfall their fabrication. Paik did not modify all the mock-ups, nor were all of them realized. A close investigation of the mock-ups reveals Patsfall’s process. Some he drew meticulously on graph paper. Some reveal cut-out photographs of wooden cabinets, acquired in large numbers especially for this purpose; these templates were arranged into anthropomorphic shapes, and attributes were chosen to represent the personality of the future robots. Solway ordered, from Paul Garrin in New York, video footage that reflected the robots’ personalities. The robots Patsfall made bore his unmistakable style, readily distinguishable from that of other fabricators, such as Glenn Downing. Family of Robots, one of the largest series in Paik’s oeuvre, offers an interesting opportunity to consider the social structure of fabrication. Often such an extensive collabora-

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tion is kept under wraps, lest it disclose uneasiness about the authorship of works when collectors begin to acquire them and they increase in value. Paik’s collaborations, however, differ because they entail complicity or co-authorship. Paik acknowledged the contributions of others, stating, “My share[,] for better or worse[,] may be 30% of the whole piece.”47 Rejecting the romantic idea of the artist as an individual who realizes his works in solitude and invents things on his own, Paik followed the lead of early conceptual artists, delegating labor, retaining only limited control over quality, and abandoning the pretense that the artist has to have expertise in the materials and technologies he employs.

P A I K ’ S FA C T O RY

Conceptual art’s separation of the artist from physical labor led Paik to establish his factory, one of the most interesting phenomena in his career.48 Carl Solway, who had become Paik’s dealer in the 1980s, set up a well-organized workshop in Cincinnati’s West End neighborhood—in the historic warehouse that also housed Solway’s gallery— to fabricate Paik’s works. The factory had a major effect on the development of Paik’s career: it increased his fame, the number of his commissions and sales, and his income in the 1980s and 1990s.49 Explaining that “media art is too complex to be controlled by one man,” Paik consigned the production of his installations to the skillful fabricators Solway gathered around him, whose work he orchestrated (plate 13). The building housed the Carl Solway Gallery and its exhibition space on the first floor and on the floors above, a shop that manufactured Paik’s installations and a storage area for equipment. Solway and Patsfall were the main actors there, organizing the labor and overseeing the production. Maintaining a factory for both artistic production and social interaction is a relatively recent development. Andy Warhol’s Factory, originally located in an industrial loft in New York, is considered one of the most effective models of the preglobalization era.50 Warhol’s professionally managed studio attracted not only technical fabricators (who worked around the clock) but also others, for whom it became a stage, dance floor, gallery, and living space.51 Life and art merged in the Factory, a place where artistic production was staged in imitation of nineteenth-century manufacturing—a symbolic replacement for the declining factories of the old industrial centers in the United States. Here, labor was divided between (famed) collaborators and (anonymous) fabricators as a staged process of artistic endeavor. Paik’s factory in Cincinnati can be associated only loosely with the anachronism of, or the nostalgia attached to, the revival of old industrial zones. The practical division of labor there followed the pragmatism of production. Fabricators were concerned with the technical execution, display, and maintenance of Paik’s increasingly large and complex installations. Although Paik visited the factory now and then, he was absent during most of the production process, leaving its management and control to others. The team consisted mostly of artists and craftsmen, but it seems that Paik’s factory (unlike Warhol’s Factory) was not a site

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for the performance of artistic activities. Whereas Warhol’s Factory was an independent entity, Paik’s was associated with Solway’s commercial gallery, which successfully represented artists such as Vito Acconci, Fabrizio Plessi, and Daniel Spoerri. An organized studio production such as Paik’s, according to the art historian Philip Ursprung, “diversifies the image of artistic authorship and thus enlarges the discursive surface of the production,” transforming the studio and the producers into “a growing social network.”52 Paik’s factory in Cincinnati, which resembles an architectural or design studio rather than Warhol’s eccentric theatrical stage, might be seen as a forerunner of today’s art studio—a place where thinking is translated into doing. Paik’s factory was not only a place where objects were produced, but also a center of technical expertise and the production of knowledge. Paik maintained four other studios in New York, one of them a small media lab—a satellite of the factory—located in his loft on Mercer Street in SoHo.53 In addition to a large number of videotapes and records stored on shelves there, the space housed video viewing and editing equipment. Kubota recounts that the loft was both Paik’s home and his workspace.54 Garrin remembers visiting Mercer Street, editing vast amounts of video footage for projects, so that he had to live “there almost round the clock.”55 When I visited the loft in December 2010 (several years after Paik’s death, in 2006) only his wheelchair, furniture, and some pieces of equipment remained, but the place retained a sense of the artist’s vigor.56 Other artifacts had been removed after Paik died, but on the doors of his studio (which at that time was lovingly maintained by his widow) Paik had made drawings and had written in various languages, also jotting down numerous telephone numbers and recording notes during the time he spent there—a touching instance of an autographic encounter.

TO WA R D C R E AT I V I T Y A N D C O A U T H O R S H I P

To engage with Paik’s works—especially those that emerged from his factory in Cincinnati and his other studios in New York—is to explore intertwined creative practices, technologies, and social systems. The involvement of former collaborators in the posthumous reinstallations of Paik’s works in museums gives these institutions a rare insight into the working methods and attitudes that produced them. In the case of Arche Noah, Saueracker, who executed Paik’s intentions at Weisses Haus in Hamburg and at the Fundació Joan Miró Barcelona, also served as the main source of information for the work’s subsequent reinstallations and modifications. Having initially produced Arche Noah, Saueracker has continued to shape the work. Although this scenario—in which a figure such as Saueracker provides invaluable knowledge about Paik’s (and his own) working methods—seems ideal, it does raise questions about the authority the fabricator or collaborator exercises over a work’s appearance. Similarly, museums consult Jon Huffman, the curator of the Nam June Paik estate, on decisions about the conservation, presentation, and curation of Paik’s installations. But how can one be certain that the judgments of such collaborators are “right”?

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It is not easy to pin down Paik’s multimedia works. The instability of their rematerializations results from instructions that evince little concern about preserving their physical form. Paik’s instruction-based media installations are not an end in themselves but rather fulfill a conceptual role whereby their Wirkung (effect or action), as Herzogenrath puts it, prevails over the fetishizing of an object.57 Additionally, the materialization of these artworks depends on a set of collaborative—and thus social—conditions. The cultural dimensions of this materiality can be linked to the practices of early conceptual art and can be fully understood only in the context of their social investment as something conceived, constructed, maintained, and revived by the efforts of many individuals. The artworks discussed here exemplify the large number of multimedia installations that undergo recurring materialization in the context of social practice.58 My own experience with multimedia installations has persuaded me that the concept-material binary has significant consequences for the presentation and conservation of all artworks. A concept often invites curators and conservators to re-execute a work with greater freedom, whereas the artwork’s material being demands a traditional approach to “authentic” or “historical” matter. My reading of certain media art installations in light of their historical-ontological proximity to conceptual art may have further implications. Rather than limit these artworks to the conditions of installation art—space, viewer, temporality—we can approach them as intrinsically conceptual works: based on a concept conveyed in instructions or a score and executed by others in an extension of the notion of collaboration. This “execution by the others” imposes a new burden on conservation and curation. Whereas curators appear to enjoy increasing interpretative freedom in executing these works—making the curatorial decision to reinstall TV Garden along the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum, for example—conservators remain trapped in the convention of fidelity to the material and its initial occurrence. As the art historian Hans Ulrich Reck asserts when referring to video installations, however, “The restorer is not a later born servant but the present co-author of an authentic work.”59 Similarly, Boris Groys proposes that all decisions regarding the exhibition of an object “are to be acknowledged as acts of artistic creation.”60 One can agree or disagree with his statement, but the tendency to push the boundaries in curation and conservation in response to the demands of recent artworks has, as we have seen, become a necessity.

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3 MUSICAL ROOTS OF PERFORMED AND PERFORMATIVE MEDIA Video installation will become like Opera . . . in which only the score will be ueberliefert [handed down] to the next generation and the video curators in the next and subsequent generations will re-interpretate [sic] and install them every time new in their anpassendes [adaptive] Place and the accents of the new incarnation will have the strong personal traits of the conductor, like Karajan’s Neunte [Ninth] or Toscanini’s Dritte [Third]. NAM JUNE PAIK

F L U X U S - S TO C K H A U S E N - C A G E

No other media artist can claim as direct a link to music and musical performance as Paik. His artistic oeuvre and the concepts embodied in his multimedia installations can be fully understood only if his achievements as a composer and musician are considered alongside them. Paik’s musical accomplishments date to the early 1950s; later, as a follower of John Cage and a participant in Fluxus, both in Europe and in the United States, he became “le grand expérimentateur” in the field of new music. Like other artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Paik challenged categories of media and materials and undertook a range of work—in performance, new music, avant-garde film, and Fluxus. Paik’s involvement in the performing arts and his particular interest in theories of musical performance raise challenging questions about the presentation and conservation of his multimedia art. What, exactly, is being presented or conserved in these works? Is it an authentic object, the possibility of an experience, or the residue of a past event? In the world of media installations, what does it mean to be “unique” or “authentic”? Paik’s installations change when they rematerialize, and their varied iterations suggest a need to rethink how his artworks can be understood as unfixed and undetermined materiality. During his early education in Tokyo, Munich, and Freiburg in the 1950s, Paik devoted himself to the study of music—and seemed destined for a career as a classical pianist. He moved from Korea to Hong Kong and then to Japan, where he studied aesthetics, music, and art history and eventually wrote his undergraduate thesis on Arnold Schoen-

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berg.1 Schoenberg, who is one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century, invented the twelve-tone scale, used by a number of composers of new music, and contributed to the emergence of serialism (a technique of composition based on twelvetone scale). Paik was one of the first East Asians to appreciate Schoenberg’s music, and in turn, it helped him bridge East and West in his thinking.2 To please his family Paik began attending doctoral seminars and writing a dissertation on Anton Webern, but he soon abandoned these efforts. In 1957 he moved to Germany, which he found particularly inviting as a center of contemporary music. For two years he studied in Freiburg with Wolfgang Fortner, who advised Paik to work in the electronic studio of the West German radio station WDR in Cologne, an important center for contemporary music that attracted such composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, and György Ligeti. In 1957 and 1958 Paik attended the International Summer School Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where he learned of the latest interdisciplinary advances in music and met Cage and Stockhausen.3 Cage’s music and his philosophy, based on Zen Buddhism, influenced Paik, and the American composer, with his Oriental attitudes, brought Paik closer, ironically, to his own cultural inheritance.4 (The inclination of the University of Tokyo, when Paik studied there, had been to admire Western music.) Cage’s major achievement in music was to erase the boundary between ambient “noise” and the sounds made by traditional instruments in a musical performance. He argued that when we pay attention to the noise that surrounds us, it becomes something other than noise, something fascinating. Cage incorporated into his work the central idea of Buddhist philosophy—the sanctity of pure nothingness and emptiness—and postulated the free development of a composition.5 Thus his scores were not a set of strict instructions, but rather proposals that allowed chance, contingency, and indeterminacy to enter the musical work. The acknowledgment of silence had its roots in Futurism and the manifesto L’arte dei rumori by Luigi Russolo (1913), which influenced not just Cage but all Fluxus artists.6 The idea that silence, with its quality of duration, was equivalent to sound had an impact beyond the world of music, influencing the visual arts of the coming decades and freighted with exceptional meaning for Paik. In a performance of his work Hommage à John Cage (1959), a composition for audiotape and piano, Paik smashed eggs and destroyed a piano. That performance irritated and shocked spectators and earned him the epithet “destruction artist.” In his later performances of “action music,” he combined musical elements with rapid physical actions, followed by very slow gestures. Such acts of what Edith Decker-Phillips called “rigid expressivity” existed only as singular events; no subsequent performance duplicated a previous one.7 This variability was a precondition for the successive audiences’ intense experience of Paik’s work.8 Given Paik’s musical roots and subsequent career, it is no surprise that his early creative activities in action music, performance, and theatrical staging brought him into contact with Fluxus artists and, subsequently, with the visual arts. Blending art forms,

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media, and disciplines in the 1960s and 1970’s, Fluxus—from the Latin word for flow— was an international network of artists, composers, and designers gathered around George Maciunas. Fluxus embraced “do-it-yourself” aesthetics and valued simplicity over complexity.9 The group’s creative output included short musical scores (by LaMonte Young and George Brecht, for example), Fluxus boxes, new music, film, poetry, and books. The origins of Fluxus lay in the concept of indeterminacy and in the experimental music Cage explored in the 1950s. Cage’s use of prepared pianos (altered by placing diverse objects on or between the strings), audiotapes, and radio receivers as musical instruments exerted the strongest influence on Paik. Unlike Cage, however, Paik, in making the transition from music to visual arts, acknowledged in those “instruments” not only apparatuses that produced sound but also objects with sculptural, aesthetic qualities. Here, for Paik, was the thread that connected music to the visual arts. If Cage inspired Paik to think about the manipulation of musical instruments in visual arts, Paik credited Stockhausen with opening his eyes to the potential of electronic media: “After twelve Performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale, I started a new life from November 1961. By starting a new life I mean that I stocked my whole library except those books on TV technique into storage and locked it up. I read and practiced only electronics. In other words, I went back to the Spartan life of pre-college days . . . only physics and electronics.”10

F R O M P E R F O R M I N G A RT S T O P E R F O R M AT I V E O B J E C T S

Paik’s works are entangled, interwoven affairs, for he recycled and reused concepts and bits and pieces of them throughout his oeuvre. Paik’s works—and the freedom with which he executed and materialized his concepts again and again—can be best understood in light of theories of musical performance, supplemented, in some cases, by the theory of performativity. How did Paik manage to move from the performing to the visual arts? In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Paik felt closer to music than to the visual arts. The transition culminated in Cologne, where Mary Bauermeister introduced Paik to Rolf Jährling, a German architect, gallery owner, and patron of the Rhine Avant-garde. Paik and Jean Pierre Wilhelm, of Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf, inspired Jährling, in 1962, to organize in his Gallery Parnass, at Moltkestrasse 67 in Wuppertal, the show titled Kleines Sommerfest—Après John Cage, an important event of proto-Fluxus. In 1963, Gallery Parnass hosted the artist’s first solo exhibition. Paik spent a year preparing for it. He recalled: “I still did not consider myself a visual artist, but 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?”11 Although he conceived the Parnass exhibition initially as an evening concert, his interests were beginning to shift and he decided to venture into new territory, covertly preparing pianos, television monitors, and record players in his secret studio in BensbergRefrath, near Cologne. He proceeded to turn what he had first conceived as a concert into

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an exhibition, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (March 11–20, 1963). In the show he “exposed” modified television sets as art objects for the first time. The exhibition exemplified Paik’s thinking on two themes, music and television, and involved specially prepared installations, mechanical sound objects, and record and tape objects. One of them, Paik’s Random Access, consisted of randomly determined sound experiences that viewers themselves produced by interacting with a specially prepared installation that consisted of a set of audiotapes mounted on a wall and the sound head of a tape recorder. Prepared pianos and diverse sound objects were central to the part of the show that was concerned with auditory elements; in the other part, twelve television sets were assembled in a chaotic manner. Although the television sets all showed the same program, the inner circuits of each one had been manipulated so as to produce a different visual output on each screen. For instance, Zen for TV (1963), its monitor set on its side, showed a single vertical line. One of the television sets was connected to a tape recorder that determined the appearance of the image. The current volume of the radio, connected to another television set, determined the size of a bright point located centrally on the screen. An extreme example of manipulation was Rembrandt Automatic (Rembrandt TV, 1963), a television set with its screen turned to the floor.12 Paik argued that “electronic TV is not just an application and visual expansion of electronic music.” His TV, he announced, was “ ‘a physical music,’ more (?) than the art or less (?) than the art,” and he himself was a “heavy weight composer,” who sought to renew music as an ontological form.13 This urge to renew music informs Paik’s performances of his own music in concerts with Bauermeister and Stockhausen in 1959–62 and later in Fluxus events.14 Symphony for 20 Rooms (1961)—a score for an unrealized project involving sound installations and the participation of an audience—exemplifies Paik’s musical attitudes, such as freedom in interpretation and score-based structure, which continued to find expression in his best-known works created in this period. To judge from the materializations of Paik’s later media installations, the interpretive freedom governing their reiterations parallels that of repeated musical performances. Paik seemed to confirm this point when he argued that video installations will become like operas, dependent on scores and curatorial interpretation (see the epigraph to this chapter).15 The catalogues of Paik’s exhibitions reveal the interpretive freedom with which his works have been re-performed in accord with curatorial interpretation, the limitations or opportunities of gallery spaces, and the resources available. Each variant generates an ever-larger pool of possibilities; each enriches the archive of a work and shapes subsequent interpretations. Paik re-implemented and reused his media installations; he rechoreographed and rethought the context in which they were shown. Paik’s works also illustrate different stages in the development of an idea, which might be altered or repeated multiple times. For these reasons, his artworks pose challenges to art historians, making discrepancies in their dating difficult to resolve.16 The entangled, interwoven character of Paik’s works and the repeated reuse of bits and pieces are evident in his videos. Indeed, the fragmentation seen in the earliest of

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them appears in subsequent tapes: he processed, combined, remixed, and repeatedly fragmented and re-fragmented images from his earliest works in his later tapes, often according to the principles of contingency and chance.17 Old material and new footage that was “freshly” at hand were subject to subsequent variations that mixed the old and the new and reflected Paik’s understanding of time—or, as Herzogenrath put it, its “visualization.”18 Paik disliked repetition in musical performances, and, drawing from his own experience as a pianist, said that repetition makes a performance bad (and boring): “I have always thought that variability and intensity agreed with each other. Now I know: variability is a necessary consequence of intensity.”19 Paik’s appropriation and reuse of his own ideas were products of his musical background and correspond with the nature of video as a medium that allows for variations and continuing reinterpretations. Although a musical performance acquires value as it is repeated and reinterpreted, only some of Paik’s seemingly musical works, or works created in his years as a composer, allow for reiteration or re-performance. A different aspect of Paik’s media art, however, one that moves us away from the musical context, also deserves close attention. The early performances of Paik’s manipulated technological assemblages, such as those in Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, of 1963, acquired a status that could not be affected by repeated performance—that of temporal uniqueness. The unique objects generated in their course—valued for their history and relation to an event or a performance—might be named performative objects. What, exactly, is performativity? The term originates in the writings of J. L. Austin, who distinguishes between a constative utterance, which describes a state of affairs, and a performative utterance, which has the power to change the state of affairs.20 A performative utterance must “do” something beyond the pure expression of speech (like the words “I do” in a marriage ceremony, which establish the marriage as legally binding).21 Accordingly, Paik’s unique objects from the Exposition of Music acquire this status when they shift from something that is performed to something that is exhibited as a unique, singular work, a process that parallels a shift from performance to performativity.22 An artifact with performative qualities would thus be a relic of a performance, an object valued for its unique status, rather than a repeatable or replaceable prop or leftover of little value.23 Thus, when removed from the context of performance, an object—regardless of its assigned status—says something about that performance and forces us to see it as both an object and a relic endowed with performative qualities.24

O N U N I Q U E N E S S A N D I T E R AT I O N S I N M U LT I M E D I A PERFORMANCES

The creative variability of Paik’s concepts resulted from his understanding of time and connections to music. Paik understood his works as neither unique nor singular. He repeated and replicated his works and ideas throughout his career, a practice that could have led to an assumption that they were “non-unique” or “non-authentic.” (Would it

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then be possible for Paik to plagiarize his own works?)25 What does it mean to claim the uniqueness of an artwork? Paik’s many reinterpretations of his own compositions make it difficult to talk about uniqueness in the traditional sense. (Indeed, the very existence of a score and/or a performance complicates the “uniqueness” associated with a visual art object.) It would be difficult, however, not to call Paik’s works unique, given that his creative process was guided by original ideas. In that sense, Paik might be said to have shifted away from positing the uniqueness of objects to claiming the originality of ideas and concepts. The theories of musical performance addressed and debated in the past decade’s discourse about media art and conservation offer a resolution to this problem. The American philosopher Denis Dutton, in his essay “Authenticity in Art,” explains how the two-stage process of creation in Western notated music—composition and performance—differs from the one-stage act of creation in the visual arts (such as painting) and the plastic arts (sculpture).26 The Western work of classical music is specified by a score, which, he says, entails a set of instructions “realized aurally by performers, normally for the pleasure of audiences.”27 Performances can differ markedly owing to the set of instructions given in the score, the instrumentation specified, and the interpretive skills of the performers, leaving space for them to translate from the written encoded language of the score to the sound of the realized performance. The philosopher of music Stephen Davies identifies different types of interpretation according to the degree of accuracy with which performers follow musical scores. Thus the very idea of musical performance is permissive and allows interpretive freedom “consistent with conventions that govern what counts as properly following the score.”28 The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1955 and 1981 offer a notable example. The two recordings differ markedly: the first version is dynamic and energetic, the second deliberate, slower, more contemplative. Both interpretations have become essential parts of the history of music. Paik’s installations likewise follow a score—whether it is written in words or unwritten, drawn from memory—and seem to embody a potential for endlessly diverse iterations. The single instance of a work’s execution is shaped by the people involved—the artist (sometimes, but rarely) and the curators and conservators who draw from, and contribute to, the archive of that work. To illustrate the diverse possibilities for iterating an artwork, I return briefly to TV Garden. Its television sets and plants are arranged freely, growing more numurous at times—to meet the architectural challenges of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (2000), for example—and less numerous at other times, their numbers shrinking to fit the gallery space of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Belgium (1983). Most of the TV screens are oriented toward the viewer and are placed on the floor or on pedestals to create the spatial configuration that works assume in a given gallery, as in the K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf (2002), where an elevated platform flanked the enclosed space. The monitors can have different shapes, but the cubic form of a CRT monitor usually prevails. The plants dominate the installation, what are known locally as “office plants”

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having been delivered from a local supplier. Upon closer inspection, however, the arrangement of plants in each new iteration of TV Garden seems to contain a unique gesture, position, dimension, or color that disrupts the work’s supposed sameness.29 Viewers stand either on an elevated platform (as in Kassel, Düsseldorf, and Yongin) or on the floor where the artwork is displayed (as in New York and Liverpool). The space is usually dark, though sometimes it is illuminated. Reinstallations of TV Garden, like performances of a musical composition, appear to be subject to an almost infinite variety of changes. Yet if a work is infinitely changeable, how does it retain its identity, its authenticity? Are questions about the limits of change unavoidable? Paik’s instructions can open up possibilities for variation but can also impose limits that define a work as still that work and not another. The archive, once again, holds the answers to these questions, setting limits—in a Foucauldian sense—on what can be said or made.

CROSSING GOODMAN’S DISTINCTIONS

Can the changeability that marks TV Garden be similarly assumed in the case of Arche Noah? Unlike TV Garden, with its exchangeable plants, TV monitors, and playback equipment), Arche Noah consists not only of the exchangeable technical apparatuses, but also of sculptured and painted elements, such as the vessel, animals, and, (initially) banners. These sculptural elements are significant and might be seen as an equivalent of traditional sculptural art forms, which are usually unique objects presented in a singular medium. The vessel is merely a sculpture further authorized by Paik’s spontaneous act of painting it, and with the animals, the vessel assumes the value of an authentic historical artifact that is ascribed to traditional art forms.30 The difficulty with perceiving Arche Noah as a complete piece when it was installed at Energie Baden-Württemberg lay in its missing elements: although there were plants, there was no ensemble of animals. It is unlikely that reducing the number of plants or monitors in TV Garden would evoke a similar unease; that work has often been reinstalled in different arrangements. Why, from a conservation standpoint, is the shifting number of elements in TV Garden treated and understood differently from the shifting, or lack, of elements in Arche Noah? The source of discomfort is the divergent understanding of these works and their uneasy position between the paradigms of traditional and recent media. I call this the duality of multimedia installations—referring to their existence as both performances based on a score or notation and sculptural artworks valued for their material uniqueness and sometimes endowed with performative qualities. My idea of duality in these media resonates with Pip Laurenson’s notion of time-based media installations as art forms existing “on the ontological continuum somewhere between performance and sculpture.” This notion is worth revisiting as an antecedent of the discussion in conservation about the dialectic of performance and sculpture that came to characterize “time-based media work.”31 But how does the word continuum,

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which denotes “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, but the extremes are quite distinct,” apply to multimedia installations?32 Although Arche Noah can be discussed as “performance,” its elements have defined roles, either performed (like music) or sculptural. The character of TV Garden, in contrast, is purely performed, its changing elements continuously replaced and reinterpreted. Consequently, I argue, Paik’s multimedia installations are heterogeneous entities marked by the duality of conventional physical objects and performances, or performed works. (Thus the answer to the question whether the word continuum applies to his multimedia works is no.) The object-performance duality in multimedia installations leads to multifarious approaches to identifying the source of their authenticity. Nominal authenticity (the empirical facts related to the origins of an artwork) applies to the sculptural and pictorial elements of an installation; the expressive authenticity of the work (its interpretation, its “faithfulness to the performer’s own self,” following a set of instructions) applies to the performed part of an installation.33 Apart from the interpretive skills of the performers, the instrumentation—historical or new—plays a significant role in the authenticity of both multimedia installations and musical performance. As Dutton suggests, a historically authentic performance might or might not involve historical instruments. Thus, playing Bach on a harpsichord is historically authentic and distinctive, but not necessarily better than playing Bach on a piano. Glenn Gould felt that the modern concert grand piano revealed more clearly the interweaving of musical voices in Bach’s compositions. Historical authenticity does not guarantee that a performer or a performance will realize the full aesthetic potential of a score.34 The analogy between multimedia installations and musical performance might be explored further in considering what constitutes the “authentic” in performance. The American musicologist, music historian, and critic Richard Taruskin claims that authenticity in musical performance is a Romantic, nineteenth-century inheritance that is related to the concept of Werktreue (fidelity to the musical work), which assumed that the Werk was an “objectified musical work-thing to which fidelity is owed and which arose with the ‘museum ideology.’ ”35 Writing of historically authentic performance, Taruskin maintains that “a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around”: a performance using historical instruments is never historical (but that very ahistoricism makes it deathless).36 According to this analogy, in a reinstallation, a multimedia artwork that involves playback and display apparatuses might allow variations in its “instrumentation” (migration, emulation, upgrading) that do not adhere to historical “correctness.”37 It also raises a question regarding the “instrumentalization” of a multimedia work, that is, the embedding of a particular technology to replace one that is outdated, an issue to which I return. The dual and temporal nature of multimedia installations is elucidated by what Nelson Goodman calls autographic and allographic works of art.38 Goodman distinguishes

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between autographic artworks, which can be forged, such as paintings, and allographic works, like musical performances, that are not forgeable. Although only one painting can be the authentic, original work of art, each performance of a musical work is a genuine instance of the work (though its correctness and quality may vary). Thus, an autographic artwork is one whose duplication, even if most exacting, cannot count as genuine.39 Goodman classifies painting as a one-stage work and music as a two-stage work, but these distinctions do not determine a particular work’s autographic or allographic character. Literature, for example, is a one-stage art, but it is not autographic; printmaking is a two-stage art, yet it is autographic. Although Laurenson acknowledges the importance of subtle details in identifying the characteristics of time-based media installations, she locates their identity in their allographicity: “Time-based media works of art are installed events and are like allographic works in that they are created in two phases.”40 Laurenson also distinguishes between traditional artworks, marked by the hand of the artist, and time-based media installations, dependent on performance. Accordingly, a necessary condition for an allographic work is that its production history be irrelevant.41 This requirement of the allographic work seems less reasonable, however, in a work like TV Garden. Its materialization in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda in 2000 (which Paik authorized and John Hanhardt directed) acquired not only historical significance but also site specificity in that audiences preferred that manifestation of TV Garden in the museum’s rotunda to the one mounted, in a reduced form, in the same institution in 2003. Similarly, the version of TV Garden that has been installed in Düsseldorf (at K21) almost continuously since 2002 is considered a manifestation that closely adheres to the artist’s initial intention. So the production history of a performed allographic multimedia work may well become anchored in a time and a space (thus my use of the term site specificity) and “autographed” by performers who execute it (Saueracker in the case of K21, Hanhardt and Ippolito in the case of the Guggenheim’s 2000 installation).42 The difficulty posed by the applicability, in multimedia installations, of the distinction between autographic and allographic creation may be further complicated when we look at the process of creating allographic artworks that involve the autographicity of the written instruction. If we now apply this allographic/autographic distinction to Arche Noah, we can determine that the ensemble of plants and TV sets is allographic, whereas the vessel, animals, and paintings are autographic. But the installation as a whole is an essentially allographic entity that involves a few autographic elements. The photographs, for example, appear to be two-stage autographic works—images printed by the artist or his team from negatives. But what if neither the artist nor his team printed the photographs from negatives, but the museum instead reproduced them from earlier prints?43 Would the photographs then be, not a two-stage autographic work, but a two-stage allographic work? Consider— as a thought experiment—the possibility of forging the autographic elements of

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Arche Noah. Would doing so shift their status from that of relics to that of the props of a performance? In this ambiguous state, could they be reproduced for, and installed in, a future materialization of the work? Perhaps it all comes down to determining whether an object is a prop or a relic. This question does not seem far-fetched when we reconsider in this light the example of Canopus at the ZKM, discussed earlier. My proposal to replace the hubcap in the damaged installation was hotly debated and eventually rejected. Even the tiniest incursion into the sacred space of the artist’s mark was unthinkable, especially to the traditionally trained conservator. That stance is curious, however, given the ready acceptance of replacing the work’s technical apparatus. The questions of authorship and the artist’s mark in Canopus and other installations discussed here are inextricably bound to the concept of intentionality. In conservation, what does it mean to value an artist’s intention—to stay close to the work as intended by the artist? And where can such an intention be located: in the instruments used, or in the expressive level of a work? To answer such questions, the American philosopher Randall R. Dipert’s ideas about what he calls high and low intentionality might be helpful.44 Dipert cites the example of a composer who included a clarinet in the orchestra at a time when the instrument was a novelty.45 Over time, however, audiences no longer thought the clarinet a novelty. If subsequent performances followed the composer’s lowlevel intentions, they would include the clarinet, as the composer’s score indicates. But were they to give greater weight to the composer’s high-level intentions, they would introduce another instrument that evokes in the audience a sense of unfamiliarity or novelty. The music of Georg Friedrich Händel offers a good example of the distinction between high- and low-level intentionality. Händel achieved an effect of tension by using simultaneous major seconds (two adjacent notes on the musical staff ); by the mid-nineteenth century, however, simultaneous major seconds had come to feel more stable to audiences, so that the initial effect of novelty had to be replaced by more stringent harmonic clashes to create tension.46 Dipert believes that following the composer’s highlevel intentions matters more than following low-level intentions, which are concerned with mere means. His ranking of intentions echoes that of Herzogenrath, who emphasized the role of Paik’s artworks in foregrounding the medium’s Wirkung, rather than the medium as an end in itself (a medium as an end in itself is nothing but an object fetish), an aspect shared by all multimedia installations. With this in mind, and returning to Canopus, it seems to me that if the artist’s high-level intentions were to be followed in conserving the work, its newness and “shininess” would have to be restored. Canopus, however, remained bound to its historical appearance—not because conservators consciously followed Paik’s low-level intentions (which would not have sanctioned a damaged hubcap) but because they valued the idea of an authentic autographic object enriched, even if deformed, by the past.

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T H E A U TO G R A P H I C M O M E N T

Even in their apparent disparity, Canopus and Arche Noah have something in common: each work enjoyed an “autographic moment,” the moment when the artist fulfilled his role as a creator. Paik’s painting on the vessel in Arche Noah in 1991 appears to be an authorization of the installation—and perhaps also of its closure, its completion. Paik inscribed his name—eigenhändig (coming from the hand of an artist)—among other forms of calligraphy on the artwork fabricated by others. Similarly, the hubcap in Canopus bears Paik’s signature and calligraphic marks. Paik, in this way, drew attention to a necessary moment of determination, pointing out the evidence of it to viewers and confirming, “That’s what it is.” Allographic works with either a signature or autographic marks can thus be perceived as definitive works, works of a certain completeness, rendering their determination less provisional—at least for that particular moment. In the signature Paik added to his allographic works, a residue of conventional art making—using a brush, palette, and paint—meets his thinking about new and electronic media as a hybrid of traditional approaches to objects and attitudes informed by his experience of music. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida sees the autographic gesture on a photograph—the signing of the work by the hand of the author—as “affixing a seal of authenticity” to that artwork, making it a unique event, the “capitalization of an irreplaceable fetish in the age of the technical reproducibility to which it simultaneously bears witness.”47 In the same way, the autographic marking of a multimedia artwork gives it the significance of a unique object coming from the hand of the artist. The obvious example is Marcel Duchamp’s signing of the mass-produced urinal (a reproduction without an original) with the signature “R. Mutt.”48 (Although it is not a multimedia artwork, its authentication operates similarly to that of Paik’s works.) What connects this discussion to Austin’s notion of performativity is the assignment of the object’s performative quality by means of the signature. On the one hand, Paik, with his signature (in Duchampian style), designates an object as performative; on the other, as I have shown, he turns the performance of the object into a performative object. The autographic moment, intrinsic to a large number of Paik’s works, can be traced throughout his career. In Cincinnati in the 1980s and 1990s, the autographic moment was performed on all newly realized installations: Paik painted his name and Korean signs and symbols on TV cabinets as his final approval of the work of the fabricators. But one of his earliest—and in some ways his utmost—autographic moment was his performance (Cologne 1961–Wiesbaden 1962) of a score by LaMonte Young, Composition 1960 #10 to Bob Morris. In executing Young’s instruction to “draw a straight line and follow it,” Paik dipped his own hands and head in paint and made a line on a length of paper placed on the floor (Fig. 10). The result was Zen for Head, a work that connected Paik’s radical action to East Asian calligraphy and rendered the allographic autographic. This “authorization” must have surprised Young, who later said, “I always understood it was my piece.”49 The generally open status of works of art in Fluxus created the paradox of answering one composition with another.

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FIGURE 10 Nam June Paik, Zen for Head, performed at Fluxus Festspiele Neuster Musik, Wiesbaden, September 1–23, 1962. Photograph © Picture Aliance / DPA © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

The fulfillment of the autographic moment complicates the replaceability of the elements of an installation, as the example of Canopus illustrates. Perhaps the autographic moment makes restoration of a multimedia installation—in the traditional sense, the replaceability of elements of a multimedia installation, an otherwise accepted procedure—impossible. Because Paik had signed and decorated the hubcap, its reconstruction was not approved. This outcome recalls the earlier discussion of conventional understandings of the artwork as a physical object and of authenticity in the visual arts: once an object carries authorized traces of artistic genius, it cannot be replaced or changed. For Canopus the case is closed. Yet the monitors of Arche Noah, with their drips and splashes of paint from Paik’s painting of the vessel in 1991, give rise to the question whether future replacements of this technology—of the monitors that will inevitably become obsolete—will honor those traces of the work’s autographic moment. Is it possible to avoid closure?50

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R E V I S I T I N G A U T H O R S H I P : M U LT I M E D I A A N D O P E N W O R K

The open status of Paik’s multimedia compositions that is also evident in art promoted by Fluxus might be further explained by a theory originating in music: Umberto Eco’s Open Work.51 Corresponding chronologically with the Fluxus movement and stimulated by Eco’s contact with avant-garde artists, Open Work, which Eco drafted in 1958 and published in Italian in 1962 (an English translation was published in 1989), addresses the role of subjective interpretation and allows for the completion of a work of art by its interpreters. In Eco’s book the term open work serves to explain and justify the apparent radical difference between modern and traditional art. Following established conventions of expression, traditional art, according to Eco, seemed to be unambiguous: its various interpretations were essentially channeled in a certain direction.52 Citing aleatory music performances of the 1950s involving Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, Eco notes that performers enjoyed increasing autonomy in choosing how to play a work; each of their interpretations of it becomes a creation improvised at the performer’s discretion.53 Unlike composers of traditional classical music, the composers of new music “reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements [that is, those of the musical works].”54 The composers’ works, which prescribe repetition along defined coordinates, appeal to and require the initiative of performers; hence, they are incomplete and infinite. The author of such an “unfinished” work passes it on to the performer as a “construction kit.” This construction kit relates to the earlier discussion of the distinction between the concept and materialization. As we have seen, conceptual works, or works based on conceptual logic, are often specified in an instruction or a script and then passed over to someone who executes the work. Both the “construction kit” given a performer and the delegating of the work’s execution to that performer are reflected in Paik’s oeuvre and his attitude toward the presentation of his works, which can involve written or memorized instructions and technical and spatial specifications. Paik’s collaborator Stephen Vitiello recalled how Paik delivered these instructions: In 1996, I introduced Nam June to two curators from Brazil, who were asking him to do his first major exhibition in Brazil. He exhibited TV Garden, TV Fish, and TV Buddha and explained to me that these pieces could be done working from a distance. . . . When I started trying to pin him down on how to construct these pieces, his favorite thing to say was, “Use your judgment.” But there are always both fixed and variable elements in these pieces. . . . It’s like a score in a performance—some things have to be done, but there’s room for improvisation. Often, he allows some of us to be the improvisers, as long as we keep the basic point.55

The “construction kit” can also be created at a later stage, when an installation enters an institution. TV Clock entered the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1999 as one of three twenty-four-monitor versions existing at that time. A kit entitled Instructions for Preparing TV Clock by Nam June Paik was created later (presumably in

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1999, though it is undated). It includes a “manual” that describes how to build the piece from scratch. Whereas one note in the museum archive endorses the “philosophy” of maintaining the original equipment in operating condition for as long as possible and as long as “there is someone around to fix it” (a collaborator or Paik’s assistant), the manual implies the possibility of remaking the piece.56 The open character of TV Clock is encoded in these instructions, which allow future interpreters of the work to put aside the issue of material authenticity as it concerns the equipment used to complete the initial version. The detailed instructions also imply that future interpretations of TV Clock can be delegated to actors who have not necessarily worked with Paik himself and introduce the possibility that the installation would become one of many interpretations of an initial idea, the performance of an instruction created in the course of its life—a truly open work. In Open Work Eco introduces another classification—that of a work in movement—to describe Alexander Calder’s mobiles and other works “assuming different spatial dispositions.”57 This idea leads Eco to the infinite possibility of form expressed by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Livre, a mobile apparatus, a (utopian) book project, designed to involve the whole world, that was never finished.58 Perhaps the implication of Eco’s Open Work most relevant to the discourse on media installations is the divorce of executing these artworks from their ultimate definition and meaning and, accordingly, the impossibility of exhausting an artwork in a singular performance, either an iteration of an installation or a performance of a musical piece. One role of a performance is to explain the artwork, to translate it from the potentiality of an instruction into the actuality of its interpretation, but a performance also complements and illuminates all other preceding or following performances. One consequence of this impossibility of exhausting an artwork’s meaning is a paradox: the artwork that has been performed is complete and at the same time incomplete because it cannot offer simultaneously all other artistic solutions for interpreting it. Here Eco follows the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in maintaining that existing objects (whether something or someone) can never be reduced to a given series of manifestations, because each manifestation is bound to a continuously changing subject.59 Multiple Abschattungen (shadings, adumbrations) of an object exist, and each can be perceived from different points of view. Given that multiplicity, there is the possibility of excess—a sense in which the object cannot be grasped by definition, and which could only be formulated based on an abstraction from that multiplicity. Sartre’s discussion of an infinite number of Abschattungen and the implied multiplicity of subjective perception is relevant to the infinite variability of a work of art and adopts the German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s concept of phenomenological imaginative variation.60 According to this concept, an object’s identity is established by imagining variations in its character up to the point where the object loses its identity. To reframe the question, this time about the identity of changeable artworks: How does the artwork, given its infinite variability, maintain its identity?

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To adapt the theory of Open Work successfully to multimedia installations would have significant implications for the ontological question this book confronts: What is an artwork and what constitutes its identity? How do the collaborators, assistants, or technicians who shape its physicality affect and maintain its identity by interpreting it? The open nature of the artwork gives broad creative freedom to the collaborator, who does more than simply fabricate works or execute them on the basis of instructions. Stephen Vitiello’s allusion to the “improviser” interpreting TV Garden closely voices Paik’s own concept of the work and echoes Stephen Davies’s idea of the different possible interpretation of a musical score. Paik introduced the (ambiguous) idea of the collaborator as at once something more than a fabricator and something less than an artist: the collaborator is both the receiver of the information and the maker. The openness of the artwork in Eco’s sense manifests itself as early as the beginning of the collaborative process of creating it, yet it is not exhausted at this stage. There is another openness inscribed in Eco’s idea of the Open Work—openness to the receiver. It acknowledges the personal perspective of an addressee, who responds to stimuli from his or her own cultural background, tastes, inclinations, and prejudices.61 A work of art, according to Eco, is aesthetically valid only from the subjective perspective of its addressees.62 Duchamp once said, “It is the viewers who make the pictures”; the French literary critic Roland Barthes proposed a similar but more radical version of that statement: the birth of the Reader comes at the cost of the death of the Author.63 Barthes argued that to draw meanings from an author’s work, one should not rely on aspects of an author’s identity (political or religious views, historical and cultural context, or personal attributes). He compares a text to a tissue or fabric of quotations and postulates that the essential meaning of the artwork depends on the reader, who situates the text in a tissue of discourses and in relation to other texts, shifting the emphasis from the origins of that meaning to the meaning found or intuited by the work’s destined audience.64 Likewise, Dutton suggests the importance of what the audience contributes by bringing a living critical tradition to the context of a performance.65 How do these interpretations of the author and reader or audience apply to Paik’s media? The presence of the ramp from which viewers engaged with the ensemble titled TV Garden (when it was installed in Düsseldorf and Bremen) signals the importance of their role. Viewers are staged on a platform, just as the installation is staged before them, with monitors directed to capture their gaze. The very presence of the platform is thus a condition for the possibility of the artwork’s completion. In Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, Paik expanded the role of the viewer. Following the lead of Cage and Stockhausen, he invited audiences to participate collectively in his work. This 1963 exhibition is widely seen as a refinement of Paik’s never-realized Symphony for 20 Rooms. In the diagrams Paik made in preparation for Symphony, he wrote the words “Audience Participation” on five of the twenty rooms.66 The objects— prepared pianos, instruments, whistles, toys, a record player, and stones and pieces of wood and metal—and the rooms were designed to allow viewers to hear and touch

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objects and experience their acoustic and tactile differences while interacting with them. Symphony for 20 Rooms was a precursor of the audience engagement Paik enacted in Exposition of Music—Electronic Television.67 Reflecting on Exposition of Music, Paik described his role as evolving from “cook (composer)” to “Feinkosthändler (delicatessen proprietor),” enabling him to “combine many senses, blowing, caressing, seeing, treading, walking, running, hearing, striking etc.”68 He explained that “as a step toward more indeterminacy, I wanted to let the audience (or congregation in this sense) act and play by itself.”69 This exhibition led to Paik’s most significant participatory works of the time, such as Magnet TV, Participation TV, Random Access, Schallplatten-Schaschlik, and Kuba TV (all 1963)—works that altered the role of the audience and changed the way early media art was perceived. Only one of those installations has survived in its initial physical form (Kuba TV, collection Rosenkranz); the others are now known only from Paik’s later authorized replicas or from the “exhibition objects” Jochen Saueracker re-created.70 Although their authorship differs, both replicas and exhibition objects pose questions about the limits of conservability and the “unconservable. In Eco’s Open Work, the openness of an artwork as a condition for change exists on both the physical and the semiotic level. The invitation to viewers to participate in an artwork in effect gives them the opportunity to insert themselves into the artist’s creation by interpreting it. The openness of an artwork also presupposes the author’s uncertainty about, and willingness to relinquish control over, the way it should be completed, which is specified in a number of organized possibilities in its script.71 Despite its seeming indefiniteness, this understanding of interpretation binds an artwork to specific temporal and social conditions. The open artwork thus depends not only on the particular time when it is created, exhibited, conserved, and interpreted but also on the skills of the actors involved in interpreting it (meaning both their technical skill and their skill in interpreting the archive). The artwork, containing a multiplicity of readings, becomes necessarily a field of meaning. There is a difference, however, between reading an artwork and interpreting it in the process of re-executing it. Although the reading of a work affects its re-execution (which depends on how the conservator reads the work), re-execution occurs at another level of the artwork’s openness: the possibilities of materializing it that are contingent on instructions or a score. As a consequence, re-executions can dictate how an artwork is subsequently interpreted or read. In other words, there is a distinct level of interpretation between the discursive interpretation and the interpretation of instructions or the archive. These levels of interpretation, linked to the activity of the actors—the artist’s assistants, collaborators, curators, and conservators—who participate in the process of re-executing the artwork, moderate the emphasis on the artist’s intention, though by no means disregarding it, to include the intentions of other actors, whose interpretive activity is linked closely to their creative involvement with the archive. In sum, an artwork can be open in two ways: it can allow multiple interpretations, and it can permit various physical iterations. These apparently distinct characteristics

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intersect at the moment of the artwork’s re-execution—and, at times, its conservation. That is the moment when the work materializes and when, on the basis of that materialization, its meaning is revealed.

TO WA R D C H A N G E A B I L I T Y

Paik’s identity as a media artist signifies more than an engagement with technological apparatuses. It also implies a universally validated mode of conceiving performances that employ technology-based media and exploit their possibilities. Whether it is possible to conceptualize an apparatus in its pure media-specific objecthood remains an intriguing question—one that recalls the modernist attempt to reduce artworks to their essential material conditions.72 It occurs to me that such a task is impossible, for it would reduce the artwork to mere physicality and deprive it of its performed and performative aspects. Thus—mindful of the examples of Paik’s multimedia installations and the consequences for media in general, including their conservation and presentation—we can conceive of a great number of media artworks in the broader context of their materiality as a set of temporal and spatial phenomena not reducible to a fixed or predetermined material. Because each work is unique, the applicability of the proposition must be judged case by case. Both the cultural dimensions of media materiality and their social investment can be understood in light of these phenomena. The openness of the artwork demands the inclusion of the social dimension in the discursive interpretation and the material reexecution of Paik’s works. The artworks discussed in the pages of this chapter can exist in various forms, some of which bypass the problems of the “original” and introduce new ways to think about the “authentic.” These considerations also suggest how the past—even if it is embalmed in the barest essentials of historical hardware—is always mediated by and constructed in the present. Most important, the interpretational openness of artworks is the condition that gives them the potential for change. And changeability—its role in the formation and influence of the archive, to which Chapter 4 now turns—will determine how conservation can conceive of artworks.

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PART 2

TIME AND CHANGEABILITY In actuality, nothing is ever at rest, since the vibrational universe moves and changes endlessly. BLISS CUA LIM, PARAPHRASING HENRI BERGSON

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The subjects explored in the preceding chapters—music as a temporal art form, indeterminism in new music, and the openness of artworks to interpretation—have laid the groundwork for the chapters that follow, which examine changeability as a phenomenon that occurs in time. The four subsequent chapters look more closely at the physical modifications artworks undergo as they are distributed, presented, and conserved. The changeability of these works has challenged the understanding of the term authenticity in the field of conservation. By extension, the concept of an artwork can also change as different physical instantiations of it are produced—indeed, the concept can change because of these physical manifestations. Changeability denotes the potential of an object or a subject to change. Change is temporal. In Book IV of the Physics, Aristotle (384–322 bc) described time as an aspect of change, as a number of changes or movements in respect to “before” and “after.”1 Although philosophers since Aristotle’s time have proposed other views of time that are neither linear nor successive, change has remained closely associated with the phenomenon of time. The chapters that follow examine how time relates to changeable objects and considers what position conservation and curation should take on the physical and conceptual alteration of artworks. It seeks to understand why the field of conservation, in formulating its principles, has paid so little attention to time. Conservation is about time and involves ways of understanding time. When media installations combine fugitive and impermanent materials, with their potential for reproducibility and multiplicity, a chronological, sequential, matrix of conventional temporality no longer applies. Thus the need to rethink the “time of conservation” in relation to specific works and its implications for multimedia artworks in general.

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4 ZEN FOR FILM

ZEN FOR FILM IN THREE EPISODES

No. 1 In a slightly darkened museum room I stand in front of a white screen that fills a rectangular wall with a proportional cinematic rectangle. The image seems to blur toward the edges, its contour soft, its corners slightly curved. The film projector clatters relentlessly, transporting a strip of film through its inner mechanics, pushing tooth by tooth through perforations—a monotonous mechanical “sound track.” The machine, which sits on a pedestal slightly below eye level, produces warmth. The shutter interrupts the emitted light as the film advances to the next frame, barely perceptible but somehow palpable. The projection is almost clear, empty, and, at first sight, static. I stand motionless, with no expectation that an image will appear; I have experienced the event before. Time passes; the screen of my imagination delineates Paik’s black silhouette on the white background of this projection, as captured on Peter Moore’s photograph from fifty years ago. Thinking about the film’s physiology, I try to imagine how the image remains—in my brain and on my retina—evoking an illusion of motion on a screen where nothing happens. I observe the whiteness. I close my eyes and see a black negative of the projected surface. I open my eyes. People pass by, and in some sense able to read nonverbal cues, I register their skepticism. Their shadows move away from the projected image, but I keep my eyes on the whiteness. This contemplation pays off, gradually, as I realize that the whiteness shows, not nothing, but random information: occasional dark traces—

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smudges, particles, shadows. Our eyes I think are trained to overlook this evidence of film’s materiality. It occurs to me that the longer I stand and observe, the more I can see on the projection screen that seemed at first hygienically white. On the abstract bright “canvas” of the image vertical smudges now emerge: hairs, blurred grayish stains. The image darkens and lightens slightly, attuned to the staccato motion of the projector. I am drawn to its physicality, the sound of its mechanism of display, the sober intensity of non-illusory real time, which invites contemplation and reveals itself only to those engaged in this active spectatorship. No. 2 A white cubic space immediately off a corridor that connects one part of an exhibition to another is illuminated by a perfectly rectangular bright image. I hardly notice the entrance as I pass through noisy displays and am overtaken by impressions of a flickering richness of visual imagery. I enter the room and stand still; I wait. Nothing happens. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, from the neighboring video installation (perhaps Global Groove), plays in the gallery next door. The perfect white rectangle projected on the wall in front of me, with its precise edges, seems simply to be there, unaffected by anything happening around it or anyone in the room, a white flag of a pristine image. Slowly I recognize, from somewhere behind me, the unobtrusive humming presence of a digital projector. As I turn from the image toward the source of the light, I can see the projector, located just below the ceiling in the center of the wall. I sit on a chair beneath it. And I wait. The whiteness hurts my eyes. The word hospitality comes to mind: I sense hospitality in the way I was received into this room, and was offered this chair, but I also register the uncanny impression of being in a place ruled by emptiness and hygiene—a hospital. I hear lively sounds from behind the walls, but they come from another world, and I am haunted by a wish to hear and see more, which, unfulfilled, becomes an unbearable distraction. No. 3 I bend over to view a round film can in a vitrine at an exhibition. The can, open slightly, holds a barely recognizable roll of a transparent film stock. For a while I study its dimensions and form, observing the stains of oxidation on the lid of the can and some traces of tape once applied there. The film itself is not readily visible. I recall an online image depicting a similar can and two boxes with film leaders, apparently a replacement for the loop wound on the reel. It occurs to me suddenly that there is hardly any difference between this film in a sealed museum vitrine and the virtual version delivered from a server somewhere. Both are distant, both deactivated, and both represent potentiality rather than actuality. Still, gazing at the object behind the glass, I attempt to imagine what this film would show if I were able to view it. I imagine hearing the projection device and inspecting it from a position that would let me see the full image and its source at the same time. Yet the film I am looking at is still, somewhat useless, enclosed in the can and then in the museum vitrine—a treatment that ought to signal its value and exceptional status. But I am unable to view or smell it. It is shut off from me and isolated from the exhibition around it—an artifact or a relic, one part of an unknown whole, a remnant of an unfulfilled spectacle.

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FIGURE 11 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the exhibition Bild für Bild—Film und Zeitgenössische Kunst, Museum Ostwall at Dortmunder U, Germany, December 12, 2010–April 25, 2011. Photograph by Jürgen Spiler, Dortmund © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

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The work described in the preceding paragraphs—Zen for Film,1 which Paik conceived sometime in 1962—is one of the most fascinating examples of materialist, minimal film. It is also a prototypical Fluxus film, consisting initially of a clear 16mm leader projected on a screen. Stripped to its barest essentials—the film stock itself—it was an anti-film, which, like Cage’s silent music, revealed nothing but its own material qualities and the noise of a film running through a projector. I have described three impressions of Zen for Film, which I encountered in three exhibitions of the work. No. 1 was an analogue film loop shown through a projector at Bild für Bild—Film und Zeitgenössische Kunst (Image for Image—Film and Contemporary Art, at Museum Ostwall, Dortmunder U, December 12, 2010–April 25, 2011 [fig. 11]); No. 2 was an eight-minute digital video projection at Nam June Paik: Video Artist, Performance Artist, Composer and Visionary (Tate Liverpool, December 17, 2010–March 13, 2011 [fig. 12]); and No. 3 describes a film reel and canister encountered in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 30–April 19, 2009 [fig. 13]).2 The three forms of Zen for Film could not be more

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FIGURE 12 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the exhibition Nam June Paik: Video Artist, Performance Artist, Composer and Visionary, Tate Liverpool, December 17, 2010–March 13, 2011. Image Photograph © 2015 Tate, London © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate. FIGURE 13 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–64). Installation view at the exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 30–April 19, 2009. Photograph by David Heald © SRGF, NY © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

different—a filmic projection, a digital projection, and a film reel—even though each version has the same title and claims to be the same work of art. The Zen for Film in No. 1, loaned by Centre Pompidou to Museum Ostwall, consisted of a loop of celluloid film run through a film projector. Closely resembling the early version of the work known from the Fluxhall festival in 1964, this Zen for Film exposes the accumulation of marks that records the film’s process of deterioration and suggests the possibility of experiencing a cinematic event. The Tate Liverpool variant of Zen for Film (No. 2) was a digital file beamed at a wall: a hygienic, empty rectangle that lacked the materiality of filmic spectacle evident in the earlier encounter. The wall label stated that Zen for Film was a black-and-white singlechannel silent video, whose showing lasted eight minutes. It also featured the following credit: “courtesy of the Electronic Arts Intermix, EAI, New York.” EAI’s online database includes a digital file of Zen for Film, described as follows: “Zen for Film, 1962–64, 8 min, b&w, silent” The file also refers to the Fluxfilm Anthology.3 Both the EAI database and the Tate Liverpool wall label hint at Paik’s description of his film as a “clear film, accumulating in time dust and scratches.”4 EAI’s digital website describes Paik’s analogue film and provides information on it without referencing its physical manifestation in an exhibition space. (What the reader sees on the website is digital content rather than Paik’s analogue film.) The Tate Liverpool, however, suggests that its installation is the (or a) “real” Zen for Film, apparently disregarding the artist’s initial intention, in which a certain materiality of display was critical. In any event, the viewer does not see what the description promises—a common problem nowadays in exhibitions that include moving images where DVD projections have replaced film projection. (This replacement has often been criticized in exhibitions of Warhol’s films.) Thus Zen for Film at the Tate Liverpool became an installation with a finite relation to time: with its duration of eight minutes, the digital file provided only a partial “documentation” of the work—a digital palimpsest of one of its analogue screenings. The concept of the work was altered when the endlessly projected loop of film leader ceased to exist. The progressive collection of traces and marks that bear witness to endless hours of analogue projection was intrinsic to the initial concept of Zen for Film; when that film was digitized, the active collection of marks disappeared (although the film that was digitized already displayed some marks).5 Moreover, as a digital video projection, Zen for Film became silent, a radical reinterpretation of the initially rich sound experience generated by the clattering of the projector. This characteristic of the analogue cinematic medium, like the experience of duration, has ceased to exist. (In fact, as the practice of Bruce Nauman suggests, the noise of the projector is of great importance and can be preserved in a recording; see Chapter 5.) Stripping Zen for Film of the audible qualities of its mechanics is thus a most radical gesture. In No. 3 the film can that holds the film leader is a relic of the 1960s that was drawn from the Silverman Fluxus Collection at MoMA (see fig. 13, right-hand side). John Cage recalled that Paik invited the avant-garde dancer Merce Cunningham, who was Cage’s

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FIGURE 14 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film and three Zen for Film Fluxkit editions. Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licenced by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

partner, to his studio on Canal Street to watch a “one hour long imageless film.”6 The film can (visible at right in fig, 14) is probably a deactivated element of one of the projections of Zen for Film from the 1960s (perhaps the one seen by Cage and his partner). In fact, as the Fluxus artist and curator Jon Hendricks reveals, the Silverman Fluxus Collection contains the only film version of Zen for Film.7 According to Hendricks, it was played several times; later, when the work had been loaned to external exhibitions, it was so brittle and fragile that playing it was prohibited. The Paik estate had approved the original work’s physical presentation in a film can and endorsed the projection of a new film leader loop on a historically appropriate projector. Hendricks defended this strategy, claiming that Zen for Film was conceived as an experience, not an object, and that because subsequent projections have been reconstructions of that experience, the use of the original leader, which lies safely in the can, is unnecessary. Currently, moreover, the museum is altogether reluctant to loan the canned leader and has placed it in cold storage for reasons of conservation.8 In the course of my research I also encountered Zen for Film in the form of a multiple— a work produced as one object in a Fluxus edition, each containing a different length of

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empty film strip—consisting of a transparent box with a short strip of film leader (visible at left in fig. 14).9 Was it a substitute for the projected film or was it an object in its own right? I had considered that question long before October 2012, when I was finally able to hold the strip of film in my hands. The yellowed film was evidently too brittle and fragile to be projected.10 Was the strip of film that I handled ever projected? Does that need to have happened? The answer to this and other questions can be sought by looking at the logic behind Zen for Film and considering the work’s emergence in the broader context of artistic and cultural developments of the 1960s. Encounters with Zen for Film raise questions about the identity of the artwork in relation to the change it has experienced. What is at stake if we address its presentation and conservation—an experience, an object, a projection, a relic, or perhaps all of these— simultaneously? Can a work of art invite change by its very nature? The different ways in which Zen for Film has been projected and exhibited raise a question about curation: How, especially in the choice of technologies, has it influenced the work’s changeability? In 2015–16, at the Bard Graduate Center’s Focus Gallery, New York, I restaged each of my encounters with Paik’s erratic work in the exhibition Revisions—Zen for Film (September 17, 2015–February 21, 2016) (plate 14.).11 Rather than present a set of heterogeneous objects arranged according to a curatorial concept, I showed a single work, Zen for Film, in multiple versions: a filmic projection, a film can, and a Fluxus edition, as well as (in a separate digital kiosk) interactive documentation of its manifestations in Fluxkits and as Zen for Film—Fluxfilm No. 1 by Maciunas. The different forms Zen for Film has taken challenge our understanding of how an artwork functions in a certain historical moment and how the available technology dictates its aesthetic qualities.

Z E N F O R F I L M A S E V E N T, O B J E C T, P R O C E S S

It is hard to establish the date when Zen for Film was first shown. Although some sources say it debuted in 1964, at the six-week Fluxus festival at the Fluxhall, on Canal Street in New York, the materials assembled by Jon Hendricks in Fluxus Codex (1988) and Fluxus etc. (1981) trace Zen for Film to 1962.12 The early history of the work can be reconstructed on the basis of photographs, one of them a little-known shot taken by Peter Moore during the Fluxhall festival. As Bruce Jenkins recalled, that photograph reveals Zen for Film filling barely “half of a home movie-sized screen that was positioned at the front of the loft space [where Fluxhall took place], adjacent to an upright piano and a double bass.”13 The best-known photograph of the work, taken by Moore during New Cinema Festival I (Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, New York, November 2, 1965), shows Paik facing the screen and casting his shadow on the projection (plate 15). As an imageless and anti-illusionist work, Zen for Film circumvented the traditional elements of production: it had no actors, camera, editing, script, sets, or (conventional) narrative. It presented the viewer with the effect of a pure electric light meeting the flat surface on which it was projected, filtered only by a transparent film leader. The spectator

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would thus see light, perceiving it initially as an apparently static whiteness—an image that, in the age of analogue projectors, might well have signaled a failure in projection, a rupture of the film, a non-image. Although at first Zen for Film appears to offer the viewer no complex imaginary associations to decipher, in its demonstration of pure material qualities, the work demands of the viewer an immediate and careful apprehension of the time and space in the psychophysical world in which he or she is immersed. Time comes into play by way of the projector, which manipulates time in relation to its speed of projection and the amount of leader transported through its mechanics; by way of the film leader, which gathers marks when it is shown repeatedly during its lifetime (replacement film leaders denote new sequences of alteration); and by way of the viewer, who observes the spectacle in time and is immersed in time—bored, interested, or indifferent. In this context, Paik puts the screening of his film on display, and the projection of the film becomes a performance. That the film leader collects marks as it is played makes a point, not about an object marked (or marred) by time, but about a cinematic performance that cannot be experienced in the same form at any other time. Unlike the traditional cinema of illusion, where the temporality of the narrative takes primacy over any other feature, time in Zen for Film becomes tangible. The audience plays a crucial role in Paik’s spectacle, participating in and witnessing the random alteration of the film leader, which is different each time it is projected. The audience viewing the film moves beyond the conventional experience of the cinema of illusion and narrative, where the film as film seems to disappear, to experience perceptually the materiality of projection. In this experience the difference between “looking” and “seeing” becomes clear.14 In Zen for Film the moment of spectatorship is not determined, because it is possible to view the loop at different stages of its alteration, its continuity, its duration, its becoming. As the projector processes the physicality of Zen for Film in a play of patterns and transformations on the wall or screen, the repetition of the sequence of forms elicits a feeling of boredom. Paik’s film takes up Fluxus’s attempt to reach the state of immersion achieved by repetition, to prove Cage’s assertion that, despite repetition, there is always change.15 Zen for Film also reflects Dick Higgins’s concept of intermedia, which entails artistic activities that occur between genres and media, so that the works oscillate between materiality and ephemerality, film and non-film, cinematic event and sculpture.16 Zen for Film, simultaneously an “object,” a process, and an environment, is in accord with George Brecht’s assertion that media are interchangeable: “Every object is an event and every event has an object-like quality.”17 Zen for Film refers to Zen Buddhism, whose adherents, to achieve a profound unification with the world, abandon their own preconceptions of it so that they can perceive things as they manifest themselves in their “fullness of being.”18 Like other artists in the early 1960s, Paik felt a close connection to Zen aesthetics. Although his Korean roots might suggest otherwise, he was most powerfully influenced in his interest in Zen by John Cage. Paik told Otto Hahn in an interview, “I am an artist. . . . Because I am a friend of John Cage, people tend to see me as a Zen monk. . . . I’m not a follower of Zen but I

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react to Zen in the same way as I react to Johann Sebastian Bach.”19 Cage, whose effect on Paik’s works of the late 1950s and early 1960s was unequivocal, acknowledged his own attachment to Zen.20 Cage created a method of composition based on the works of Zen artists, isolating the element of chance and generating random information according to procedures derived from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. Later, as he moved away from Zen, Cage began to test methods of indeterminate composition, fully or partly silent scores, scores based on star maps, and a process in which he simply “let the sounds be themselves.”21 One of the most famous Cage compositions, 4′33″ (1952), emerged from these tests; like Paik in Zen for Film, Cage, in this composition, drew ideas from both indeterterminism and Zen aesthetics. Zen originated in China in the sixth century and later spread to Korea and Japan— where the form of Zen that reached artistic circles in America originated. The Japanese scholar Daisetsu Taitaro Suzuki, who wrote books and essays on Buddhism, Zen, and Shin, was a key figure in the spread of Far Eastern philosophy in the West. Cage attended Suzuki’s lectures when the scholar taught at Columbia University from 1949 to 1950. Those lectures became a catalyst for the later “Cagean revolution.” Although Paik was ambivalent about Zen,22 it left its mark on his oeuvre, most notably in his acceptance of Suzuki’s notion of withdrawing or turning away from pictorial content, accepting the seeing of Nothing as the seeing of the real, as eternal seeing.23 Paik, in an interview, explained to Justin Hoffman his attitude toward Eastern thought and its aesthetic influence, noting, however, that the title Zen for TV “is an artistic coincidence, you know. It is a beautiful title.”24 Zen for Film shares a number of characteristics with Zen compositions, such as using the simplest means possible to suggest the inherent nature of an aesthetic object; understanding the Buddha nature (the inner nature) of an object before emphasizing its essence (an artwork is already a natural work of art before the arrival of the artist); deemphasizing the execution of the object because technique matters little unless one first comprehends the essence; and pursuing experimentalism—another link between Zen for Film and Fluxus. The conceptual quality of Zen for Film that reflects the simplicity of Zen can be located in Paik’s emphasis on the nature of the filmic medium and spectacle—one need only run a blank film leader through a projector—and in the delegation of labor. In Zen for Film, Paik delegated the labor to the projector itself, which produces the tangible traces of its own process. This work pushes the perceptive ability of spectators to the extreme: viewing it, they see an extended dimension of the cinematic timescape, an anti-spectacle that is close to pure whiteness yet also far from it, the epitome of nothingness. Are we watching a no-thing? Or are we watching a some-thing? Zen for Film opened up an entire tradition of Fluxus film experimentation with time, image, and the materiality and technology of the medium.25 In its enchanted materiality, Zen for Film pays homage to Cage’s seminal 4′33″, in which the musician plays nothing for the duration of the piece, specified in its title, letting the ambient sounds of the environment play.26 Cage’s “composition” is significant not only for the novelty of withholding

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the active involvement of the musician, but also for introducing the element of chance, questioning the role of the composer, and imposing agency on the listener. The impossibility of silence in 4′33″ resonates with the impossibility of visual nothingness in Paik’s blank film. Just as the listener finds it impossible to experience pure silence in a performance of Cage’s piece, so the viewer of Zen for Film finds it impossible to see a non-image; a clear frame—something essentially transparent—proves that the image cannot be empty.27 Although Paik underscored his close connection to Cage, Cage himself stresses that Paik’s Zen for Film at once united and separated the two artists. According to Cage, Paik’s Zen for Film is his 4′33″, even though Paik’s stillness was primarily visual and Cage’s aural.28 Zen for Film is also a tribute to Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951)—a series of works, each consisting of two to seven panels, painted white with a roller—which anticipated Cage’s 4′33″.29 “Off hand, you might say that all three actions are the same. But they are quite different,” said Cage. “Nam June Paik’s film . . . has no images on it, the room is darkened, the film is projected, and what you see is the dust that has collected on the film. I think that’s somewhat similar to the case of the Rauschenberg painting, though the focus is more intense [in Paik’s film].”30 Indeed, in Moore’s photograph of a showing of Zen for Film, Paik’s silhouette is captured as a shadow on the screen, which resembles Rauschenberg’s panels in his White Paintings series—each of its iterations itself a screen—reflecting the most fleeting impressions of ambient conditions.31 Rauschenberg was Cage’s friend and the two men collaborated closely, Cage often admitting to being inspired by Rauschenberg’s eccentricity. In his book entitled Silence (1973), Cage called Rauschenberg’s white panels “airports of the lights, shadows, and particles” and “mirrors of the air”; he saw them as substrates on which change and infinite visual possibilities could be observed.32 The idea behind White Paintings—which seems inspired by Zen notions (though Rauschenberg was not)—accords with Rauschenberg’s conviction that “a canvas is never empty.” That idea is mirrored in Cage’s approach to silence in 4′33″, and expressed cinematically in the blank film leader of Paik’s Zen for Film.33 Cage said he was already thinking about a composition entailing only silence when he first encountered Rauschenberg’s white panels, but that they impelled him to respond immediately and encouraged him to create 4′33″. “Silence, like music, is nonexistent,” Cage said. “There are always sounds.”34 Another antecedent of Paik’s cinematic Zen can be found four decades earlier, when Marcel Duchamp turned against what he called “retinal art”—the notion that art is intended primarily for the eye—and created a sculpture out of air entitled 50 cc of Paris Air (1919). Later, Yves Klein echoed this idea in his exhibition of “invisible art,” “shown” in the empty premises of the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris (1958), and in his plans for air sculptures with Jean Tinguely (also 1958), and, to nurture spatial awareness, his plans for Architecture de l’air (1961).35 László Moholy-Nagy added another link to this chain of antecedents. In his treatise New Vision (1928), he discussed Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) as a surface for projection, virtually ignoring the depiction of the square.

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Moholy-Nagy wrote, “Here is to be found the interpretation of Malevich’s last picture— the plain white surface, which constituted an ideal plane for kinetic light and shadow effect, which, originating in the surroundings, would fall upon it. In this way, Malevich’s picture represents a miniature cinema screen.”36 Despite these many associations, Paik’s film is not about whiteness; it is about transparency and non-transparency.37 The three artworks—Cage’s 4’33”, Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, and Paik’s Zen for Film—all manifest fundamental differences between vision (Rauschenberg), sound (Cage), and time (Paik).

T H E P R O B L E M O F W H AT TO P R E S E RV E

Cagean silence and the “emptiness” of Paik’s film projection pose questions about what, exactly, there is to preserve in these works. Although a projector is required for Zen for Film (in most of the installations I have viewed, an Eiki projector has been used), there is no “object” to conserve—no particular “condition” of the work to capture, no way to reconstruct the random marks left by the projector on the film. All that remains is a set of elements evoking certain effects. The only option is to examine the process of the work. Cage’s description of Rauschenberg’s paintings as projection screens for ambient “noise” applies equally well to Paik’s Zen for Film. Both artists work at the level of pure materiality, refusing audiences a straightforward and pleasant visual illusion and exposing their media as both the carriers of a visual message and the message itself. Paik makes visible the effects of time and alters viewers’ expectations about watching moving images projected from strips of film—a medium that inevitably ages, collecting scratches, smudges, and dust. Audiences—drawn to the imaginary illusion, contemplating the depths of a cinematic narrative seen on the screen—overlook the aging of the film itself; it does not exist. The accumulation of dust on the film leader of Zen for Film recalls Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes), a 1920 photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp’s unfinished work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). This remarkable, beautiful photograph captured the texture of the dust that gathered on the glass surface that Duchamp had divided by applying delicate lines of lead wire. After Man Ray had taken the photograph, Duchamp wiped the surface clean, except for a section of the work left covered with dust, before affixing the permanent glass plate. What Zen for Film and Dust Breeding share, beyond dust, is an emphasis on a process that leads to a final result. Duchamp fixed and finished his work with the simple gesture of wiping away the dust and stopping its further accumulation. These finishing steps were preceded and accompanied by an act of “conservation”: Man Ray’s recording of the whole layer of dust. Paik’s film leader required a similar determination: Paik had to decide how many times the leader could pass through the projector and still be what it was intended to represent—when the accumulation of random traces might make it entirely unreadable as a clear projection.

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Like the artist who makes the initial decisions about process, the conservator, curator, or technician exerts control over the appearance of the projected image. During my research for this book, I experienced versions of Zen for Film that had been affected by the wear on, and deterioration of, the film. At a screening in September 2010 at Centre Pompidou, the leader was extremely worn, displaying a large number of particles, smudges, and stains; a screening at the Nam June Paik Art Center in October 2012 showed a leader that was similarly worn. In December 2011, however, at the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, Germany, a much “younger” film leader of Zen for Film was projected, revealing only a small number of dust particles and scratches. These variations can be seen in videos recorded on different occasions, which are available on such platforms as YouTube or Vimeo.

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Contingency and process characterize White Painting, 4′33″, Dust Breeding, and Zen for Film, all of which, in addition, raise questions: Can chance events be captured? Can an essential moment in a work, required for traditional conservation, be arrested and preserved? These works also question more broadly the common understanding of an artwork that refuses to be stable, fixed, and “finished.” Whereas Duchamp seemed to find a solution to this problem before it appeared— removing most of the dust and then affixing the glass—Rauschenberg’s White Paintings series continues to provoke debates in the field of conservation. Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, was known to repaint his canvases (those of the 1951–52 series Black Paintings, which followed the white panels, for instance, were modified at least three times, the last time in 1985), but a question remains whether the White Paintings should be “refreshed” to retain their pristine condition or displayed with evidence of age: yellowing, darkening, staining, and cracking.38 How does one read paintings, now tan and stained, that were initially meant to be pure white—paintings that expressed Rauschenberg’s interest in “getting complexity without their revealing much” and in making works where “there was much to see but not much shown.” During my research, I encountered both repainted and patinated variants of White Paintings. According to David White, the curator of the Rauschenberg Foundation, repainted versions accord with the artist’s intention that the works never reveal any patina or evidence of age.39 Yet patinated versions have documentary value; the canvases, rather than being “airports for light,” are marked by the passage of time, making them artifacts that, like Zen for Film, have witnessed their own material transformation. There are still questions to answer about Paik’s clear film leader: If there is nothing— that is, no object—to conserve in Zen for Film, should the “used” strips of film be conserved as filmic remnants of the 1960s? Would these strips of film then become collectables—documents that form an evolving archive, recording time and the mechanical traces of the projector on the celluloid? This approach would accord with the practice of conserving every piece of material evidence connected with an artwork.

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Zen for Film—as an object, projection, and process—owes much to the exhibition procedures fashioned and disseminated at different stages of the artwork’s life. Whereas the conservation of the film leader and the Fluxus multiple relates to traditional strategies of monitoring the physical condition of materials (and follows practices commonly used in caring for traditional artworks), Zen for Film as a projection escapes common presumptions about static, fixed objects. It demonstrates the need, when thinking about conservation, to take into account the artistic and curatorial decisions that have shaped the work during numerous processes of display, maintenance, and dissemination. Curation can assume the role of preserving the work—in the sense of maintaining its presentation—but can also radically change its appearance. Both curation and conservation have creative aspects with consequences for the identity of the work. Yet the tendency of conservation and curation to preserve the historical experience of the work—as Taruskin’s critique of authentic historical performance shows—has little chance of success. Thus, with Zen for Film, to approximate the experience of an event first performed in the 1960s, a new leader is run through the projector with every new iteration of the work. If priority is given to preserving the original leader, then it cannot be run through a projector. This consideration underlies the decision to exhibit Zen for Film as a film reel in a canister. Because the projector originally used for Zen for Film has not been preserved, the work becomes an entirely new assemblage of materials every time it is exhibited. In that (physical) sense—and also because it is impossible to “conserve” an experience (or reconstruct a historical performance)—Zen for Film is unconservable. As an object, projection, and process, Zen for Film has a complexity that transcends suppositions in Western museology and conservation about the identity of works of art. The goal with Zen for Film must be continuation rather than conservation and an acknowledgment that changeability is intrinsic to, and an irreducible essence of, an artwork.

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5 CHANGEABILITY AND MULTIMEDIA ART My TV is not always interesting, but not always uninteresting. As nature, which is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but because it simply changes. NAM JUNE PAIK

FORMS OF CHANGEABILITY

Changeability is an artwork’s potential to transform from one condition, appearance, or constitution to another. Although change in traditional paintings and sculpture is a matter of damage or loss, many multimedia installations invite change as a positive value each time they are reinstalled in different galleries and museums, their heterogeneous media reconstituted, and (often) the vantage point of viewers—and thus their participation and involvement—altered. Change is fundamental to the identity of these works. Changes to an artwork can be intrinsic—as when a work is conceived as open, designed to be different each time it is materialized or performed, like Cage’s 4′33″, in which no performance sounds like another; like Paik’s plant ensembles in Arche Noah and TV Garden, and like Zen for Film, each iteration of which has a different accumulation of scuffs and marks—or extrinsic, as when conservators intervene to repair a damaged work, replace obsolescent technology, or alter elements intrinsic to the work that were not supposed to change. Curators and conservators can take part in both categories of change, allowing intrinsic change or limiting its extent to maintain the work’s identity. A multimedia artwork can change physically, in tangible and identifiable ways—and/ or discreetly, so that discerning what has changed would require precise optical devices and some deeper knowledge of the work’s materials, as well as an investment of time on the part of the viewer (most likely a conservator or curator). If a multimedia installation consists of numerous components joined in interrelated systems—a sort of cosmos unto

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itself—then any change in a constituent part can shift its relationship to other parts. In the attempt to impose some kind of order on these works, conservation thus wrestles with the disorder of changeable materials, all moving inexorably toward an entropy. Changeability means not only alteration, decay, and obsolescence but also a fundamental change to a multimedia work of art that can come about in disseminating, curating, or archiving it. Zen for Film, for example, has been transformed into a relic, a Fluxkit, a looped and later a digital projection, and although it was initially only a processual work, it became ultimately also a static artifact. Changeability differs from variability, which denotes the extent of change possible within limits set out, in the case of a multimedia artwork, in a score or instructions (for reinstallation or as a part of an artwork). Variability implies sameness, within a prescribed range related to some kind of mean value, rather than difference.1 The Variable Media approach (established at the Guggenheim Museum in 1999 as a result of the Variable Media Initiative) assumes that the life of an artwork can continue, whether or not it does so in its original medium, a stipulation that allows the work to be translated once its original medium becomes obsolete.2 (That dispensation recalls the discussion of historical instrumentation in musical performances in Chapter 3.) Whereas a performance based on a score can vary within defined limits, changeability in multimedia works of art allows the transgression of such limits. The changeability of an artwork unfolds in time, and is not reversible. Multimedia installations generally undergo changes when they are reinstalled. In this sense, reinstallation, like reiteration, is a matter of repetition and difference—two words the art historian Tina Fiske uses in describing the reinstallation of White Walls by Andy Goldsworthy (2007). Fiske’s account is based on the Derridian conviction that “the structure of iteration . . . implies both identity and difference.”3 Curatorial and conservation decisions in the iterations of an installation can affect the identity of the work. Iterations of Zen for Film, for example, can result in a conceptual shift in the artwork, whereby the work ceases to be a film leader, wound on a projector spool to display its own material condition, and becomes a relic, a multiple, and a digital file. Iterations of an installation can also differ because of the shape or dimensions of the space in which they are set, as has been the case with TV Garden. If an artist instigates and then directs a change in a work, what occurs is understood as a further development of that work. But if a significant change takes place posthumously, it may completely alter the concept of a work, as happened to Zen for Film, and affect how long it can be perceived and mediated. So what form can change take in an installation? The sections of this chapter that follow touch on aspects of change in the conceptual level of an artwork, on the consequences of shifting from a dynamic engagement with an installation to the static viewing of an object, on the ways in which spatial change affects the work and on the role obsolescence plays in changeability. Finally, the chapter establishes the limits of changeability and tests whether a work’s further development can be classified as an example of changeability. These perspectives on changeability can help determine the potential for both conservation and the museum’s engagement with multimedia art.

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T H E C O N C E P T U A L L E V E L O F A N A RT W O R K

The conceptual basis of multimedia installations seems to be affected by changes in their material embodiment, which also have an impact on their identity. A change in the material carrier can effect a conceptual change in an artwork. In this section I return briefly to Zen for Film, described in the preceding chapter. As originally conceived, the work was bound to a specific display apparatus, a film projector, that determines the behavior of the work and results in a visual performance in which change—the dust, scratches, and marks that accumulate over time on the film—plays a considerable role. But when a digital projector reading a frozen digital file of Zen for Film replaces the original projector, the change betrays the basic logic of the work. Moreover, this physical change, which alters Zen for Film at the conceptual level, occurred after the artist had died. Paik was interested, not in the projection of a bright rectangle, but in the performance of a clear strip of film running through a projector—an interest and idea shaped by the conceptual tenor of his time and inspired by the work of fellow artists. Zen for Film, unlike any other cinematic work, inhabits the filmic essence of a translucent medium, making explicit the process of light passing through celluloid; as a result, unlike any other cinematic work, it makes evident the distinction between analogue and digital projection. The consequences of change in Zen for Film are thus far greater than those of a physical shift from one display apparatus to another. The effect of change on the concept of an artwork can also be seen in another of Paik’s installations, Zen for TV, of 1963 (fig. 15). This work, which appeared initially that same year in Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, at Gallery Parnass in Wuppertal, was shown in the form it took as a result of his creative response to an accident: Two television monitors intended for the exhibition were damaged in transit from Paik’s retreat in Bensberg-Refrath to the venue in Wuppertal. One of them was named after the make of a monitor (Rembrandt Automatic4) and the other was called Zen for TV.5 In Zen for TV—because the vertical deflection, an electronic component and part of the electron assembly gun in CRT television that deflects the beam of electrons and allows us to see a full image, had ceased to function—the monitor displayed nothing more than a horizontal line. Paik, after assessing the broken monitor, turned it on its side, making the line vertical—introducing, in the process, the reduction and stillness characteristic of Zen aesthetics. Paik recomposed what had signified the failure of the monitor to function and gave it a new meaning. He created a new life for the artwork, based on a chance incident—an exceptional chance operation, in Cagean terms, that paralleled the one in Duchamp’s Large Glass in which the artist accepted the shattered glass as part of the artwork. Paik’s acceptance of chance brought Zen for TV into existence; it was not (pre)conceived in any conventional sense; instead the work was conceived when the artist adapted to the situation that presented itself. Paik’s creative process here was contingent, and only after the fact was it affirmed as a conscious,

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FIGURE 15 Nam June Paik, Zen for TV (1963–75), P 163/0. Photograph © Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. Formerly Hahn Collection, Cologne © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

purposeful act. Unlike traditional techniques in art that are based on skill and a knowledge of fabrication and proceed in steps from genesis to end result, Paik’s technique in Zen for TV was retroactive: he determined what the work would become by seizing the opportunity offered by a chance event, and he revised it as a decision that affected the status of contingency, so that Paik’s creative act did not remain an event determined purely by chance but became an artwork based on a conscious decision because the artist designated the TV set a work of art. The artist controlled some of his decisions in this type of creativity—rotating the monitor ninety degrees—but others were beyond his control, such as the chance incident that produced the line on the screen in the first place. The line in Zen for TV looks like the result of a kind of electronic Zenga, the intuitive Zen style of painting that uses quick, expressive brushstrokes to achieve the effect of immediacy.6 Zen’s singular brushstroke, expressed in electronic form, conveys the entire content of the artistic message—and the contingency of this gesture expresses Zen’s serenity, its stillness, its openness to chance. In Zen calligraphy, the line portrays the “heart of the thing,” a concentrated image ready to release its compressed energy.7 In

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Paik’s Zen for TV, the straight line stands for enlightenment as a sudden flash of intuition, an act that is central to Zen Buddhism and achieved by breaking free of the restrictions of conventional thinking. This enlightenment, the concentrated line of compressed electronic light, became a statement of the very bare minimum of the existence of form expressed by electronic media.8 Zen for TV has undergone a number of physical changes since it was first exhibited in 1963. In fact, it has been exhibited using so many different televisions and TV cabinets and monitors that its many iterations could almost serve as a survey of the aesthetics of cathode-ray-tube technology from the 1960s to the present (plate 16). In addition to the obvious shifts in the work’s sculptural form, changes have occurred on-screen. The lack of vertical deflection means that the on-screen image is actually a full TV picture compressed into a thin line of light. If this is an image, what does it show? Or, more to the point, what does it conceal? And from a contemporary perspective: What did it cease to show? Like a number of other manipulated devices in Paik’s groundbreaking 1963 exhibition, Zen for TV originally transmitted an analogue German TV broadcast.9 That broadcast continued to be present on-screen in the compressed line. In other words, the TV was not really broken; there was still a picture present on-screen (even if it had collapsed and even if the mechanical manipulation causing the compression in Zen for TV was not visible to the viewer).10 Although to imitate a vertical line on a TV screen might at first seem a simple matter, an exact temporal translation of the artwork is impossible. This is so, first, because to transmit an image in the collapsed line, using a present-day digital TV and broadcast technology, would render the artwork a “thing” of the second decade of the twenty-first century (rather than one of 1963), and second, because using a current plasma or LCD screen would deprive the work of its internal logic of manipulated circuits. (Even though it is possible to transpose the image of the line to other display technologies, those would never be able to emulate the mechanical specificity of CRT.) Nonetheless, if the idea of a compressed image is still essential to the work, it is hard to say how many of the versions of Zen for TV created since 1963 have displayed a TV broadcast, which would necessarily have changed over time and with geographic location, rendering the work something different. Or is it possible that they displayed white noise, which would have been noticed by only a few? The instructions Paik created retrospectively for the iteration of Zen for TV (now in the Silverman Fluxus Collection at MoMA) do not disclose details about a TV channel that must be played and thus omit it from the viewer’s potential experience.11

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A similar form of extrinsic change can be seen in the installation Moon Is the Oldest TV (plate 17). As in Zen for TV, the manipulation of the TV medium takes place at the visual level, here rather discreetly. In Moon Is the Oldest TV different phases of an electronic moon were generated mechanically by moving the picture tube scanner to the back of

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the tube. This distortion produced an image of the moon that, with the magnets that were applied to the neck of the picture tube, created the image. The monitor case concealed this manipulation, which was therefore not visible to viewers. Moon Is the Oldest TV employed the internal logic of the apparatus to create the image and was unobtrusively yet closely dependent on specific display technology. The work evolved from a concept realized on one monitor, in Paik’s 1965 exhibition Electronic Art at the Gallery Bonino, to a multiple-monitor installation, developed only in 1976.12 Later Paik created a twelve-monitor version—the number of monitors suggesting the twelve months of the year. In multiple later manifestations of the work, both the number of the monitors and their spatial arrangement continued to change. One of the more radical reinterpretations of Moon Is the Oldest TV was a twenty-five–monitor compilation created for the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1993. At that point Paik decided to film the images of the lunar sphere generated on the TV tube, with the assistance of Paul Garrin.13 This decision had far-reaching implications. It resulted in an artwork that was visually close to the original in the images seen on the monitors but operable on a playback system. But the significance of the playful manipulation of the cathode-ray tubes was lost because the moons were “played back” rather than produced by manipulation, creating a sort of visual narrative that related the moons to a medium embedded in the technological possibilities of that time. Zen for Film, Zen for TV, and Moon Is the Oldest TV have all experienced conceptual change. In Moon Is the Oldest TV and Zen for TV, the artist himself instigated the changes, responding to the increased demand for his installations with a pragmatic approach to their handling. Curators and conservators dealing with these works face a multitude of instantiations and versions—some authorized by the artist, some unauthorized— and must decide which of them should be preserved. I argue that basing decisions on a sequential understanding of time is not an adequate approach to changeable artworks.

F R O M I N T E R A C T I V I T Y TO R E L I C S : T H E PA RT I C I PATO RY A RT W O R K

The identity of Paik’s early participatory art in electronic media—such as Random Access (1963) and Magnet TV (1965)—was undermined by the museum context that made it impossible to maintain both the aesthetic integrity of the artworks (which would have involved “preserving them from being used”) and their value as pieces manipulated by audiences (according to the participatory tradition of Fluxus events and as an extension of Duchamp’s dictum that the viewer completes the work of art).14 Over time, the museums made changes that prevented Magnet TV and Random Access from being activated by the viewer and transformed them into static objects of contemplation. Magnet TV developed from a number of earlier experiments Paik had undertaken in his 1963 exhibition (which also included an early version of Magnet TV). In the 1965

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FIGURE 16 Peter Moore, Photograph of Nam June Paik with Magnet TV, October 15, 1965 © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

iteration of the work Paik invited exhibition visitors to manipulate the cathode-ray tube with a horseshoe magnet and a degausser, both of which interfere with the flow of electrons in the tube and create baffling forms on-screen. The image Peter Moore took in Paik’s Canal Street studio that year demonstrates Paik’s participatory concept of the work (fig. 16). In the recent past, when the Whitney Museum of American Art presented its version of Magnet TV, it did not invite the viewer to participate, in order to conserve the work— that is, to prevent the destruction of the monitor and the magnet.15 Although the work is less dynamic when presented this way, the distortion of the monitor produced by the magnet is still visible. This solution is legitimate from a conservation standpoint, but it also contradicts Paik’s concept of an artwork as participatory. Magnet TV, deprived of the interactive element originally intended for it, becomes a semi-static artifact displaying a kinetic image. Paik’s interest in participatory art has its roots in his 1963 exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, where he encouraged visitors to press pedals, push buttons, and engage physically in the installations: “As the next step towards more indeterminacy, I wanted to let the audience (or congretation in this case) act and play by itself.”16 Paik invented a descriptive term for the viewer’s activity—and his own dismantling of the passive one-way delivery system of art—calling it Participation TV. The concept of Par-

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FIGURE 17 Nam June Paik, Manfred Montwé, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, Peter Brötzmann Demonstrates “Random Access,” 1963 (2004), G 1003/22. Photograph © Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien © Manfred Montwé © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

ticipation TV—“the one-ness of creator, audience, and critic”—conveyed Paik’s aim, to engage and reactivate the viewer and presaged his later efforts to “humanize technology.”17 “Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we have to strike back,” he proclaimed.18 And later, he said: “Communication means two-way communication. Oneway communication is indoctrination.”19 His radical thinking corresponded with the rise of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, which postulated that the manipulation of the public by the mass media—as a consciousness industry—made that public passive and its experience, regressive.20 Random Access (fig. 17) consisted of audiotapes that were unspooled and attached to a wall. (The 1975 version of this work is installed on a panel; see plate 18.) Using the play head taken from a tape recorder, viewers could produce their own audio output from the tapes. The intensity and sequence of such compositions were determined by, and depended on, the creative capacity of the viewer. Similarly, Record Schaschlik, of 1963

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FIGURE 18 Nam June Paik, Manfred Montwé, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, 1963, Visitor at “Record Schaschlik,” 1963 (2004) G 1003/3. Photograph © Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien © Manfred Montwé © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

(fig. 18), offered participants the opportunity to play the music recorded on a tower of vinyl records—at random or in any sequence they chose—using the stylus of a phonograph cartridge. Random Access might be seen as a forerunner to later digital information-retrieval technologies, whereas Record Schaschlik might be considered a predecessor of the mixing decks known from DJ and clubbing culture. Random Access and Record Schaschlick, which represent Paik’s ambition to seek new ways to retrieve information, exemplify his vision for the arts: Human beings have not really learned how to structure time-based information in recording and retrieval very well, because it is new. No one says that the Encyclopedia Britannica is boring . . . because you can go to any page of the encyclopedia, to A or B or C or M or X, whereas when you watch videotapes or television, you have to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G. While the comparison is simple, the difference is very big . . . until electronic information conquers the random access problem.21

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Paik wanted to reshape ideas about participation, indeterminism, and chance, impatient at the limitations on sequential access dictated by such media as video and television: “indeterminism and variability is the very underdeveloped parameter in optical art, although this has been the central problem in music for the last 10 years, (just as parameter sex is very underdeveloped in music, as opposed to literature and optical art.)”22 Record Schaschlik visualizes not only the randomness of its output but also its inner workings. (Most technology-based art conceals its playback mechanism.) In Random Access Paik, by “thinking outside the box,” as Jon Ippolito puts it, creatively exposes the innards of a record player and delivers to the participant a hands-on experience of what a record player “feels” like.23 What impact does the viewer’s inability now to participate in these artworks in the museum have on the way they are perceived? Museums often present them as deactivated, like relics. Associated with religious cults, relics often serve as memorials to departed saints.24 They can be parts of the once-living body of a saint, venerated for the power attributed to them. Props and leftovers that are considered relics—performative objects—are analogous to the relics revered by religious cults in that both find their way into vitrines and occupy pedestals in museums (or shrines). But not all props and leftovers become relics, nor are all relics derived from performance. David Lowenthal, ascribing to relics a “felt remoteness,” posits that it is precisely “their lack of consequence for the present that lends preserved things much of their charm”—a dynamic exemplified by Paik’s deactivated works.25 This shift from “object used in a performance” to “object as relic” links performance and performative objects, deriving their association from the conceptual proximity of media artworks and performance and performing arts, which have a common time-based nature and in Paik’s works are linked by musicological roots. Performative objects that cease to perform and become detached from their original context, whether in ritual or in performance (certain ethnographic objects are examples), become fetishes, objects deprived of their context, meaning, and use, in a process that takes them out of time, in effect stopping time, and defines them as static.26 The institutional preoccupation with the future of these objects leads to their removal from the participatory realm in museum displays and from the threat of destruction posed by viewers’ participation. But by removing them, the museum denies the function the objects were meant to have in the artwork. In a museum setting Magnet TV maintains its semi-active appearance even without the element of participation, but Random Access in the museum lacks an essential material and conceptual element—the random actions of the viewer. Thus deprived, Random Access—so clearly reliant on chance and indeterminism—becomes something different: a document of past performance. Moreover, because a media artwork can be switched on or off—an act that renders it intermittent and radicalizes time—its identity comes into question. The “switched off ” status of media installations is a subject of much interest in the debate over the sustainability and continuity of artworks. Jochen Saueracker’s reconstruction of Paik’s Random Access—for the exhibition titled The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, at Schunck, a museum in the

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cultural center at Heerlen, the Netherlands (September 3–November 28, 2010)— suggests however, that an artwork that has been deactivated, “switched off,” can be revived. Saueracker’s reconstruction of that work allowed viewers to interact with it in the spirit Paik intended when he made Random Access in 1963.27 The copy, although it gives viewers a more or less “authentic” experience of the work, nonetheless raises questions about the appropriateness of reconstructions whose status is linked to the deactivated works even though they also show a tendency to establish their own identity and lead their own life, independent of the deactivated original.28

T H E A RT W O R K ’ S A D A P TAT I O N T O S P A C E

Can spatial circumstances dictate change? TV Garden’s temporary displays, for instance, look strikingly different. In the Whitney Museum (1982) the work was installed in an enclosed space; in the Guggenheim (2000) it was arranged around the ramp of the museum’s rotunda. At the Kunsthalle Bremen (1999–2000) viewers took in the installation from an elevated platform that overlooked the garden, whereas the Charleroi version in Belgium (1983) was enclosed in a quasi pyramidal structure that visitors climbed in order to view the work.29 Further, of the three museums that acquired TV Garden for their collections (Guggenheim Museum, New York; K21 Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf; and Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin), at least one did not necessarily install it permanently, varying the display according to different exhibition concepts. For example, the Guggenheim, which in 2000 installed the work around the rotunda, in 2003 exhibited it in an enclosed space. The spatial arrangement of Moon Is the Oldest TV has also shifted considerably in different venues—from a linear version in one of its early exhibitions (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1976) to an expanded pile of monitors in a side room of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1993). Similarly, green plants became integral to Arche Noah only in 1992—three years after Paik conceived the work—when the artist had his assistant add them to the installation for its exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Site-specific and financial issues were determining factors in the production of TV Clock in twelve- and twenty-four-monitor (color and blackand-white) versions.30 Conceptual and economical factors identified by the exhibiting institution (often by the curator) dictate the changes in the space where an artwork is displayed. According to Paik: “The video curators in the next and subsequent generations will re-interpret and install them [the works] every time new in their anpassendes [adaptive] Place.”31 In conceiving the context and developing the concept of an exhibition, curators and conservators—along with the artist and his assistants—shape the spatial presentation of multimedia installations. Museums often consult documentation of earlier exhibitions of a work before deciding on site-specific adaptations. And the documentation of their display of the work shapes future installations; the cycle ends where it began.32 Once again, the archive is both the starting point and the destination.

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U P G R A D I N G D I S P L AY A N D P L AY B A C K F O R M AT S

Upgrading display and playback equipment and data formats constitutes an extrinsic change, an intentional decision by the artist, curator, or conservator or a combination of the three. Although the concept of both Zen for Film and Moon Is the Oldest TV changed when, in the former, analogue film, with which viewers could interact, and, in the latter, a manipulation of a TV set were replaced by video, digitization does not necessarily result in a conceptual shift. If the playback equipment is concealed and the digitized data serve only to produce visual content, neither the migration of the data to new formats nor the updating of equipment affects the viewer’s perception of an artwork.33 Wall labels rarely explicate these processes; rather, they take place backstage and are concealed from the viewer. Although digitizing analogue material can affect the concept of a work (which is based on what one knows about the installation rather than on what one perceives), this was not the case for Arche Noah. The laser disc players originally used as playback equipment in the work were replaced by flash media players. As a rule, Paik’s early works used diverse video formats, such as 3/4-inch tape and U-matic cassettes. These were migrated in the 1990s to more reliable state-of-the-art laser discs. Here one might recall the certificate Carl Solway issued in the 1990s to address the difficulties some collectors had with the playback equipment of Paik’s installations, prone to become dysfunctional or obsolete: I, Nam June Paik, the artist of the above listed work, grant my permission for the owner of this work to make the following types of modifications to this work to maintain the continued operations of the work in the future days. I state that these modifications do not change the authenticity of this work as an original work by me. 1. Television sets may be replaced with newer model hardware, by the same or different manufacturer, with substantially the same television screen size. 2. Laser disc players may be replaced with newer models or newer technology to play the software. The software may be converted to be compatible with any new technology. 3. Any supporting interior or exterior framework for the television sets may be modified, or re-fabricated, as required, to accommodate a replacement television set or sets, provided that the modification of framework does not substantially alter the visual design intention of the work. 4. If a television set is replaced in work where the design intention requires matching identical screen size and cabinet appearance, then the replacement of one such television with a model of different dimension or appearance requires the replacement of all identical matching sets.34

Thus, Solway and Paik authorized the modification of works involving data formats likely to become obsolete. The idea conveyed in this certificate is most striking, for it attempts to offer the generic solution to a problem afflicting a large number of Paik’s

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installations. Although allowing the collector to decide based on subjective judgment would seem to invite a host of problems, the document can also be read as freeing artworks from certain physical requirements or prescribed instrumentation. Not all replacements of outmoded and unusable playback equipment that Solway’s document allowed when a work like Paik’s Zen for Film was to be reinstalled are straightforward. In the early 2000s Bruce Nauman agreed to a digitization (and subsequent playback from a DVD) of his work Art Make-Up, of 1976, which had been shot initially on 16mm film.35 Nauman, when migrating his film to the newer format, recorded the sound of a film projector and added it as the soundtrack to his digitized visuals, explaining: “No sound is also different—silent projection—and because it is a reproduction of the original rather than the original, it’s an odd thing to think about.”36 Nauman, by adding the recorded sound of a film projector, draws attention to what is lost with digitization and underscores the conceptual importance of the original playback equipment, making his piece a reflexive meditation on remediation. At the time of this writing, none of Paik’s works is displayed with its initial playback equipment in functional condition. All of Paik’s installations in the ZKM collection have been upgraded to digital display formats, and other museums are exploring reliable solutions for future presentations of his work. In 2013 conservators at MoMA, for example, upgraded the playback equipment of Paik’s 1993 installation Untitled (Piano). That equipment, which had been upgraded previously from the U-Matic format to laser disc with the artist’s consent, fulfills an important role in the visual apprehension of the work. Decisions to upgrade formats are more difficult to make when the artist is not present to allow the change (even Solway’s certificate seems less authoritative than anything Paik himself might have said)—especially when the playback apparatus, far from being hidden, puts both the problem and itself on display.

B E YO N D T H E L I M I T S ? T H E A RT W O R K ’ S F U RT H E R D E V E L O P M E N T

In addition to necessary changes in the format of Paik’s media installations, these works also have the potential for further development. This development can entail a new artwork, in which Paik takes up once again creative ideas he had expressed in previously realized works. The artworks that evolve in this process often reflect Paik’s ongoing reworking and reshaping of the concepts of the earlier works. As a result, later works can resemble earlier works—but they do not necessarily have to. A very close resemblance among works might lead us to describe them as a series (the series of works based on the Buddha or Rodin’s Thinker facing a monitor, for example). In these instances, the artist continues to develop the concept of a work or works after realizing a prototype and releasing it into the world. Virtually every one of Paik’s works quotes or references an earlier work from his oeuvre. TV Garden, first exhibited in 1974 as TV Sea—an installation designed to present the video Global Groove on multiple screens—later became a techno-organic garden. The plant

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FIGURE 19 Nam June Paik, TV Clock (1989). Installation view at the exhibition The Worlds of Nam June Paik, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 11–April 26, 2000. Photograph by David Heald © SRGF, NY © 2016 Nam June Paik Estate.

arrangement incorporated into Arche Noah in 1992 can be seen as an adaptation of the techno-ecological garden from TV Garden.37 Similarly, Global Groove, the classic example of early video art (first produced in 1973 in cooperation with John J. Godfrey), was remodeled and deployed numerous times in such diverse installations as TV Garden and Global Groove 2004, created for the eponymous 2004 exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Paik continually reinvented and resurrected the works he had already realized, pushing the boundaries of his medium. He conceived TV Clock as a continuation of Zen for TV, and the construction of the two works followed a similar logic, with the thin line of light seen on the monitor of Zen for TV altered on the twelve monitors of TV Clock, so that the electronic beam that appears as a thin vertical line of light in Zen for TV, rotates slightly on its axis on each successive monitor of TV Clock, like a hand on a watch. The twenty-four-monitor version of TV Clock expanded the earlier version spatially and also reshaped and refined its concept (fig. 19). One instance of this larger version used twelve black-and-white monitors and twelve color, creating the impression of a contrast between day and night, hot and cold. TV Clock refuses to display the hour or minute of time,

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instead abstracting the mode of time in a series of stills that evoke a watch face, visualized poetically and minimally. Zen for TV—and Paik’s playful handling of its realization—spawned yet another adaptation: Untitled (TV Sculpture). Created in cooperation with the German artist Otto Piene in 1968, it features a monitor (Symphonic Model TPT 800), encrusted with silver-gray plastic pearls, that displays on-screen a diagonal line, achieved by turning the deflection yoke (a system of electric coils that produces a magnetic field for deflecting a beam of electrons in a picture tube) to a forty-five-degree angle, following the same principle that produced the image in the earlier Zen for TV and TV Clock. TV Buddha, of 1974 (plate 19), which again demonstrates Paik’s continual development of a concept, may be the ultimate example of an artwork’s potential for serial realization; it is one of the artist’s most evocative ensembles.38 Here, an antique statue of Buddha that gazes at its own live closed-circuit video image on a monitor represents symbolically the conflict between transcendence and technology. Paik initially conceived TV Buddha to fill a gap in one of his exhibitions at the Bonino Gallery. Kubota recounts that Paik loved to spend money on junk and antiquities on Canal Street—the Buddha being an example— while she worried about their precarious financial situation. TV Buddha, as it turned out, was the first of Paik’s closed-circuit installations to be sold and the first to enter a public collection, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1977.39 When the museum acquired it, the director asked that the piece be unique. Paik responded: “Needless to say, I will not make a multiple or something like that. . . . I have too many new ideas to devote my time for the repetition of an old work.”40 In the event, TV Buddha spawned perhaps the largest series of works in Paik’s oeuvre. In one early instance, Paik’s contribution to the Project ’74 exhibition in Cologne, the artist himself took the place of the statue. TV Buddha also spawned TV Rodin (1976–78), where the Buddha was replaced by a miniature statue of Rodin’s Thinker—an idea that reappeared later as a tiny Rodin sitting atop a Sony Watchman as a part of the outdoor ensemble Something Pacific (1986). Another extension of the concept was the minimalist ensemble Buddha (1989, ZKM collection), an installation that has neither the monitor nor the video image and instead features the Buddha gazing at a burning candle placed in an empty monitor cabinet. More significant than these extrinsic alterations, however, is the Buddha itself: no longer an antique statue, it is instead Paik’s own sculptural work.41 In light of his performance in Project ’74 in Cologne, this substitution might lead one to conclude that Paik not only made, but also embodied, the Buddha.

B R O A D E N I N G H O R I Z O N S BY A C C E P T I N G C H A N G E

The changeability of Paik’s multimedia artworks, expressed in their many forms, challenges common assumptions about the singular object (or sequence of performances) and broadens our understanding of the identity of these works. How, then, does changeability—the potential to change—contribute to the conception of such artworks as Zen for Film?

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First, changeability can ensure an artwork’s continued existence. But not all change is good, nor is survival desirable if to survive, the object becomes something else, if change alters a work’s identity. Second, instead of focusing on the number of changes an artwork has experienced (or on the kind of changes, an issue addressed in this chapter), we could look at the degree of change permissible in a work, contingent on the work’s open or autographic character, and determined by the behavior of its components (playback and display equipment, its sculptural value and the value of other non-technological sculptural elements, the ratio between the exchangeable and fixed elements, its relation to space and to the viewer’s involvement, and so forth). In this sense, and independent of its form, the degree of permissible change in Zen for Film is greater than that in TV Clock, whereas that in Arche Noah would be less than that in TV Garden. We can also ask about the degree of permissible change in the components of installations. Hypothetically, at least, the strip of film in Zen for Film has a greater permissible degree of change than the projection apparatus used to show it. Third, changeability enables us to step back and examine artworks outside the conventions of conservation and the paradigm of variability, encouraging us to reflect not only on the ontological level—what the works are—but also on the culture and context of conservation and curation. These cultures determine how artworks are shaped, and also shape the consensus among custodians (conservators and curators) on the degree of change permissible in them. Zen for Film is an analogue film projection, a relic of a 16mm film reel, an “object” in the form of a film leader from the Fluxus kit, and a digital projection. Each of these elements has the same title, yet each is distinct. Whereas the film leader for the Fluxkit must have been made with the consent of the artist—and in response to Maciunas’s policy of distributing Fluxus editions—the display of the film reel as a relic and the work’s digital projection were affected by (historical) exhibition practices. Hypothetically, the film reel and the strip of film could both still be projected, but in fact they never are. Are the film reel, the analogue projection, and the digitized variant “parts” of the work? Or are they distinct and separate works? Apart from any autonomy they might have acquired as a result of historical practice, I would argue that they are material evidence of the changeability of Zen for Film—the work, by its very nature, welcomes change. In reciprocal dynamics, the catalyst for change can be sought in the artwork’s transformation and in the cumulative evidence of historical practice. Changeability, which depends on cultural context and values that are widely accepted, undergoes constant critical evaluation. From the perspective of the culture of conservation—which seems to differ from that of the culture of curating in accepting change—the display of Zen for Film as a digital projection is problematic. If Paik were around to approve the digital projection—and it would be no surprise if he did, given his welcoming attitude toward new technologies—wouldn’t conservators have to accept his decision as an expression of his intent? (Fluxfilm Anthology, which includes not only Zen for Film

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but also other filmic works that once emphasized the specificity of that medium, now enjoy ongoing life in digital form.) Why do so many digital film projections in galleries show medium-specific filmic artworks?42 Decisions made by curators or conservators depend on context. Some may accept the adaptation of TV Clock, Moon Is the Oldest TV, Arche Noah, and TV Garden to various spatial conditions and others may reject it. Similarly, the judicious upgrading of equipment depends on knowledge and values that allow migration and emulation in some cases but not in others. But at one point weren’t liquid-crystal TV displays banned from the technological garden even though they were welcomed into TV Garden in Yongin? Wasn’t Arche Noah without plants entirely different from Arche Noah with them?43 These changes became part of the historical record and changed these works. The dominant conservation culture did not support the changes, which were governed instead by some external logic—a different cultural approach, in Yongin, or economic conditions, in Karlsruhe. How to understand the relationship between the static, protected, museum-bound versions of works like Random Access, Magnet TV, and Record Schaschlik and the interactive installations they once were? It is again a matter of judgment—the acceptance or rejection of an embodied historical practice that does not prevent these works from remaining true instances of Random Access, Magnet TV, and Record Schaschlik. Saueracker’s reconstruction of these works aims to reconcile the viewer’s need to experience the work as intended and the institution’s, to preserve an authentic relic, difficult as it is to discern which approach should prevail. To be sure, given the dominant values of Western museological culture, the exhibition object cannot become a surrogate for an artwork. Still, in the course of my research, I encountered surrogates of Zen for Film that allowed me profound experiences of the work. I cannot help questioning the limits of conservability as dictated by what the field of conservation accepts and what it does not. In other words: What do we conceive as changeable, and what change violates common sense? Understanding artworks according to their changeability might lead those in the field of conservation to reconsider how their own decisions are necessarily contextual.

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6 TIME AND CONSERVATION For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past gnaws without ceasing, there is also no limit to its preservation.

Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides there, actual and acting. HENRI BERGSON

T O WA R D A C R I T I Q U E O F T I M E I N C O N S E RVAT I O N

To present and conserve multimedia installations requires an understanding of their relationship to time—not their position on a chronological timeline but their relation to time. Technology-based artworks and electronic media can manipulate time. Moreover, because of the heterogeneous materials of which they are made, they can be dismantled and their constituent parts dispersed and reassembled. For this reason these works can be thought of as cyclic and repeatable. Institutional display, conservation, and storage procedures add a further element of complexity. Many of these media, moreover, were conceived during the 1960s and 1970s, a time of cultural-technological changes and transformations: during these decades—the heyday of Fluxus—new forms of artistic expression, technology-based media, conceptual art, and performance arose. It became possible to re-perform, reproduce, repeat, record, and replay artworks. With the introduction of such possibilities, a new temporal awareness entered art and art making, and artists began to incorporate time in the structure of their artworks. Conservators and curators of multimedia installations who intervene in these art forms need to recognize the characteristics specific to them, including temporality. Although traditional conservation seems to consider time in relation to reversibility, restoration, and chronology, it is not clear whether these concepts can accommodate

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nontraditional artworks. Is there an alternative, nonsequential way of thinking about time that conservators and curators might find useful in dealing with these artworks? Although media artworks and installations undergo change for various reasons, traditional institutional thinking habitually regards one instance of an artwork (often the first) as more important or relevant than any other. The “original” (in this case, the restored) version of Paik’s Canopus is preferred to the version that was damaged. Similarly, curators would generally prefer to show the original canned film leader from Zen for Film. (Because it has to be preserved, however, they usually acquire a surrogate of the film for projection.) This preference applies to all artworks, but it seems especially relevant to media artworks and installations, which are susceptible to change during their disassembly and reassembly because of their heterogeneous elements and their heterotemporal character.1 Can a sole instance of a work of media art be called valid, and if so, under what conditions? One can assess change in an object only comparatively, by juxtaposing one instance of the object to another. Zen for Film, for example, has been a film projection and a Fluxus object (in the form of a film leader, both on a reel and as a short strip of film), and has been transferred to analogue and, later, to digital video projections, regardless of whether it was the right thing to do. Each realization is an ontologically distinct form of Zen for Film that has itself developed over time and can be subject to its own intrinsic, medium-specific changes. Yet were I to ask, narrowing the focus to Zen for Film as a film projection, which of the many realizations of the work in that medium is truthful (or real or original in traditional terms) and to be recovered by any means necessary, there could be no straightforward answer. Is one of the first performances of Zen for Film, in Maciunas’s Fluxhall in New York in 1964, more significant than its performance the following year, also in New York, at the Cinematheque, famously captured in Moore’s photograph? Should later museum instantiations of Zen for Film—re-executed according to institutional policies (and the available projection apparatus)—be assessed differently from their predecessors? The same questions can be asked about TV Garden. Is its first realization more significant than the many others that followed? If so, would that imply that TV Garden’s forerunner—TV Sea (1974)—is the most significant materialization of the work? (Considering its minimal form, reduced to TV sets only, without plants, that would be a peculiar conclusion.) Accepting the implication of TV Sea’s primacy would effectively devalue many of TV Garden’s later realizations, including those installed at documenta 6, at Kunsthalle Bremen, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at K21, and at Nam June Paik Art Center. The situation would differ little were we to prize, not the first, but a later instance of an artwork. The 2000 Guggenheim rotunda installation, for example, could be named the most significant realization of TV Garden, making it the yardstick by which to judge all other instances. The works mentioned in the preceding paragraphs for the most part follow the allographic logic of re-performance; like musical works, they are inherently changeable owing

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to the presence of a score or instructions and the possibility of multiple instantiations by different performers with different instruments—playback and display equipment, for instance. This logic does not apply to Arche Noah, however, which has a dual existence: as a conventional sculpture and an allographic entity (because its plants and TV sets are replaceable). Arche Noah has had a number of distinct materializations. Should the earliest of them be acknowledged as the “real” one and later re-executions, like the EnBW version, be dismissed? Such a line of thinking would make the earliest version of Weisses Haus, of 1989, preferable to the 1991 MultiMediale installation, during which Paik “performed” its authorization. The exercise would become more clearly futile were we to restore the Weisses Haus version of Arche Noah for the sake of its originality (that is, its closeness to the earliest instance of Arche Noah) and neglect its later development. The answers to all the questions about primacy and originality are entirely independent of either the artist’s intentions or those of his collaborators and fabricators, which can (but might not) determine the extent of an artwork’s changeability. Canopus, although it remained in its damaged state, did so, not necessarily because the artist—who did not anticipate the damage—intended that outcome but because the damaged state was understood as singular, apparently authentic, historical. Doing nothing is doing something; leaving the damage affirms the change and recalls the much-disputed principle of “minimal intervention” in the field of conservation. Is it legitimate to validate one particular instance of an artwork and devalue others? The concept of changeability suggests that it is not. I propose that all instances of an artwork that experiences change can be as significant as any previous materialization by which later change is measured. This understanding denies recognition to any specific instance of a work as “original” or “authentic “ because of its chronological position visà-vis other instances. Such a chronological hierarchy would reflect conventional thinking about time as a measurable spatial phenomenon. An artwork that is changeable occupies a universe of the “already realized” but also one of potential transformations. Understanding these transformations requires that an alternative be found to the conventional sequential conception of time—one that supplements the linearity inherent in decay and aging.2 The great number of reflections—in professional writing on the conservation of traditional and recent works on time in relation to the change of materials, meaning, and artists’ intention—signifies considerable interest in this topic.3 Yet none of these writings seems to examine the concept of time. The profession seems simply to have adopted, without much consideration, the conventional measurement of time and to have accepted uncritically the implicit linearity of decay that emerged as the discipline of conservation developed. I would go so far as to say that the field of conservation has overlooked the concept of time—even though the rationale for the field itself is the need to respond to time in relation to artworks and to conservation itself. Superficially, conservation seems a homogeneous field engaged in maintaining or mending objects. But the discipline is intrinsically complex, governed by the dichotomy

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between old and new, tangible and intangible, and theory and practice, including the knowledge sourced and developed by conservation.4 The boundaries between new and traditional conservation are difficult to define. Although some activities in the conservation of contemporary art and multimedia installations relate to specific innovative practices, traditional theory can reverberate in the field. And even though many multimedia works call, prima facie, for a particular practical and theoretical approach, that approach does not always involve the implementation of a new theoretical framework. In the conservation of both media installations and contemporary art, traditional conservation practices still reverberate. New conservation, understood as practices that engage recent art and artifacts, is not necessarily equivalent to a new theoretical engagement; however desirable that might be, it does not happen automatically. Moreover, despite the ubiquitous presence of multimedia works of art, the theoretical grounds for their conservation still have to be laid out. The influence of traditional conservation is also present in the nomenclature that describes the profession—the word restoration, for instance. Thus questions about the concept of time cannot possibly address one “conservation” or another, traditional or new, but must address the general respect for the “original,” attempts to limit change, and efforts to repair damage that to a great extent have defined the discipline. Aware of the risk of running roughshod over the emerging ideas of many fellow scholars, I use the word conservation in this general sense.

IMPLIED LINEARITY

The concepts of time that inform conservation have not been articulated clearly but are implicit in the rules and theories of traditional conservation. The efforts of conservators are often bound up with their own temporal awareness and with the cultural-social-political context. Conservators who emphasize the durability of an artistic outcome may take measures that subordinate ideas of causality that lie beyond artistic creation to mere precedence. It seems that they impose their own perspective regarding permanence and durability on the artistic process of creation, giving the ideals of conservation priority over those of the artist.5 This attitude, as Albert Albano has put it, is “an attempt . . . to permanently lock a work of art into a single moment of time” by imposing on it “our own concept of timelessness.”6 The attempt to “lock a work” can be explained in part by the Brandian separation of the time of creation from the “moment” when an observer recognizes in an artwork an interval of historical time, which, by imposing linearity, counters the open, processual character of many multimedia works (that is, their continuous becoming, a trait integral to Paik’s Arche Noah, for example, as is evident in its amendments).7 Similarly, Muñoz Viñas offers a critique of the term restoration, meaning the return of something to its original state.8 He cites the Oxford English Dictionary definition of it as a process of restoring something to an unimpaired condition.9

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The original state of a work of art is assumed to be its material condition if the history of a work is restricted to its physical history.10 But in conservation literature, the term original state has also referred to the concept of a work, as when the “purpose of restoration”— in the words of Jonathan Ashley-Smith—becomes “the conservation of an object so that it can be seen, or even used, in its original concept and original beauty.“11 Reconfirming the importance of arresting artworks in time to attain, or to define, their most preferable condition, Carol Stringari posits that when a museum purchases an installation, the artwork is “frozen” in that particular historical moment.12 The term freeze strategies expresses the traditional understanding of an artwork as “locked in time”; similarly, the formulation freeze-frame paradigm refers to the conservation of an artwork based on scientific analysis (and not on truths derived from phenomenological awareness and interpretation).13 The aim of restoring a work to a past condition was closely associated with the idea that that particular state was the one the artist intended. This idea prevailed largely because, as Steven Dykstra has put it, scientific techniques introduced to the conservation laboratory in the nineteenth century made it possible to analyze materials and thus distinguish between those the artist used originally and those added later.14 The “Cleaning Controversy” of 1947, a debate between those who wanted conservators to rely on verifiable scientific knowledge and those who favored a historical-humanistic approach to conservation, had a profound impact on Western conservation.15 The “intended” instance of a work and its “authentic condition” (meaning, as a rule, its material condition) are closely related.16 In traditional conservation the term authentic condition is associated with a sequential understanding of time: in the life of an artwork, events that occur earlier on the timeline appear to have a higher authentic value than those that occur later. Thus, authentic refers to the work in an early state, whereas original refers to the beginnings of an artwork or its conception. To understand the history of a work as a temporal progression along a sequential time line leads to peculiar situations that I have already mentioned (e.g., seeking the origin of TV Garden in TV Sea or privileging an early “condition” of Zen for Film over a subsequent one).17 According to that sequential logic, all of Paik’s TV set manipulations from his first solo exhibition in 1963 would have to be stamped as authentic and the evolution of those works (e.g., TV Clock, the autographic Zen for TV, and Moon Is the Oldest TV) as less so. The application of this logic has resulted in the radical cleaning of wall paintings and frescoes like those in the Sistine Chapel, numerous interventions in classical sculpture (like the Laocoön Group), and the stripping of colored varnishes and glazes from paintings (one of the reasons for the Cleaning Controversy). The conservator Helen Glanville says of this approach, “It is an imagined authentic past re-created by the restorer in the present.”18 In Conservation Treatment Methodology (2009), Barbara Appelbaum argues that the goal of conservation should be to capture, not the “original” of a work, but its “ideal state”—which is “defined by time, not by physical description.”19 To determine the ideal state of an object requires fixing that object to a specific historical moment and then

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deciding which physical state best corresponds with that moment. That the ideal state inheres in the past confirms once again conservation’s deep-rooted belief in sequentiality and a recoverable past. Susan M. Pearce maintains that what is preserved in archaeological conservation is a “version of the past.”20 She discloses conservation’s wish to recover the “true nature” of an object, whose removal destroys the material evidence of the archaeological site and obscures its relation to the object that, up to the moment of its excavation, had “encapsulated” the history of the site.21 Miriam Clavir, citing her field of study, the conservation of ethnographic collections, claims that the “authentic moment” in a culture’s history derives from the present value placed on objects from the past as discrete forms of evidence. Similarly, she contends that when ethnographic objects are preserved and displayed in a museum, the indigenous culture’s history is frozen in an ethnographic present, which posits the importance of the past “within a constructed, fixed period of time.”22 Isn’t this “freezing” of the history of an artwork the fate of too many objects, and not only the ethnographic? The concept of reversibility—another temporal issue in conservation and a muchcontested theory related to the paradigm of minimal intervention23—implicitly obeys the logic of sequential, linear time and simultaneously attempts to question it. It does this by positing a state to which an object can return if conservators employ materials and processes that are reversible. The impossibility of such a return in traditional and multimedia artworks reveals the paradox here. The concept of reversibility violates the principles of decay and aging (nothing can ever become younger) and exposes the absence of an appropriate concept of time. According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but they themselves are gone by.”24 Heidegger’s statement refers not only to time but also to the “world.” Even if it were possible to restore the object to its original condition (but it is not, as I have argued), we would not be able to restore its world, so it would always be different from “how” (rather than “what”) it was. Reversibility also refers to a chemical process used, for example, to extract a consolidating polymer from a treated material, contingent on the degree of solubility and reactivation of the polymer that permeated the substrate of the work. Even the most reversible materials, however, are not fully extractable from the treated object, and the process, once completed, is irreversible.25 Although the American Institute for Conservation and other professional ethical codes have removed the paradigm of reversibility from their permissible goals, it persists in current conservation approaches and appears in such expressions as “perfect reversibility,” even in relation to the presentation of conceptual art. The conservator Chris Caple prophesied that reversibility would become the mother of present-day ethical ideas.26 I am convinced that this paradigm underpins the decision to store the original supporting frame of Arche Noah, with the goal of returning it eventually to its previous form. “Consciously or unconsciously,” according to Glanville, “this is an attempt to turn back the clock, to return to the ‘original’ untainted state.”27

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A different (and admittedly more abstract) kind of reversibility can be found in the example of Viollet-le-Duc, the French restaurateur and father of stylistic restoration, who was responsible for the extensive restoration of French cathedrals in the nineteenth century.28 His approach to restoration was defined by interpretative freedom, mediated by respect for historical testimony (essential in his historicizing age) and the ongoing usefulness of a building such as a church (which allowed that some historical alteration might have been destroyed).29 In short, Viollet-le-Duc attempted to reinstate a condition that might never have existed and thus did not respect the decay and stratification of time intrinsic to architectural objects. His near-contemporary John Ruskin—a writer and a thinker rather than a doer like Viollet-le-Duc—opposed such an approach, denouncing any restoration that interfered with the objects of the past as “a lie from the beginning to the end.”30 Ruskin was convinced that historical buildings expressed the inherited values of past generations and thus were to be guarded.31 Was restoration—as Ruskin said—a lie? Certainly it might have been based on a misunderstanding of time as expressed in the fantasy of reversibility. The word restoration means to bring “back to the original place, again,” with an added sense of “undoing.” According to the German philosopher and Fluxus artist Bazon Brock: “History can exist only if we accept that the historical past is unique [einmalig] and cannot return, like every instant. One cannot fix it. There has never been the same man, the same church.”32 The conventional understanding of time is related to the Aristotelian idea of time as a line. Although the temporal irreversibility of decay and alteration can imply linearity, the concept of linear time is insufficient to encompass the complexity of multimedia installations in time. The wish to return to an “ideal” or “original condition” disregards “linear time,” whose progress is recorded chronologically, in instances of objects. Indeed, the impossibility of returning an object to its “original condition” is the very basis of reversibility. Why would we wish to return to something if we had not already lost it, as in Origen’s Garden of Eden?33 In the effort to restore objects, in other words, the understanding of time as linear is predicated on the notion of reversibility—and thus on a misinterpretation of the true nature of time: one cannot reverse entropy. I propose an alternative conception of time, one that supplements the understanding of the temporal irreversibility of decay and alteration. The key to acknowledging the changeability of multimedia artworks is to recognize the temporal equivalence of their instantiations. The freezing and refreezing of changeable artworks, according to the prevalent thinking of Western museum conservation culture and its values, reflects an understanding of time as progress, a succession of moments that in the end privileges one instance of an artwork over another. Progress in this context can be understood in relation to the technological and scientific advances that give conservators access to the newest methods for achieving the best result, bringing the object from the “past” (when it was in its “most precious” and “original” state) to its altered present reality. Rather than return an object to an earlier state, restoration/conservation applies contemporary values to it, in the process manufacturing historicity and actually producing something new.34

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To be fair, there have been efforts to acknowledge the multiplicity of the artwork’s occurrences in time. Against a fixed and unchanging perception of authenticity, Lowenthal, for instance, recognizes the historical palimpsest of built heritage and values its endurance through a sequence of changes rather than in an original state.35 Similarly, with reference to installation art, Vivian van Saaze concludes that authenticity does not involve a singular state but is constructed continuously during the lifetime of the artwork.36 These views define the dynamics of multimedia installations and refuse the traditional reduction of an artwork to a singular condition. In putting forward a different concept of time for conservation, I offer a theory of the temporal equivalence of the artworks’ multiple instantiations and relate them subsequently and irreversibly to the archive.

“MEASURABLE” TIME

Conservation engages deeply with measurability. The linear understanding of time originates in an inclination to measure objects physically and mathematically: conservators photograph, map, and measure objects in magnitudes, numbers, and units. And since the late nineteenth century, they have also undertaken chemical analysis; conservation has been built on a belief in the objectivity of science. When conservators prepare an installation for exhibition, they chart distances, draw maps, and even measure structures using geodetic methods. They know exactly where one element should be placed and how far it should be from another. They can document any changes and record them. How many of the same processes apply to time? How do conservators grasp time? True, its effects are visible in photographs taken during the life of a work. The animals of Arche Noah seem to be bright and colorful, the vessel shiny and new, in images from the Weisses Haus, whereas later photographs reveal them as somewhat faded. The images provide evidence of the change that Arche Noah experienced between 1989 and 2009. A conservator looking at them “grasps” time according to the twenty years on the calendar that separate the two photographs. In conservation, time—like space—is measured.37 Conservators can manipulate spatial relationships—displacing elements, relocating artworks, changing their dimensions—but time perplexes them. Common parlance for what appears to be the manipulation of time—phrases like “arresting time” or “turning back time” to the moment of an artwork’s conception or to its original condition—are misleading. That conservators use technology to artificially age objects by subjecting them to extreme climatic conditions also confirms the notion of measurable, quantifiable time. But the ability of conservation to measure space and spatial relations—an ability developed over decades and employing ever more sophisticated devices to capture, macroscopically and microscopically, the quantitative change in things in the physically graspable world—seems to have narrowed the profession’s preoccupation with time to the ordinary measuring of duration. Aristotelian in its linearity, conservation’s under-

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standing of time follows that of industrialized society, in which time is clock time, measuring, regulating, and standardizing labor and locomotion. Yet time is more than a sequence of moments measured by clock and calendar.38 In modern philosophical thinking, it is a fundamental mistake to identify measurable time with what time actually is. Time perceived by human beings is much more complex than the image of linear succession. Time as an index is expressed, represented, and articulated in diverse forms. The mechanical sequence of instances characteristic of the linear succession of moments, however, fails to embrace the organic continuity of time. I propose to supplement the conception of time based on entropy (the Second Law of Thermodynamics) and the irreversibility of aging and decay with another concept of duration. Recognizing that one aspect of time can be understood as linear (entropy), I also acknowledge other aspects, for example, that artworks, because they are human cultural products, involve time specific to human beings and to technology. That acknowledgment opens up the possibility of thinking about time as something other than a method of measurement that obscures the plurality—the iterations and reiterations—of the artworks it affects. Though I developed it by interacting with Paik's artworks, this concept has implications for all multimedia artworks (and perhaps also for traditional artworks such as painting and sculpture). It allows a venture into the theory of time as duration and heterotemporality. Henri Bergson’s analysis of time provides guidance in resolving conservation’s engagement with time.

B E R G S O N ’ S D U R AT I O N

The philosophical project of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) responded to a notion of time as an external, spatial surface phenomenon. He offered a corrective aimed at standardized public time, time as a homogeneous and measurable magnitude, a product of the expansion of railway systems that soon became dominant globally; indeed it still is.39 Bergson based his philosophical method on intuition, rather than the numerical measurement of time.40 In his view, time does not exist as a linear progression, marked by a succession of points, that begins in the past and stretches on into the future—a view of time that merely coincides with the steady tick of a clock hand or the movement of cinematographic apparatus. For Bergson this “homogeneous time” projected “time into space.”41 Rejecting such a homogeneous, conventional, spatial, numerical conception of time, Bergson argued for heterogeneous time, or durée: “succession without distinction”—time experienced as an immersive, indivisible, organic whole.42 Time is a multiplicity but not a sum; as a heterogeneity, it is a nonidentical plurality and a non-numerical multiplicity.43 Although Bergson gained access to it by intuition, Bergsonian time is not merely subjective, even though his concept of time is often reduced to subjective time. Instead, it is the structure of time itself, an idea that originated in duration but eventually encompassed another dimension, expressed in the formulation that the only subjectivity is time, nonchronological time, grasped in its foundation, to which we are internal.44

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A founding dualism of Bergson’s philosophy is at the heart of his critique of time: the clear distinction between pure duration (heterogeneous time) and time-as-space (homogeneous time). Space without duration represents a homogeneous, divisible, measurable quantity. Duration without numerical measure implies succession, but not spatial continuity. Bergson criticizes the modern, homogeneous time of magnitudes—the time of clocks (“translation machines”) and calendars—as a disciplinary instrument.45 He believed that science’s capacity to measure points on a line and simultaneities as starting and end points of movement had reduced time to a matter of space and numbers.46 The Bergsonian concept of time as duration applies to media installations as entities enduring in time, subject to a continuous, indivisible flux of change. I have critiqued the concept of time implicit in conservation’s theoretical underpinnings, especially the problem of the changeability of artworks and the view of time as a succession of instances. Bergson provides a solution and a different view of time: “No doubt, external things change, but their moments do not succeed (in the ordinary sense of the word) one another, except for a consciousness that keeps them in mind. . . . Although things do not endure as we do ourselves, nevertheless, there must be some incomprehensible reason why phenomena are seen to succeed one another instead of being set out all at once.”47 The topology of time for Bergson was neither linear (as in Aristotle), nor theological, nor cyclical (as in agrarian societies). Bergson first conceived time as durée to critique the spatial, fragmented time of the natural sciences. Bergsonian durée is the movement of time itself, the permanent, unstoppable changing of things. The concept of duration is based on the idea that the present involves a past and anticipates a future—an idea that I propose to apply to conservation, one that contradicts the fragmentation of an object’s identity into externally related moments. Although I base my argument mainly on Bergsonian theory, it is difficult today to discuss Bergson without citing his most significant interpreter, Gilles Deleuze. In fact, Bergsonism, as I understand it, is now virtually inseparable from Deleuze’s contribution. His expansion of Bergson’s dualism of virtuality and actuality resonates in my thinking on the archive. Deleuze, in his book Bergsonism (1966), provides insight into Bergson’s method and lays out his own ideas about the ontology of things. Assuming that “things must, of necessity, endure in their own way,” Deleuze confirms Bergson’s assertion that “we do not endure alone, external objects, it seems, endure as we do.”48 Deleuze bases his statement on Bergson’s argument that duration was defined from the beginning as multiplicity, and qualities exist in things no less than they do in consciousness.49 Bergson’s assumption of duration outside the “self ” (which Deleuze elaborates) introduces a dimension that can have further consequences for our “object.” Those consequences include a horizon of time that inheres in the subject (psychological time) as well as a time that enables objects and artworks to have their own duration, so that they cease to be “screens that denature duration”50—a form of exteriority—and become temporal multiplicities on their own.

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A

B

A’

B’

A”

B”

S

P

FIGURE 20 Diagram, drawn by Hanna B. Hölling after Bergson’s cone of memory, illustrating the coexistence of temporalities in the present. From the chapter titled “On the Survival of Images,” in Matter and Memory, by Henri Bergson (New York, 2005), fig 5.

Deleuze’s analysis of Bergson’s visualization of the contemporaneity of the past as a cone (fig. 20) is also relevant to understanding time in the conservation of multimedia installations.51 The cone is divided into three sections—AB, A′B′, and A″B″—symbolizing the coexistence of all layers of the past with the present, S. The past AB coexists with the present S, including sections A′B′and A″B″. The sections are virtual, symbolically representing the distance of the past from the present yet comprehending the entire past rather than its particular elements. The identity of duration is presented as an ever-growing image of the past in the present and “the conservation and preservation of the past and the present.”52 Every successive moment contracts and is condensed with the former and, simultaneously, “always contains, over and above the preceding one, the memory the latter has left it.”53 According to Deleuze: We are too accustomed of thinking in terms of the “present.” We believe that a present is only past when it is replaced by another present. Nevertheless, let us stop and reflect for a moment: How would a new present come about if the old present did not pass at the same moment as it is present? How would any present whatsoever pass, if it were not past at the same time as present? The past would never be constituted if it had not been constituted first of all, at the same time as it was present. There is here, as it were, a fundamental position of time and also the most profound paradox of memory: The past is “contemporaneous” with the present that has been. . . . The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements that coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass.54

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So in their contemporaneity, the past and the present that has been coexist, but the past also preserves itself endlessly within itself, whereas the present passes. In this line of thought, could an artwork’s present preserve all its pasts? There is common ground between the Deleuzian notion of actuality and virtuality (both of which are real) and Bergsonian dualism. Deleuze, however, conceives of the past as preserved but no longer acting, or acting indirectly. Bergson speaks instead of the acting, abiding, actual past: “Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged to its present, and abides there, actual and acting. How otherwise could we understand that it passes through distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its age—in short, that it has a history?”55 This duration of the past is essential to rethinking the notion of time in conservation, which is preoccupied with the search for the past authentic condition of an artwork as the one that has ceased to be present. The past, for Bergson, exists alongside the present— a concept distinct from conventional thinking about the past, present, and future as separate realms.56 Duration is the survival of the past, an ever-accumulating ontological memory that is wholly, automatically, and ceaselessly preserved. The duration of the current moment does not depose the moment that came before. Following the Bergsonian conception of time and its Deleuzian interpretation, I propose that in changeable multimedia works of art, the present is the survival of the past. Rather than being virtual, the past is actualized in the present, which is all we are able to analyze from our temporal perspective.57 Duration is key to understanding the continuity of artworks and essential to divorcing conservation from its traditional views of time. It is also relevant to the archive. Instead of positing a return to the past as the most justifiable goal of conservation, the Bergsonian concept of duration offers a way to reexamine the assumptions of the profession. One possible consequence of applying durée to works characterized by change is that their changeability can exist unrestricted in a continuum of duration; in other words, each instantiation of a changeable artwork preserves previous versions. To explain how an artworks’ changeability can be understood to exist in a continuum of previous and future manifestations, we need to change the focus briefly from the ontology of time to phenomenology, the philosophy of consciousness as dependent on subject. The continuum of duration encompasses what might be defined as retentions and protentions. The idea of retention and protention is based on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporality, in which he rejects an understanding of the experience of the world as a series of unconnected instances. Protention (an anticipation of the next moment), though distinct from immediate experience, is retained in consciousness; it relates to the perception of the moment that has yet to be perceived. Continuity rests on the idea that each moment of protention becomes a retention (a perceptual act retained in consciousness) of the next. Retentions and protentions respond to an artwork’s former and future instantiations58 creating a conceptual realm of duration where the past is rendered present, insofar as it is actualized in this present. In such a framework, the changeability of artworks is not a

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passive concept related solely to the instances of artworks that have been. The vectors of the continuum of changeability point in both directions. Protentions might be conceived of as the openness of the artwork to future changeability. In these terms, potentiality, closely related to contingency, plays out in the archive. For now it suffices to say that in this metaphysical realm of an artwork’s destination, preservation continues without relaxation. From an ontological perspective, the past is thus preserved automatically. The traditional orientation of conservation to the past involves back-and-forth movements between abstract times or what is at best a misinterpretation of linearity—in the common sense, conservators “take care of the past” and “hand it on to the future.” If the past is contemporaneous with the present, then we do not need to preserve the past, as that phrase is commonly understood, but rather preserve the present, which is in fact the only given reality and the only reality to be preserved. Conservation could thus be defined as a process that determines how artworks change but does not prevent this change. If anything, conservation helps reduce the degree of changeability. Thus artworks—as objects that undergo transformation—abide in their present (and only) “condition,” which is constituted by their many different pasts. They are constructed by their “present” as much as by their “past conditions.” My view aligns with Muñoz Viñas’s argument that the only “authentic condition” we know is the current condition of the artwork.59 If he is right and if my conclusion—that artworks construct in the present a durational identity that “contains” many different pasts—is accepted, the result might be not only the abandonment of the search for authenticity somewhere in the remote past but also the movement of conservation away from attempts to manage change (measured by the former conditions of an artwork) to the intervention in the artwork’s temporality. In other words, conservation becomes a temporal intervention that changes and interprets objects by introducing ruptures, intervals, and intermissions into what is otherwise a continuum. Additionally, such a reorientation of conservation would end efforts to “recover the past” or “the original” or to “give back the authentic object”—all misguided approaches based on a misconception of time. This proposal to rethink time in conservation applies to both traditional art and multimedia works like Paik’s. Each intervention by a conservator transforms the work of art and is thus by no means neutral. (Neutrality underpins an objective approach in traditional conservation.) According to Brandi, conservation is a methodological recognition, the moment when the observer consciously recognizes an object as a work of art.60 In discussing human engagement with the past, Lowenthal holds that “every act of recognition alters what survives.”61 In his account, however, this alteration has a positive value: the past can be used fruitfully when it is “domesticated.” In other words, “To inherit is to transform.”62

M OT I O N A N D I N S TA N C E

The Bergsonian philosophy of time opens up an understanding of the multimedia artwork’s continuous existence in duration. Early photography’s struggle to depict the

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FIGURE 21 Étienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotograph, 1894. Gelatin silver print from glass negative, 16.3 × 20.2 cm (67 16 × 715 16 in.). Purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel and the Rogers Fund, 1987 (1987.1054). Photograph © The Metropolitan Musuem of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

continuum of motion (figs. 21 and 22) offers an illustration. The French scientist ÉtienneJules Marey (1830–1904), to capture photographically the motion of humans and animals, set up a single camera, fixing it in place, to take instantaneous exposures of movement.63 He reconstructed the movement of the subject he photographed by overlapping the instantaneous exposures sequentially on a single photographic plate, so that the image shows, not a series of stoppages in time, but motion spread across the plate. The British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), Marey’s contemporary, succeeded in a similar effort: to visualize motion for anatomical studies. He took his photographs with a number of cameras, producing a series of images of objects, animals, and humans in motion. Marey’s transcription of motion seems to affirm Bergson’s concept of durée, whereas Muybridge’s photographs represent time as a spatial dimension, constructed by capturing sequentially the fractured moments of individual chronological events. If we were to apply Marey’s vision of motion to change in multimedia installations, it might yield a continuum of change expressed in a sequence of documentary snapshots. As on Marey’s

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FIGURE 22 Eadweard Muybridge, Album on the decomposition of movement: “Animal Locomotion.” The Parrot Flying, 45 × 16.5 cm. (17 ¾ × 6½ in.) Inv. PHO1983–165(160–27). Repro Photo: Béatrice Hatala. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

photographic plate, the transition would take place in a ghostly overlapping of forms that merge with one another in an approximation of fluid motion, blurred in some fragments, distinct in others, and by no means separable. In contrast, Muybridge’s sequential chronophotographies, like the sequence of frames in a motion picture, are separate instants, removed from the arc of an action completed by the moving human or animal. Each individual image stands for itself, and although these images attempt to represent motion, they must each first be absorbed if they are to approximate continuity. Each image is, paradoxically, frozen, ready to be extracted and inserted in another series, somewhere else. Chronophotographic experiments can serve as a visual metaphor that makes evident the differences between the spatial and durational concepts of time and illuminates the continuum of changeability in artworks. Muybridge’s chronophotographs might be said to resemble photographs that record the artwork’s reconstruction in separate instances, each as a stoppage in time that contradicts the idea of an uninterrupted duration. This stoppage, to use a photographic analogy, becomes a snapshot of a continuum—a snapshot of an event that has not been completed and cannot appear as a whole. Thierry de Duve’s consideration of photographic snapshots can help explicate this concept: “In the snapshot, the present tense, as a hypothetical model of temporality, would annihilate itself through its splitting: always too early to see the event occur at the surface; always too late to witness its happening in reality.”64 Photography becomes, according to de Duve, an event that is hung on the wall. Because, as we have learned from Bergson, reality is made of things that are happening continuously and have a durational character, it is impossible to conceptualize it as a series of interruptions, singular nows. If we apply these insights to some of the practices of conservation, the captive moment

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can be seen as freezing the natural flux of time by producing another temporality for the artwork—a temporality of “frozen,” “captured” works, or works “turned back” to their “original state.” This petrifaction of the continuity of artworks can thus be seen as a metaphor for one of the most profound and far-reaching problems facing a conservator operating in a conventional temporal framework. The snapshot can also traditionalize otherwise dynamic works that evolve over time and are characterized by changeability. Often this traditionalization is effected in a documentary record in which photographs, graphs, and written testimony interrupt the continuum of multimedia works and make it available by placing the work, not on a wall, but in an archival register.

W H AT C O N S E RVAT I O N C A N L E A R N F R O M B E R G S O N

Conservation’s assumption that an artwork can have a singular instance—extricable from temporal continuity, discernible from all other instantiations, and assigned a higher or a lower value—is being replaced by the multiplicities of the artwork’s temporal existence expressed by changeability. This multiplicity complicates the notion of uniqueness related to the singular appearance of a work. Artworks are interventions in time;65 the attempt to return to this moment of intervention is necessarily impossible. An intervention in time can be repeated, yet it will always take place in another time. Any effort to restore accurately the conditions present when an intervention in time took place would fail because time does not stop; in Bergsonian terms, it is a pure continuity, a qualitative and multi-temporal dimension. As a consequence, conservation that follows sequential time can only moderate the process: it either restores the object (denying its temporal character) or remakes it (obliterating its material authenticity). Conservation based on the Bergsonian conception of durée does not fall into this paradox. The life of a multimedia work of art ceases to be a series of instances and becomes a mirror of the continuum of its transformation in duration. The locus and resource of a work’s durée is the archive, which serves conservation and which conservation simultaneously creates. Conservation partakes in an act of recognition of an artwork’s pasts as integral to its present; rather than recover the past, it adapts an artwork to the present. Moreover, in this understanding, the past ceases to be a remote thing, lying distant on a chronological scale, separated from us and foreign—so tempting to return to, so in need of restoration. Rather, the past is here, present and durational; it is—in the words of David Lowenthal—“resurrected into an ever-changing present.”66

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7 HETEROTEMPORALITIES Film Time, Video Time, and Paik Time

I think I understand time better than the video artists who came from painting-sculpture. . . . Music is the manipulation of time. . . . As painters understand abstract space, I understand abstract time. NAM JUNE PAIK

Paik knew that different understandings of time can be applied to different media and that the musicological roots of his own media art impose on those who attend to them— artists, viewers, curators, and conservators—a particular engagement with time. Writing to Rudolf Jährling about the artworks displayed in his Wuppertal exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, Paik remarks, “One must stress that this is neither painting nor sculpture, but a ‘time-art.’ ”1 To grasp time in media signifies a deep preoccupation with its specificity and the ways in which it is manipulated. Consequently, conservation must not only rethink how its own principles relate to time but must also consider the time that imbues objects and the time that is affected by them: media time. This is as important for conservation as it is for the presentation, curation, and, in a broader sense, the continuation of artworks. Bergsonian theory, which introduces a heterotemporal understanding of the existence of time and criticizes sequential, spatial time—the notion of time that multimedia artworks also question implicitly by incorporating video and film—provides the basis for venturing into the world of artworks that are enfolded in the individual temporalities of the heterogeneous components that constitute them. If we acknowledge the heterotemporal existence of an object, we can approach artworks with a deeper awareness of their specific existence in time. Conservation’s underestimation of the value of time reflects its lack of interest in the temporal turn that art took in the 1960s and 1970s. The artists who eagerly embraced technology in the 1960s gave rise to forms of artistic expression that contravened

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conventional understandings of temporality. That decade, marked by change and transformation and a different apprehension of time, developed new technologies, innovative collaborations of artists and engineers, visions of globalism, and milestones in art criticism.2 According to the critic and curator Anne-Marie Duguet, “Time emerged [in the 1960s] not only as a recurrent theme but also as a constituent parameter of the very nature of an art work.”3 If these artworks brought time to the fore, why did conservation pay it so little heed? Media art makes us think about time in unaccustomed ways. Media time is not the time expressed in the process of change that affects all artworks and is discussed in a great number of conservation studies in the visual arts. Time has a much more profound relationship with multimedia works of art. Video and film are essentially about processing time. In these media—from analogue film to contemporary digital devices, with their diverse playback systems—time is recorded, converted, rewound, forwarded, arrested, condensed, compressed, and unfolded; time is stretched and expanded. Time becomes an essentially tangible dimension that can be manipulated. Like no other art form in history, media art refers to—and is embedded in—the technological possibilities of the time in which it originated. Unlike a painting or sculpture, in which the tool and the medium remain timeless (at least to a degree, even if the medium is culturally and historically specific within a long durée), the media apparatus always refers to its own time and, seen from a present perspective, imposes a shift in perception from now to then. This chapter proposes a deeper consideration of “object time,” one that aligns with the dicta that the work of art conditions the conservation and not vice versa, and that, according to Brandi, the moment of conservation is the methodological moment when a work is recognized as a work of art.

C I N E M AT I C T I M E

That manipulable time is an essential component of the cinematic medium becomes clear in Paik’s Zen for Film. The different modes of thinking about time in film (and cinema) are related to the film moving through the projector and to the spectator’s immersion in a dimension of time—recorded time and temporalities—different from his or her own time. The time of the film is bound to cinematic time, imposing a relationship between the apparatus and the spectacle of viewing. Cinematic time makes it possible to enter other temporalities and even to overcome human finitude—to the extent that immortality inheres in the recording of time on film. And cinematic time introduced the possibility of archiving time. Whereas a sense of “pastness” permeates photography, the cinema involves at least two temporalities: that of the spectator and the “event” he or she experiences (the spectatorial experience of the filmic flow) and that of the historical actuality of images made at a particular historical moment. Both the technology and narrative of film thus become dated—its images, like still photographic images, bear witness to

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the moment when they were recorded. As the American film theorist Mary Ann Doane notes, cinema and photography are practices with epistemological underpinnings.4 Cinema is a further development of photography, which arrests a moment with every click of the shutter. This moment is an indexical sign of the present, a promise of the “rematerialization of time.”5 Doane underlines the impact of photography on the perception of the “moment” as historically decisive. She maintains that the “snapping of the camera shares with . . . other modern technologies the drive to condense time, the inspiration for instantaneity.”6 The photographic moment is free of any hierarchical subordinations; it is indeterminate—unlike film, with its clear sequential structure. As I have suggested, “capturing the moment” in photography becomes complicated when we conceive of reality as a continuum (as in the Bergsonian idea of real time as indivisible). If reality, rather than consisting of moments, is the “continuous happenings of things” (in the words of Thierry de Duve), capturing the moment in photography is impossible, and the attempt to do so produces only a frozen gestalt and petrified versions of an otherwise fluid continuum.7 Photography suggests not only that time has indeed paused, that it has stopped, but also that the uniqueness of the photographed event might be transcended— because photography can repeat what could never be existentially repeated.8 In Camera Lucida, one of the most lovingly but also ambiguously formulated meditations on photography, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes calls the camera a “clock for seeing.” He also notes the noise of the mechanical shutter of traditional photography—which might be compared to that of Zen for Film, with its sound of clattering mechanics. The transition from photographic time to cinematic time is represented by the invention of chronophotography—literally the photography of time—by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Marey’s obsessive engagement with capturing the motion of bodies in time was driven by the desire to understand the dimension of time inaccessible to the human eye—psychological time. Only after coming into contact with Muybridge, however—his British contemporary who in 1878 published in a French journal a series of photographs of bodies in motion taken by multiple cameras—did Marey devise the technique so important to the development of film and cinema. His dream of the infinite divisibility of a continuum pointed to the desire for a lossless representation of time. These frozen instances would reduce movement and duration to the immobilities Bergson criticized in his assessment of cinematography. Paradoxically, the obsession with instantaneity and the present moment in the photography of meticulously traced movement generated a desire for archivability, in which photography became “the past of the present.”9 This atomization of time became embodied in the materiality of film. Individual frames of film—photograms—represent instants of time.10 The Lumière brothers presented the first cinematograph to the public in 1895. It improved on the principles of chronophotography, introducing the movement of images by means of perforations in the film stock and a tooth–and-claw mechanism in the projector, thus enabling the machine to reproduce movement and create an illusion of motion by projecting a series

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of static photograms at a certain speed. The afterimage, the basis of perceived motion in cinema, is produced because the retina retains the impression of an object for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared—each successive photogram persisting and blending with the one that precedes it so that they produce an illusion of motion.11 (This longstanding theory has been superseded by theories of cognitive psychology concerning the critical threshold beyond which the human eye is incapable of perceiving difference.) Bergson posed ontological questions relating to cinematic time. He saw early cinema as an inheritor of homogeneous, empty time, which (to reiterate) was a product of the mechanical clock, telegraph, and railway. Bergson discussed how the human intellect perceives change or motion as an instant, in a single image. The ceaseless flux of reality is captured in individual “snapshots,” a series of frozen images. The freezing of the continuous changes of form and the transitions become manifest in Bergson’s description of the cinematograph. The analogy between human perception, characterized by fluidity, and the cinematograph, which substitutes flickering images for that fluidity, derived from the human ability (or inability) to perceive movement and duration in a series of instances—a kind of decomposition of duration, its dissection into moments of time. Bergson employed this analogy in his critique of time, positing that the illusion of movement would be achieved by the camera, first breaking down movement into a series of singular frames and then later, restoring movement by means of the projecting apparatus. Cinematic movement thus is not a real, fluid motion but an accumulation of the transitions between static states, so that just as movement cannot be reconstituted out of immobilities, the time of cinema cannot be real. Admittedly, Bergson based his critique on cinema in its infancy, and Deleuze criticized him for doing so, saying that because of his approach, he focused on the intermittent mechanics of the apparatus rather than the perceptual continuity of the moving image. Deleuze opposed Bergson’s failure to recognize how cinema could represent duration. Convinced that it was impossible to see singular photograms, Deleuze related continuity to the spectator’s ability to perceive projected images as a continuum.12 In Paik’s Zen for Film, does the spectator encounter a sequence of instances or a continuous movement? Time in Zen for Film is first processed by the cinematic apparatus, which moves the film through the projector’s mechanism in a sequence of discrete images. Given that process, it would be reasonable to expect cinematic time to become tangible, imprinted in instances of presents-that-have-been and simultaneously are not yet. Yet this temporal relationship in Zen for Film is somehow peculiar; the relationship conveys a skewed message. The film leader is empty, and the frames—time frames—are nonexistent. Paik’s blank film is not, as has often been asserted, an unexposed film. Rather, it is a clear film leader, conveying no message, establishing no spatial intervals, and leaving no temporal record in a cinematic sense. According to Jud Yalkut, the clear film stock Paik used was ordinarily a means to color existing (exposed) films by superimposing the tinted leader over the sections of film to be colored.13 On Paik’s film nothing has been stopped, no instances have been recorded, no photograms or other pictorial

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presence exists. Because no motion can be resurrected from the continuous flow of frozen instances under stereoscopic illumination—motion exists only in the spools pulling the transparent leader through the projector—any discussion of movement and duration reduced to immobilities is beside the point. Zen for Film in effect suspends Bergson’s view of cinema as a substitution for the fluidity of real motion and an illusion of ceaseless durational flux. Although the cinematic rhythm is still present in the projector’s blinking radiance, that ray illuminates no rectangular frame on the film. If there are no (time) frames and singular instances, nothing to trip up the contemplation of pure duration, Zen for Film becomes a subtle argument for the cinematic duration. Because of the lack of photograms, Paik allegorizes the temporal continuum of the filmic medium and provides an ultimate token for a Deleuzian argument of cinema as continuity. Paradoxically, at the same time, the film’s lack of content proves the impossibility of representing pure duration. If photography and the photogram embalm time as the record of a fraction of time, then Zen for Film escapes this specificity. But what does it mean that Paik’s film has no relation to any recorded image, has no discernible content, no reference? This question needs to be answered to understand Zen for Film and the temporality it confronts us with. The French film critic and theorist André Bazin, in his essay Ontology, identifies the origins of art in the human drive to overcome death and defines photography as a successful preserving gesture against the destructive flow of time.14 In Barthes’s Camera Lucida death is a recurring motif evoked by the image in its attempt to preserve life. Laura Mulvey takes up this idea in Death 24× a Second, finding new ways to frame the relation of film to time. She proposes to define cinema as “death 24 times a second,” basing that definition on Godard’s conviction that a photograph freezes reality in its transition from animate to inanimate, from life to death, and film completes the process by reanimating static frames.15 If a frame is a static image with a deathly aspect, Paik’s empty leader escapes that condition by entering the realm of nonrepresentability, distancing itself from the flicker film of the 1960s and its relation to stillness and movement, the frame and the projector. Because there is no static frame in Zen for Film, no image whatsoever, the film’s actuality is sustained. Paik’s film transcends the cinematic death drive, the 24-times-a-second sequence of frozen temporalities, and successfully circumvents the condition of the film medium in its specific performance. This is not to say, however, that Paik’s work is unrelated to finitude (as distinct from death), which, in effect, corresponds to the marks left by the projector. Moreover, Zen for Film does not manage to escape another temporality, which crystallizes gradually in the mechanical impact of its running time: the intervals of projection. Time persistently imprints its traces on the surface of the celluloid, and affects the cyclical intervals of the projection that runs in an endless loop, apparently seamless. This is the feature that distinguishes analogue from digital, especially in Zen for Film: the accumulated “analogue” residue on the celluloid (dirt, particles, scratches) leads ultimately to the obliteration of the

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content of the leader. But here, the residue itself, the index of obliteration, becomes the visual content. What does it mean to have all these marks accumulate on the film? Is time—the time of the machine—being inscribed, compressed, concentrated on the film’s surface? An object marked by a person—a line on a paper, for instance—transcends its mere “objectness” and enters another realm of existence. In analogue film, a machine makes the mark. In Zen for Film this mechanical inscription of time, the imprinting by the apparatus on the transparent film leader, takes the artwork into another realm. Moreover, the possibility of replacing the film offers another way to circumvent the death drive—by opening up a new surface on which to repeat the inscription of time. Every replacement of the film leader initiates a new period of “usage.” A looped variant of Zen for Film made subsequent to the linear version that played from a spool would accumulate marks faster than the “linear” version. The decision of the curators or conservators to replace the film is dictated by the extent of its usage. Is there a moment when the film has been used sufficiently and is ready to be replaced? When does the imprinting of time stop—or when it is “completed”? These are all matters of subjective judgment. How does the accumulation of marks—the imprinting of time—on the transparent leader in Zen for Film affect the transparency of the film? Transparency is commonly given a higher value than opacity in any parsing of the relationship between them. Transparency is a matter of judgment that can be assessed only comparatively, in relation to a state of lesser or greater transparency. In Zen for TV the process by which time imprints its trace on the film leader results in a gradual loss of transparency, and ultimately a state of opacity. One possible reading of this aspect of the artwork might suggest that Paik’s filmic endeavor is a critique of transparency. In Zen for Film, transparency (which enables undistorted seeing) would mean the avoidance of change in response to the flux of time. Transparent works are timeless, and the imprint of time, whatever form it takes, complicates them. In Paik’s film the transparent surface is rendered opaque by multiple projections, an effect that reveals the reality of the medium. Alteration, the loss of transparency, and decay can become highly aesthetic experiences in themselves, as Bill Morrison’s film Decasia (2002) demonstrates, addressing the beauty of decay and the aesthetics of even the deadly effects of time. Conceptually, Paik, by radically reducing the imagery of Zen for Film, removed himself from the evolution of image culture and recalled Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of pictorial strata in the iconic Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953. There, the unmaking of one work became the creation of another. (Removing one mark left a trace that became a work of art in itself.)16 The unmaking in Zen for Film would be the rejection of narrative and the addition, in a positivist sense, of value in the accumulated traces of time and decay. Zen for Film allows for a contemplation of decay, creating a remarkable aesthetic encounter. Indubitably, there is a positivist imprint of time in Paik’s Zen for Film, a positive value that inverts the relationship between the transparency that enables seeing and the loss of transparency that

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endows what is seen (or what is becoming less visible and more opaque) with another quality. And this new dimension of seeing reveals itself only in time, in duration. The cinematic time of Zen for Film necessarily involves the time of the viewer, as the spectator (according to the Duchampian credo), in the act of interpreting the work of art, contributes to it.17 The time of the spectator in this context is that of the viewer’s engagement with what is seen or not seen, depending on the intensity of this engagement. This intensity is strictly bound to the duration of the spectacle, which unfolds in time. The time of spectatorship might be located at the juncture of the viewer’s empathy with the work and his or her temporal condition. The viewer confronts the image and perceives the cinematic happening; he or she is divorced from external time, which moves tirelessly in an entropic expansion, independent of the viewer’s perception and irrelevant to his or her existence. Zen for Film becomes an “indifferent” entropy, like that addressed in the works of artists such as Dieter Roth, in his organic assemblages, or Eva Hesse, in her unstable plastics. Here, an indifferent entropy resembles the temporality of Zen as a nonquantifiable, nondirectional, nonprogressive movement.18 According to the Zen understanding of space and time, the course of time is like the movement of a wave on the ocean: the actual movement is in the wave’s up-and-down rhythm, whereas the directional movement is illusory.19 Time and space become integrated into the “here-now,” a living space-time, and time refuses to be a quantifiable and punctuated unit or a linear progression through past, present, and future. Zen time is neither symmetrical nor reversible, and it ignores the clock of natural science; Zen “takes time to be living.”20 The Zen understanding of time opposes the significance of the present, which can only contain records.

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Paik’s Zen for Film, to be screened, requires a projector. Even in the time of the digital cloud, the ubiquitous web, and the surfeit of sophisticated display technologies, a number of contemporary artists use film projectors, not only because they are required for the screening, but also because of their sculptural—and sometimes auditory—relevance. The physicality of the apparatus carries with it another presence, however, one related to the past. In the words of Walter Benjamin: “The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age.”21 The clattering mechanics, the radiant light source, the flickering image—all evoke emotions; all engage spectators in an act of remembrance that follows the reconstructive path of memory. The decision to incorporate a projector into an artwork today encourages viewers to remove themselves from the present and to enter the time when projectors were used for film screenings in movie theaters, often unseen, behind a curtain or in a projection room. The projector present today—visible and even centrally displayed to emphasize its sculptural value—has a status surpassing that of the original practical machine. In the 1960s Zen for Film was projected by a widely used device. The films Yalkut made of Paik’s early videos also required a projector. These projectors attracted no more

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attention than DVD playback devices do today.22 In a sense they existed, to recast Rosalind Krauss’s notorious phrase “post-medium condition,” in a “premedium condition”—the medium is used because it is necessary, it is available at the right moment, and at that point in the evolution of technology it is the only means available (in this case) to screen a filmic work. Paik included a projector in his work, not because he was attracted to the outmoded technology of early cinema (which, Krauss has posited, because of its obsolescence as a filmic medium, has a redemptive quality, rendering it worthwhile to reinvent or rearticulate as an artistic means),23 but because the materiality of film projection was embedded in the technological relations of his time. With the advent of new digital media, the perception and the implementation in artistic practice of filmic projections and other analogue technologies have undoubtedly changed. The machines and the medium have about them now an air of melancholy pastness, commonly elicited by objects from times past that are no longer in use. Paik’s works are often understood as “possibilities of experience” rather than “objects.” In this sense, the possibility of experience in Zen for Film has another meaning—that of the shift between then and now, apparent in the archaeological character of the apparatus. Paik’s work, by changing the valence, meaning, and potential of that apparatus in relation to the development of other media, becomes both temporal and historical. The question remains whether the presence of a projector can be guaranteed in future installations of Zen for Film. Perhaps, like the “original” film spool that has been exhibited in a vitrine near the projection, Zen for Film’s projector will be deactivated as it becomes obsolete and unavailable, extinguishing the spectator’s experience of both filmic time and filmic flow. Technology-based media are always temporally referential, so that as the distance from their original implementation in an artwork increases, so does the awareness of their historical condition. Updating Paik’s film projections to a new medium always involves a change—either a translation or a suppression—of its characteristic temporality.24

TELEVISION AND VIDEO TIME

Paik himself instigated the transition from film to video, and Zen for Film might be seen as bridging the gap between premedium and obsolete medium. The new medium of video (and television) offered artists effects and results more direct and immediate than those of film. Video also changed the way film operated: at a time when video was widely available and associated with low production costs, film was judged a historically sophisticated, but also economically underappreciated, technology.25 The concept of remediation put forward by David Bolter and Richard Grusin may help explain this transition.26 Marshall McLuhan assumed that “ ‘the content’ of any medium is always another medium.” Remediation—a term coined to complicate the notion of “repurposing”—takes as a given that new media follow the logic of old in presenting themselves as improved versions of other media.27 Although the cultural work of new media is never isolated from social and

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economic circumstance, what is new about new media is precisely how they refashion older media—and how older media refashion themselves—to answer the challenges of new media.28 Moon Is the Oldest TV exemplifies how a technical manipulation of television sets undergoes changes to suit the needs of the new medium of video. Paradoxically, however, a later work, Electronic Moon No. 2 (1966–72), which sprang from Moon Is the Oldest TV, subverts the progressive model in which the older medium is replaced by a newer one. Yalkut and Paik, in creating Electronic Moon No. 2, transferred Paik’s technical manipulation of Moon Is the Oldest TV to 16mm film, inverting the evolution of the medium and making the electronic visualization a photogram again.29 Moon Is the Oldest TV also exemplifies how the temporal structure of film differs from that of video and television. In this artwork, the immediacy of the electronic image that emerges from the mechanical manipulation of the deflection circuit becomes repeatable, playable, and linear when recorded on video. Time in video cannot be discussed without looking into television and televisual time. The temporal dimension of television is determined by the effects and results one could achieve by manipulation, either direct (handling the inner circuits) or indirect (pressing knobs that do the job remotely). Such immediacy was important for Paik’s first solo exhibition in Wuppertal, which led the artist to many of his subsequent developments. The invention of television is connected to the industries that produce matériel for the military. In line with Friedrich Kittler’s assumption that all media were invented in response to military needs, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio claims that because TV is a “media of accidents,” it cannot be used as art.30 That claim contradicts McLuhan’s more optimistic view; McLuhan saw in television an emerging art form (an idea that influenced Paik). McLuhan had a vision of a world connected by satellite and expressed that idea in the term global theater—which developed from the earlier notion of a global village—whose aim was to turn the world into a programmed theater.31 The prophecy that television would not become an artistic medium was proved false when Fernsehgalerie (TV Gallery) Gerry Schum (1967–70) emerged, transmitting and “communicating” video art successfully on the German public TV network, Deutsches Fernsehen. Television and video stand in strict opposition to film and photography. The sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato considers media temporalities in his brilliantly formulated essay “Video, Flows and Real Time” and posits: “Photography is already a technology that crystallizes time because the image is bound to the shutter speed and, therefore, to the ability to capture time. It registers a development by fixating it. Film makes the still image run, thus causing the ‘illusion’ of movement (according to Bergson’s definition). Yet video technology captures movement itself: not something moving in space, but the ‘pure oscillations’ of light.”32 Video, unlike television, can both transmit and record images. Television, like video, is distinct from film, which divides time sequentially into frames. Video offers direct transmission by reducing forms to raster elements and then transmitting them point by point.33 Although I venture no further

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into the technical differences between television and video, it is difficult to draw a line between them as artistic media, for often video has used television as its means of transmission, and television (as a broadcast technology or manipulation of the cathode-ray tube), can readily be transferred to video.34 Unlike the continuous loop of video footage implemented in his works, Paik’s manipulation of electronic vision—the electronic circuits of the cathode-ray tube—played on the effect of immediacy: in Magnet TV (1965), for example, viewers interacted directly with the flow of electrons in the TV tube. Their interactions, a novelty at the time, engaged viewers in an immediate way in the obscure technological interior of monitors—an intervention in the temporality of the medium expressed in the image viewable instantaneously on-screen.35 Yet Paik’s manipulated televisions reveal something more than the mere modification of an image. Unlike a video that can be migrated from one format to another and replayed, television, tied to the technology (cathode-ray tube) and milieu of the 1960s, is barely transferable to present conditions. As I have already mentioned, the television set in Zen for TV displayed the only TV broadcast then available in Germany, collapsing it into a line. An analogue broadcast of the 1960s differs in both content and technology from the digital broadcasts of today. I know of no attempts that have been made to recover Zen for TV’s original “authentic” (tele)vision of 1963, so that a temporal translation of Zen for TV appears to be impossible. Paik’s video wall in Something Pacific (1986) presents a similar problem. A live feed of MTV that was a part of the video wall in the 1980s cannot be “sent” on the screens again as a live stream. (The new MTV has a different pace and aesthetics.) Unless it is untethered from its specific temporality, the self-contained logic of TV time is by its nature fixed. Video operates on mechanisms technologically different from those of film; as an electronic medium, however, it shares technical characteristics with television. The technology of the signals transmitted determines the video image displayed on a monitor. (The captured visual information is transformed by scanning it into electronic signals.)36 In contrast to the singular image in a frame of film, two interlocked half images staggered in time create what is seen as a constant image on the video screen. In the vidicon (an electron tube used in a traditional video camera), a photosensitive coating able to register the pattern of light and dark is scanned by an electron beam and that scan subsequently creates a video signal. The video information is encoded in lines scanned from left to right. The electronic signal runs vertically and horizontally, constructing and deconstructing synchronously the image in the camera and on-screen. One of the greatest advantages of video was that it could translate events happening in real time into an encoded system of data that could be replayed repeatedly, in a temporal loop. The emergence of the first artistic video changed the way both artists and viewers encountered the temporal dimension of this medium. With the invention and increasing use of the first half-inch video cameras, both image and time became easily—and eventually economically—recordable, manipulable, and viewable shortly after recording. The

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experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs declares that development “a revolution in terms of access. Because of its accessibility, more people could enjoy the freedom of using the new media for creative thinking. People started to believe you could be a ‘filmmaker’ without being a ‘director,’ and that making a film could be an autonomous act from start to finish, as painting and writing are.”37 No longer was it necessary, in making experimental motion pictures, to carry a heavy film or television camera. The introduction of Sony’s Portapak meant an end to the long waiting times for—and the high costs of—film processing; it seemed to have been invented to meet the needs of artists. The first artistic implementation of video was ascribed famously to Paik, who (using a portable video camera acquired with funds from a Rockefeller Foundation grant) taped the pope’s visit to New York on October 4, 1965, and played his recorded material later that same day during an event at Café au GoGo.38 Although the (art) history of video commenced in 1965,39 it remains unclear whether Paik, when he made his famous recording, actually used Sony’s Portapak. The German media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, in Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders, maintains that the Portapak, the first portable half-inch unit Sony produced, became available in Japan and the United States only in 1967.40 If so, the pope must have been filmed with a different, since-forgotten, half-inch device.41 Paik was obsessed with the instant feedback of video. This feature, according to Krauss, differentiates video from the other visual arts and became important in the artistic use of the medium in the 1970s.42 The closed-circuit installation series that Paik created in the 1960s (the works he based on a statue of the Buddha gazing at his own image on-screen) introduces viewers to the new temporal dimension—simultaneity— that approximates real time and makes it tangible. For Paik “video is time,” meaning that the dispositive of video technology “imitates” the relationship between the different temporalities involved. Lazzarato compares the video machine to a brain that translates movements that are imperceptible according to our categories of space and time into movements that can be perceived.43 His assumptions are based on Paik’s interpretation of the technological process of video, which in turn is based on the translation of spatial information into signals and code systems, thus allowing the viewer to enter the temporal dimension.44 Paik laid out his argument for the necessity of television in a manifesto entitled “Electronic Video Recorder” (1965; the manifesto was disseminated at the time of his first video screening at Café au GoGo). In it he states, “the historical necessity, if there is a historical necessity in history, that a new decade of electronic television should follow to the past decade of electronic music. . . . Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.”45 Just as Paik compared the electronic arts to traditional painting, he related the video synthesizer to the immediacy of image transmission. The video synthesizer, which Paik developed with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe in 1970, enabled an instantaneous transmission and decomposition of images from seven inputs simultaneously. Paik said

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of it: “This will enable us to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”46 In its early days, the video synthesizer was based on an audio synthesizer and enabled a live transmission of the mixed image: “One simply plays it and one immediately sees the effect,” Paik contended.47 The WGBH-TV live broadcast of Video Commune in summer 1970 enabled passers-by to take part in the four-hour-long performance by interacting with the synthesizer, which then mixes forms of input and their temporalities according to its analogue logic. But when we look more closely, this initial freedom offered by the then new technology becomes elusive: With our presentday digital techniques and image processing, does this groundbreaking technology of the 1970s, animated by new content, still mean what it once did?

T E M P O R A L A RT W O R K S

The temporalities of media shape not only how they behave but also how they are perceived and presented. More important, conservators and curators engaged with these media have to understand their complex temporal logic and take it into account (for example, when they display, conserve and archive these media). Reinterpretation to ensure the continuation of the work is legitimate only if the temporality of the artwork is considered during the process. In this sense we can view conservation as an intervention in the temporal structure of artworks, acknowledging it as a process engaged principally with time in artworks and with the internal temporality of the media. If we recognize the temporalities of film, television, and video, we can define these media accordingly. And if conservation is a temporal intervention in media that incorporate time, conservation also translates these art forms temporally, as can be seen most clearly in the processes of migration, emulation, and reinterpretation. According to Walter Benjamin, “Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as a mode one must go back to the original” to test its translatability—to test, in other words, whether the work lends itself to translation.48 Thus translation, or reinterpretation, may already inhere in the essential character of the work.49 If so, then the implication is that some media or elements of media do not lend themselves to translation. The analogue German TV broadcast from 1963 that collapsed into a line of light in Zen for TV exemplifies the impossibility of temporal translation. Furthermore, in the current (Western museum) culture of conservation, temporal translation would be impossible in the case of elements that bear a trace of the artist’s hand. More broadly, we can ask whether the temporal translation of the participatory art and novel media of the 1960s and 1970s would succeed in present times. But how did thinking about the temporal dimension of artworks (which is directly applicable to conservation) come about in media theory? The serious consideration of the temporal dimensions of artworks might be traced back to the dispute that addressed the division, or the distinction between, temporal and spatial arts. In an essay written in 1766 outlining the strengths and weaknesses of art, the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold

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Ephraim Lessing chose space and time as generic distinctions between the arts: painting and visual art as spatial art were distinguished from poetry and literature as time-art.50 Paik was interested in this idea: “The more I work with Video, the more I think about Lessing’s distinction of Space art and Time art.”51 Lessing’s division was much criticized, however, two centuries later, by Marshall McLuhan, who posited that electronic media conflate space and time. In Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan argued for the need to understand media in terms of “space-time.”52 What does it mean, however, to say that art might be spatial or temporal? And how does this thinking apply in a time when art and media theory is informed by knowledge derived from the close observation of change in artworks? From the perspective of a conservator who has observed how artworks endure in time, all art seems to be temporal. Lessing’s “spatial art”—painting or another form of visual art such as sculpture—like temporal art in its response to the flux of time, can also be viewed as temporal, yet slower rather than fast.53 In this light, all media could be defined by their temporalities—an implication that reaches beyond electronic and technology-based art, which by their nature incorporate and process time. The commonsense definition of “time-based art” (a term generally used to describe performance and media art) could encompass media that incorporate and process time, as well as traditional media. The assertion that painting and sculpture respond to time more slowly than video art and installation can be contested by pointing to evidence that both media can change rapidly and that assessing the rate of change is a matter of interpretation and context. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the pace of change in a video artwork (in playback apparatus, data format, and display technology) would usually be much more rapid than changes affecting a traditional medium like painting. Whereas the distinction between slow and fast artworks helps establish how artworks endure in time, another distinction may sharpen the artworks’ relation to time even further. Artworks can respond to time actively or passively. A passive response to time in an artwork signifies slower change that coincides with an artwork’s decay and degradation. Art that responds to changes more quickly is actively involved in processing time; such processing is intrinsic to film, video, TV artworks, and multimedia (and, by extension, performance art). This art, however, can still incorporate characteristics of art that responds passively and slowly to time—as its physical materials degrade, decay, and age. In conservation, the distinction between active and passive responses to time in artworks may replace the convention of dividing objects into traditional arts (painting and sculpture) and media art (which is usually more problematic because of its rapid change). The passive response to time in painting and sculpture and the slower rate of change of these art mediums have contributed to the myth of reversibility, of “arresting” time, in conservation. Unlike media artworks, which respond more quickly to time, the conservation of traditional painting or sculpture used to be preoccupied with a range of time that reached far beyond the working life of most conservators; in the past, works might have stayed “conserved” for forty or fifty years after an intervention. (It is no surprise, then, that such works, once conserved, were considered “stable.”) Nor should it seem odd that

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traditional conservation has failed to radicalize time. The pace of change affecting multimedia works demands a deeper involvement with time and a willingness to question traditional understandings of time and change. Multimedia works allow conservators to scrutinize and radicalize time; they also provoke the rethinking of traditional art media as changeable, even if they change more slowly. Conservation’s understanding of time in media artworks has altered its approach to traditional art. Consequently, conservation of traditional art can now turn to the conservation of recent media to reconceptualize its pursuit and methods. In other words, the question is not whether to conceive of and conserve works on the basis of what we know about traditional art and its conservation; instead, it is how to understand and maintain traditional artworks in light of the temporal awareness derived from media artworks (and, by extension, all artworks that radicalize time).

T H E PA R A D OX O F T E C H N O L O G I C A L R U I N S

Technical apparatuses deprived of their original function as a result of decay or obsolescence differ markedly from active media works on display. Unable to emit an electronic image, the broken TV set in Rembrandt Automatic gave the work a sculptural presence that was emphasized by its defect (plate 20). Some sources describe an aura of light spread around the screen facing the floor in the 1963 Wuppertal exhibition; others maintain that the monitor was dark. This suppressed activity and sustained stasis of Rembrandt Automatic is a curiosity, especially if one considers that technology is meant to perform a dynamic function, to produce an image and an audio signal. Even today, the dysfunctional set directs attention to the stillness of the casing, to a form of absence. What does a viewer see here? Is it intended? What would a viewer see if the monitor were turned and the screen became visible? Paik, by concealing it and preventing any view of its possible image, turns perception into pure speculation, for the work consists only of a nonfunctioning CRT case. The television is doubly disabled: as a technical device that has been switched off and as an object that (if it were properly positioned) would present only the prospect of an image—an electronic window. The active time of the medium in Rembrandt Automatic has ended; what remains is a technological ruin, governed by time, that evidences the decay and alteration intrinsic to all artifacts. The ruin represents transience and breakage and it bears the traces of time as a historical palimpsest.54 Although technological ruins can be compared with classical ruins, the technological ruin seems to contain within it what the artist Robert Smithson called the “ruin in reverse,”55 the idea that the structure becomes a ruin even before it is assembled.56 New ruins create a more brutal impression than classical ones. In the technological ruin, malfunction makes a viewer aware of things—the assemblages of technical parts and careful fitting.57 Rembrandt Automatic’s bygone glory reminds a viewer of technology’s attempt to overcome its incompatibility with time. No longer obliged to transmit, the TV set, in its enclosed temporality, preserves an image of the past.

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Paik’s Something Pacific (1986), conceived for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego (plates 21 and 22), features a number of outdoor groupings— this was Paik’s first outdoor installation—including statues of Buddha and ruined TV sets embedded in the landscape, a Sony Watchman topped with a statue of Rodin’s Thinker, and TV Graveyard—a pile of electronic rubbish thrown out one of the windows of the university’s Media Center.58 Indoors, Paik set up a video wall with some twentyfour monitors simultaneously displaying a live feed of MTV and footage from his own tapes (plate 22). Viewers could manipulate the content played on the monitors using a Fairlight synthesizer. The scattered ruins outside—skeletal remains returned to nature— were conceived as a contrast with the interactive installation inside, showing the latest craze in broadcast television. As the years passed, the synthesizer broke and was repaired; but did the museum “allow the grass to continue growing” over the video wall? And even if broken monitors among the work’s many video monitors could be replaced by monitors purchased new on the secondhand market and stored for future use, guaranteeing the initial look of the installation for the next decade or two, should what was originally a live feed of MTV continue to display a recording from the 1980s? Or should the feed reflect the content of the network today? In a later interview Paik solved the problem by releasing conservators: Asked whether the Fairlight synthesizer should be replaced by a similar model, to maintain the state of technology in 1985–86, Paik answered, “No, I think it should be made better. Every young kid expects more now from media. So they should go with the progress of industry. . . . It’s like a symphony. When you write a symphony each new generation comes along and changes it and that way it becomes better and better. We got Ormandy, and [Toscanini], and they all make good work. They all make the conductor’s work. Curators make good work now.”59 If Paik’s attitude—that a broken element in a work “should be made better”—were applied to the question of the MTV broadcast, our problem would be easily solved: a contemporary equivalent of that MTV broadcast could be played on the video wall. But if the historical value of the ensemble (including the specific MTV broadcast of that time) were given greater weight in the decision, the video wall would present a dilemma.

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Time in the outdoor ensemble of Something Pacific is experienced in a remarkably transformed and “prolonged” way. The computers, monitors, Sony Watchman televisions—all devices that commonly manipulate the viewer’s perception of time, transmitting signals in real time (and/or with a delay), rewinding, fast-forwarding, or stopping the flow of audiovisual output—are disabled here. The stasis speaks to another temporal presence, the conservation of dynamic time as static, so that the technological apparatus acquires another identity, as one more static object passively responding to time. The problems related to the performing elements of technological devices cease to exist. What remains are TV sets, in all their presentness of plastic casings and buttons, whose vulnerability to

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weather conditions provokes a certain anxiety. The sun, its UV rays, rain, air pollution, groundwater and salts, insects, worms, and, not least, people (their dogs, their moods, their lawn mowers), constitute conditions as distant from the optimal protective casket of the museum as one can possibly imagine. This confrontation, which conservation inevitably loses, is truly Paik’s superb joke. Yet Paik, by emphasizing that these nonfunctioning artworks are static, transcends time twice. The once active devices (display technology that once transformed time) now exist only in the viewer’s unconscious; Paik deactivated them, so that the screens are blank and the ensemble is peculiarly displaced in the nature of the yard. That outdoor portion of Something Pacific is a sculptural graveyard, full of devices that have escaped the fate of technological obsolescence. Yet those dead devices have a better chance of achieving “eternal life” in Paik’s graveyard than they would have had in their original, active incarnation. The technological ruin presents a paradox. It is like a static object, but a static object that once was active. What does it mean then to remake a ruin? Can a ruin be “ruined”? The grounds of the University of California, San Diego, campus provide a test for conservation as a process that intervenes in time. The objects in the yard are decaying, and the curators of the Stuart Collection have begun to search the secondhand market for equipment matching the originals in Paik’s ensemble.60 If the original TV cabinets were to be replaced, the time of Something Pacific would be “rewound” a number of years—at least until the new equipment succumbed to sun, wind, and rain. Should the ruins be left to their fate? Should the museum surrender Paik’s work to decay and prevent the “lifting [of ] their timeworn remains out of their time”?61 Are conservators the enemies of ruins, or of ruination itself?62 The author Göran Schildt, discussing the archaeological approach to ruins, adopts a radical perspective: “From . . . [an] ontological [perspective] all conservation is a loss because it deprives the ruin of its essential quality: its relation to time. Can anything give us a more vivid understanding of time’s exceptional dimension, and of our own place in this context than such flotsam and jetsam?”63 One of the challenges of the technological ruin lies in the incredibility of its very being: unlike classical ruins, technology seems too young to attract us with its decay. The conservation of ruins contradicts what they say, if left alone, about decay, degradation, and aging. To intervene in time by replacing parts seems a helpless gesture against the work of time on the surfaces and structures of TV sets. If Paik conceived the San Diego graveyard as something to awaken memories and thoughts and to immerse viewers in the psychedelic image of technology, gradually reduced to entropy, any intervention in this process is essentially misplaced. But if an intervention in time—a replacement part—prolongs the time when the work can be experienced, the conservator cannot but feel tempted to act. The technological ruins of Rembrandt Automatic and Something Pacific exemplify the transition that takes place from active to passive engagement with time when an artwork, created with equipment that processes time (say, video screens) stops doing so and

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becomes something that is processed by time, responding as traditional artworks do to its passage. Technological ruins have an exceptional ability to transform time, a feat they accomplish simply by being deactivated, a gesture that opens up another temporality— that of a static, sculptural object—demonstrating a sense of duration distinct from that of other multimedia art.

THE MANY TIMES OF AN OBJECT

The Bergsonian durée is a time of heterogeneity—of “succession without distinction,” multiplicity but not a sum—and the heterogeneity of time presumes a temporal, nonidentical plurality, a non-numerical multiplicity, and the coexistence of the past, along with the anticipation of the future, in the present. On these grounds, Bergsonian theory is useful for considering the idea of a heterotemporal possibility for the existence of time.64 Earlier I noted that heterotemporality opened the possibility of venturing into the specific temporalities of media. Here, to differentiate this heterotemporality further, I go beyond the realm of objects into the nexus of their existence in their surroundings on the one hand, and into their internal temporal structure on the other. I refer to temporal relativism—a heterotemporality in the sense of the multi-temporal levels of objects, set in relation to outer temporality. If singular media are characterized by specific temporalities, then multimedia installations are polychronic entities. Many temporalities inhere in their constitutive parts, such as film and video carriers, playback and display equipment, traditional sculptural elements, paintings, photographs, and, at times, organic components. Moreover, technological components (with the exception of the deactivated objects of technological ruins) can be sources of another transformed temporality—that of video collage, closed-circuit broadcast, and manual or electronic manipulation of audio and/or visual output. Changeability in the elements of media installations occurs with different intensity and at a pace that varies according to the active or passive involvement of the works with time. To illustrate temporal relationships in artworks, I turn to Marcel Duchamp. The British social anthropologist Alfred Gell, in his book Art and Agency, places Duchamp’s engagement with the fourth dimension in the tradition of Bergsonian durée (Duchamp’s interest in the fourth dimension was extrapolated from the classic period of Cubism and culminated in his “symbolic” works).65 Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914) is the work of particular interest here. Although conceived as a preparatory study for the later Large Glass (1915–23), it is an independent work that recapitulates Duchamp’s earlier Three Standard Stoppages (1913) (fig. 23). Duchamp created Three Standard Stoppages by dropping three pieces of string, each one meter long, from a height of one meter onto a varnished horizontal support. He used the resulting randomly generated shapes to make three curved wooden slats—a unique measurement of a transitory and trivial event.66 It is possible that Duchamp “borrowed” the shapes he had created by dropping the string in Three Standard Stoppages and multiplied

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FIGURE 23 Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages. Paris 1913–14. Wood box 11 ⅛ × 50 ⅞ × 9 in. (28.2 × 129.2 × 22.7 cm), with three threads, each 39 ⅜ in. (100 cm), glued to three painted canvas strips 5 ¼ × 47 ¼ in. (13.3 × 120 cm), each mounted on a glass panel 7 ¼ × 49 ⅜ × ¼ in. (18.4 × 125.4 × 0.6 cm), three wood slats 2 ½ × 43 ⅛ × 3 38 in. (6.2 × 109.2 × 0.2 cm), shaped along one edge to match the curves of the threads. Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licenced by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © Succession Marcel Duchamp / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

them in Network of Stoppages (fig. 24). The resulting work features a network of lines and symbols resembling the map of a railway or subway system, a map of rivers starting from various sources and meeting in a delta, the branches of a tree (a family tree?), or a map of lines on the palm of a hand. Duchamp painted Network of Stoppages on the unfinished painting Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), rotating that work ninety degrees so that the network lies horizontally on the painted environment. Closer inspection of the work reveals a preliminary sketch from 1913 for the layout of Large Glass.67 Duchamp deliberately created a palimpsest when he decided to use the same canvas for three different renderings. He had no economic rationale—Duchamp could afford to use a fresh canvas or a piece of paper. As Gell points out, the resulting work is simultaneously the painting Network of Stoppages

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FIGURE 24 Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas, 58 ⅝” × 6’ 5 ⅝ in. (148.9 × 197.7 cm). Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund and Gift of Mrs. William Sisler © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licenced by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © Succession Marcel Duchamp / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

and an actual network of stoppages.68 The artwork not only depicts a map, but is a map, a network of time, of its own polychronic temporality. The temporal stoppages represented in Network of Stoppages relate to the multilayered time of artworks. These temporalities only seem to be subsumed in the experience of the finished work. Unpacking the pictorial structure of Network of Stoppages inevitably draws attention to traces of the other compositions, their peculiar, quasi-invisible presence engraved on the finished painting. Time is represented graphically, but it has actually been “stopped” at different points and on different strata corresponding to the previously executed works within it. Following Gell’s theory in Art and Agency (which employs Husserl’s terminology of retention and protention), Network of Stoppages becomes a retention of Three Standard Stoppages and a protention to the Large Glass (especially its section of Capillary Tubes, a network seen in perspective).69 The heterogeneous temporalities of this artwork (or, perhaps, these artworks) are simultaneously visible and invisible, with the invisible stratum of an earlier work becoming a protention toward the stratum that

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follows. This artwork’s mastery lies in its combination of the completed visual representation of time and the retentions and protentions of the underlying studies. Understanding Duchamp’s work(s) can be helpful in grasping the underlying polychronic principle of other works of art. Works like Duchamp’s multilayered canvas can contain different layers of temporal presence, slices of time, or what the Bengali historian Dipesh Chakrabarty calls heterotemporalities and Foucault calls heterochronies.70 This polychronic time—a manifestation of the heterotemporal character of artworks—accords with the Bergsonian past that exists alongside and in the present. Duchamp and Paik are related on a number of levels. First, the notion of protentions and retentions of artworks applies to Paik’s further development of earlier installations— for example, the relation of TV Sea to TV Garden, of TV Buddha to a great many examples incorporating a statue gazing at a screen and closed-circuit video, of Zen for TV to TV Clock, and of TV Garden to Arche Noah‘s enhancement by the plant ensemble. The artists’ works are also linked by the way in which their heterotemporality is inherently bound to the heterogeneity of their elements (new strata in Duchamp’s work can be compared to varying elements in multimedia installations). Zen for Film’s film leader is a new layer in the temporal structure of the work. Similarly, the plants, data carrier, and playback equipment in Arche Noah and the planned replacement of cathode-ray tubes in Zen for TV introduce new temporal presences to these works. (The migration of playback technology also creates new temporalities.) A further connection between Paik’s work and Network of Stoppages relates to the various temporal layers in the two artists’ works seen from the perspective of their lives— new instantiations of a work sanctioned by Paik—Arche Noah, for instance, or layers in Duchamp’s works barely discernible under the Network of Stoppages. Although the instances of Arche Noah do not overlap literally, as is the case with Network of Stoppages, and are distinctly invisible (as recorded only in the archive), the 1989 installation of Arche Noah and the 1991 reinstallation (with the vessel painted by Paik) become distinct temporal layers in the life of the work. The effort to “return” the work to an earlier layer would therefore be comparable to restoring Young Man and a Girl in Spring from under Network of Stoppages. Paradoxically, such return, however, is still a justifiable conservation approach. As it happens, Arche Noah moves through time as a vessel of “stoppages” and activations, decelerations and accelerations. And because time cannot be “rewound,” such efforts—instead of returning the artwork to “something from before”—always change it and add a new temporality to it.

INNER AND OUTER TIME

Thinking about time in objects can be taken a step further, so that it becomes possible to distinguish the inner temporality of artworks from their external time. This distinction allows us to think about complex objects as entities inhabited by multiple polychronies in relation to time outside themselves.71

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Multimedia installations, when released from the museum vault and reinstalled, encounter a time different from the one they inhabited before they entered the museum. This encounter takes place on the occasion of an exhibition or a loan that requires the technical maintenance of an artwork’s components: playback and display equipment is updated; data and documentation are migrated to new formats or emulated; at times, sculptural or pictorial elements are reinforced, cleaned, and retouched. A form of adjustment and adaptation takes place, a mediation of the unavoidable clash of different temporalities. Arche Noah is a good example. During its nearly two decades in storage, Arche Noah only seemed to be “protected” from outside influences and change. Because the natural alteration of its materials had inevitably continued, its time in storage had worked against its redemptive return to the bright and stable conditions of a gallery space. Indeed, the artwork resisted. Some of its slats refused to be bent back into their original shape and monitors failed to function. The laser disc players—which, as the most reliable and best functioning playback system available, were employed in many of Paik’s installations at that time—were still “adjusted” to the 1990s. The clash between “then” (the time before storage) and “now” (the present time) was evident. By upgrading the artwork’s technology—digitizing the videos and migrating the playback equipment to Compact Flash Players—Arche Noah was made a state-of-the-art installation. Although a new version, variation, or interpretation of an artwork can result from such an “update,” the effect is momentary, lasting only until better and more stable technologies arrive. The decision to rebuild the inner structure of the vessel in 2008, similarly dictated by the state of knowledge and the skills of those involved, was made to adjust Arche Noah to the present (and fit the work to the politics of the institution). The adaptation and assimilation of Arche Noah to new conditions made evident the coexistence of two times: the inner polychronies of the object and the time external to the work. It occurred to me as I assisted the technicians and conservators in the slow work of returning the artwork to the world, that Arche Noah had spent most of its life within the protective walls of a vault, in a state of limbo, sustained by and immersed in its own immanent time. The work’s “experience” of its “deactivated” time differed from its experience of the “active” time of its first presentations; deactivated time had a different pace. The installation looked to me like a temporal vessel, carrying its own material evidence of the past alongside its up-to-date technology, which had been “arrested” at the moment of its most recent presentation. All multimedia installations experience (to some degree) the clash of temporalities that arises during the process of their rematerialization. TV Garden‘s recurring elements—sets of plants and playback and display equipment—appear to fall at the other end of the spectrum of artworks’ adaptation to the present. In every one of its materializations, TV Garden appears to harmonize its inner time with the time of the exhibition space, thus resolving the conflict between them. Because new realizations of TV Garden—like similar examples of conceptual works—are contingent on instructions, they allow a frictionless adaptation.

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An artwork that is conceptual or allographic relates directly to its temporal adaptability (allographic work is more adaptable than autographic work).72 Unlike media works based on instructions, works intentionally involving decay and degradation—for instance, Dieter Roth’s edible “printing media,” which include slices of sausage or cheese—agree with the time of entropy and decay, symbiotically bound to all natural processes.73 Conservation not only participates in adapting outer time to the inner time of an artwork; it also moderates the clash of an artwork’s time with outer time. In fact, conservation generates a consciousness of the diversity of the temporalities it encounters.

MUSEUM TIME

The NASA website reports that in 1977 two unmanned space probes, Voyager I and II, were sent off on an expedition to explore Jupiter and Saturn.74 After completing their mission to those planets, the probes were programmed to continue their journey through the outskirts of our solar system without a final destination. Like their forerunners Pioneer 10 and 11, they contained information necessary to “communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.” On their interstellar journey, the probes contained a cross section of artifacts, chosen for NASA by a group of scholars at Cornell University as representative of our culture, including a phonographic record containing images, audio tracks with greetings in different languages, ethnographic music, and the music of Mozart and Bach. It will take about 40,000 years for the Voyagers to enter remote planetary systems. This remarkable mission is like an archaeological project that, in the words of Johan Redin, who interprets the messages from civilizations directed to the future as an attempt to salvage the present.75 The mission, instead of seeking communication with imaginary extraterrestrials, becomes an attempt to represent and preserve the present. This happens because it is impossible to render history accessible and readable outside the experience of culture. The Voyager mission stands as a helpful analogy to the enclosed temporality of another form—the museum. Museums appear to incubate their objects in a slowed-down temporal flux that distinguishes itself from time “lived” outside its walls. Alternately, museums become places where certain experiences of such time are possible. A museum, like a time capsule, creates and maintains a unique temporality that affects (or “conserves”) the object by separating it from the world with a wall of policies and regulations. The works that leave a museum on loan or for exhibition must not be changed or manipulated by anyone other than the museum’s own conservation or registrarial staff (who assume some of the conservators’ responsibilities, such as the condition of, and climate control for, works on loan and guard accompany the work to venues worldwide). This dynamic is transparent when we look, not at collections in institutions in the public domain, but at private collections, which often do not subscribe to the “protectiveness” of institutional collections. In collections that house multimedia works, the incubated time of the museum is necessarily rendered more open. Media collections appear to act against institutional

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regulations, restrictions, and limitations designed to protect the museum against any incursion by outer time that might result in change. I have suggested that inner and outer time might be associated with the time of the object in relation to an institutional time, which imposes its own logic on the object. Yet the inner time can also refer to the time governing an institution in relation to outer time. Picturing the relationships spatially, inner time is thus the time of the inner element of the system: an object’s own time in relation to institutional time, and, in the case of a museum, a museum’s own time in relation to the outside. The conception of time in Western museum culture is consistent with linear time, which follows a chronological succession of events on a timeline.76 This is also the time that governs conservation. History, as understood in museums, is static and does not permeate the present. Museum time is a pluperfect time, a closed period in which history is fixed, a period that rejects anything other than a monochronous narration. In the desire to connect viewers with the past, in the urge to memorialize, objects are often obscured, withdrawn from the outside world, and reinserted into it with a different set of meanings. Foucault describes museums as heterotopias, oriented toward the eternal, divorced from flowing and transitory time and thus protected from its ravages; they are projects of the perpetual and an indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place.77 The idea of accumulating things in a general archive, enclosing different temporalities in one place, is a modern one. The museum itself becomes a time capsule. As Johan Redin and Peter Jackson suggest: “[The museum is an institution] that mixes static time with dynamic in analogy with the relation between memory and forgetting. It is at the same time inclusive and exclusive . . . the heart of the museum is not its exhibition but its depository. . . . It is a belated version of the crypt, not only in the usual sense of catacombs and relics in Romanesque churches, but as the architectural internalization of its own ideological energy.”78 Traditional museums can also be seen as loci that impose an artificial concept of the extreme prolongation of the life of objects in what is envisioned as a mock eternity. But that reading of the museum contradicts current knowledge, which explains the complexity of life and reveals that nothing can stop change, nothing releases us from the final reality, that life leads to death; birth is an act that begins the journey toward death. Heidegger posited not only that the Dasein (“there being,” “being-in-the-world,” human existence) is time itself, but that because this possibility of being involves death, it is thus an anticipation of death.79 Heidegger also developed the notion of time as a being-towarddeath, in which death is a way of being and the Dasein’s ownmost in being-toward-death. (It is what makes Dasein individual; I am, therefore I die, to reformulate Descartes.)80 Museums and conservators confront finitude in their work, acting against the frangibility of mediums in an almost impossible act of salvage. They deal with the illusion of sustaining the passage of time and managing change, protecting the object from threats of obsolescence, decay, and degradation. This is the paradox, the dilemma, of conservation, for just as there is no possibility of arresting time, there is no way to freeze something evolving toward entropy.

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T H E C O N S E RVAT I O N N A R R AT I V E

The conservation of an artwork depends on the relation of the inner time of the work to the time that transforms it—the time of aging and decay. This temporal relativism of inner and outer time requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms it involves. A question still remains, however: how does conservation acquire this understanding? The answer to this question is the “conservation narrative”—which connects and moderates inner and outer time. The conservation narrative leans on the narrative theory of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In a discourse that takes the form of a narrative, he interprets the different kinds of time involved in the human condition. A central point of Ricoeur’s narrative is that it synthesizes phenomenological time (human time, the time of human lives) with cosmic time (the time of the world in which all change occurs and where both humans and nonhumans are subject to time that is nonhuman).81 Ricoeur’s narrative mediates between different kinds of time by creating a narrative (a plot). Their reconciliation takes place in and through language. People establish methods to harmonize these two “times” by using calendars and creating “historical time,” which, says Ricoeur, becomes human time “to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode.”82 Most important, he proposes that time becomes understandable only when it is narrated. Narrativity is often associated with telling a story that exists in time, so that the narrative becomes a way of mediating different times. We can extend what Ricoeur classifies as phenomenological time to technological time, insofar as it is a fundamental dimension of the human (according to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler)83 and one of the inner times of the object (where outer time involves physical processes such as aging and decay that are not produced by human intervention). A meaningful plot—storytelling that can be explicated in the documentation, oral narrative, and biography of the artwork in the narrative of conservation—mediates these different kinds of time. The conservation narrative unites the heterotemporal complexity of artworks and fuses the inner time of the artwork to outer time. If the inner time of the object “accepts” the change and outer time, then material degradation and decay are inscribed on the work. Artists who work with decay equate outer time with the inner time of the work, as in the example of Paik’s technological graveyard in Something Pacific. The function of the conservation narrative is to explain the equation of inner and outer time and to provide a reason to refrain from the traditional pursuits of conservation meant to forestall the process of alteration in artworks because traditional conservation interpreted the change that occurs to them as a loss. The recognition of an artwork’s susceptibility to alteration and decay is analogous to the acceptance of its mortality. That acceptance contrasts with the Romantic idea of an artist as a genius whose ambition leads him to create artworks that will last, “unchanged,” for centuries; to attempt to return something to its “original state” is to confirm this Romantic idea. If the work is mortal and changeable, the only way to understand its

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imperative is to tell a story about it, one that can (but might not) become a documentary record. Some artists, however, aim to make artworks for eternity (for example, the early version of Damien Hirst’s Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living [1991] and some works of James Lee Byars obsessed with the idea of perfection). If a work expresses a sense of eternity, then aging and decay would work against it. The conservation narrative mediates knowledge about complex installations that involve changeable materials; it not only records the research and practical steps taken to reconstruct them, but also explains why artworks based on instructions, such as TV Garden and Zen for Film, are updated to the time of the outside.84 The conservation narrative ultimately creates a space where the different temporalities of changeable artworks and outer time can be encountered and negotiated, and it influences decisions about present and future conservation procedures. In this narrative conservators can take a biographical approach to understanding the trajectories of works; writing biographies of artworks can constitute one form of the conservation narrative.85 Although it does not yet answer questions pertaining to the identity of the object—the problem of identity through time—the conservation narrative mediates the changeability of a multimedia artwork as integral to its identity by providing the rationale for certain actions—replacing elements of installations, conserving other elements in their material manifestation. It explains why some changes are allowed but some are not. (In Canopus, for instance, the conservation record explains why it is impossible to replace the hubcap and what actions can be taken to replace the monitors.) In a museum, the conservation narrative can support institutional memory—both recorded data and unrecorded data, such as oral narratives or stories told about artworks that do not necessarily end up in an official register. It can also become a part of the archive: not an archive of dusty documents that resides in a state of deactivation and stasis, but a dynamic realm of birth and creation—an archive where all the threads meet, where the continuity of an artwork is maintained, and to which the following chapter turns.

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PART 3

ARCHIVE AND IDENTITY Heraclitus, you know, says that everything moves on and that nothing is at rest; and, comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you could not step into the same river twice. PLATO

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In the account of Plutarch (Vita Thesei, 22–23), Theseus, the mythological demigod and hero, emerges as a leader in classical Athens. Theseus battled and overcame foes, and in honor of his deeds as a sailor and a warrior, his ship became a memorial and was kept intact for some hundreds of years: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”1 Plutarch poses a paradox about the identity of objects experiencing change that is still debated intensely in contemporary ontology. When does an object experiencing change become something else, and when is it still the same object? How much can an object change and still retain its identity? How much change would transform it into something else?2 The account of the ship of Theseus provides a basis for thinking about objects and their identity. Plutarch reports that the ship of Theseus, to be preserved, had to be entirely rebuilt. If so, one could argue that the ship was no longer the same ship. Would the ship have been the same had the Athenians retained one or two planks from the old ship? How many old parts would have had to remain for the entire ship to be considered the same?3 Where does one draw the line? Consider a further modification, in a hypothetical account of what takes place while Theseus sails on his ship: What if Theseus’s ship had been rebuilt during a sea journey and another ship had been constructed by a follower from elements Theseus threw overboard? Which ship would be Theseus’s when the two vessels returned to the harbor: the new one sailed by Theseus or the one reconstructed by his follower? If the new ship is not the one Theseus embarked on and the reconstructed ship is not captained by Theseus (who never left the other ship), can either ship be called the ship of Theseus? An analysis of the conceptual mechanisms governing our thinking process might help resolve these questions. According to the mereological theory, the identity of an object involves the identity of its component parts. This theory assumes that every compound object composed of the same elements at two different points in time maintains its identity. If that assumption is valid, the reconstructed ship of Theseus’s follower would be the one that maintained its identity, being numerically the same as the one on which Theseus embarked. But this theory appears to go too far considering that Theseus never left his ship; it was gradually rebuilt as he sailed it. The ship he returned to harbor must necessarily be Theseus’s because he never “exchanged” it. Or perhaps both ships are the ship of Theseus. That is impossible, however, because material objects cannot

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occupy the same place at the same time, cannot be spatially coincident. Admittedly, one could argue that the ships do not occupy the same space since they occupy different berths in the harbor. Even so, it is impossible to conceive of a single object that occupies two places at the same time. Heraclitus’s river metaphor—“It is not possible to step twice into the same river,” in Plato's telling—offers another view of this paradox that explicates the persistence of identity through space and time. This metaphor posits that things retain their identity through time even if they change physically. We cannot step into the same river twice because its waters change; yet it is still the same river into which we step. Like the ship that Theseus returned to harbor, the river has changed compositionally; yet in some sense it is still the same river.4 The French philosopher Jacques Lacan furthers the notion of material and compositional difference. His paradox of the 10:15 express train, which he relates to the signifier and signified, is based on the system of differences.5 Lacan notes that a particular train is readily identifiable as the “10:15 express” despite any changes in its material constitution (its different cars, different occupants), despite delays, despite multiple occurrences of a “10:15 express” on successive days. So even though the train has a different structure and components, it is still the 10:15 express. Lacan claims that neither the material constitution of the train nor the time it departs gives it its identity but rather what he calls a “signifier,” which is defined by its difference from other signifiers (other trains on the timetable, for example), that designate the “signified.” A signifier, instead of having intrinsic meaning, functions in a symbolic system or structure of differences. Just as the “10:15 express” functions as a signifier in a timetable, the “ship of Theseus” functions as a signifier by bearing Theseus’s name rather than any other possible name, regardless of its material constitution. The ship’s identity is based on difference, not on intrinsic properties. A parallel might be found in Duchamp’s elevation of a ready-made object as a work of art. Paik paralleled Duchamp by exerting his right to call a group of constituent elements the work of art (Arche Noah’s animals and plants, for example, or the electro-trash in the technological graveyard of Something Pacific).6 To explore further the problem of identity, I turn to the theory of spatio-temporal continuity, which, like the Lacanian proposition, circumvents the numerical sameness of things in time. This theory is based on intuition and assumes that objects maintain their identity by tracing a continuous path through space-time. As long as the object sustains both its form and shape, the gradual exchange of constituent components does not affect its identity, which endures in time. Although spatio-temporal continuity is often claimed when objects follow an unbroken spatio-temporal path, I assume, in the discussion that follows, that tracing such a continuous path permits some change of parts and thus partial intervals of discontinuity as long as the form of objects is preserved. The wooden Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, exemplifies spatio-temporal continuity. The shrine has been disassembled and rebuilt of new materials every twenty years for 1,300 years, thereby proving that its identity does not necessarily depend on the same-

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ness of its material components.7 (There are periods when the new structure exists side by side with the old structure.) This ritual of periodic reconstruction—shikinen sengū— preserves, not the material aspect of a specific piece of architecture, but an ancient building tradition.8 The concurrent opposition and convergence of theories of the identity of objects in time is exemplified by artworks that exist simultaneously as objects and as entities endowed with a certain aesthetic value rather than mere functionality. Like the Ise Shrine, Paik’s Zen for Film, in its multiple manifestations, retains the identity of the artwork, even though such physical components as the film leader and projector have been replaced. Those who believe in material authenticity based on palpable evidence traced, ideally, back to its origins, often oppose the spatio-temporal identity of artworks that explains how it is that Paik’s artworks endure over time. Yet these distinctions in how we grasp identity in his artworks are not always straightforward. The specific value assigned to the singular physical elements of Arche Noah—the painted vessel, the animals, and the photographs—relates to the material evidence they contain and, because this evidence has to be continued unchanged, it accords with the mereological theory of identity. That this continuity exists in material evidence linked to the autographic mark of the artist stamps a work as unique (or at least uniquely authorized). Yet Arche Noah could also shed its plants and audiovisual apparatus in favor of new arrangements without annulling its identity. Its identity persists despite the changes made to its organic and technological components. The same persistence of identity also holds for Canopus, which shares Arche Noah‘s dualism—the replaceability of its display technology and the nonreplaceability of the hubcap. These examples reveal the dualistic (which in earlier chapters I specified as autographic and allographic) nature of multimedia installations characterized by changeability: they continue through time as objects that carry material evidence and the mark of the artist and also as objects that retain their identity despite material changes. It might be argued that the autographic moment moves multimedia installations into the realm of things that follow the mereological theory of identity, persisting in time and retaining identity in the material evidence of their constituent parts. Thus, the replacement of the hubcap shifts the understanding of the continuity of Canopus from the mereological theory of identity to the spatio-temporal realm based on intuitive reasoning—and undermines to a degree the ruling conventions of conservation: Paik’s unique mark was judged more important than the Wirkung of the ensemble. TV Garden presents yet another paradox related to the problem of identity. In 2010 it appeared in an exhibition at the Tate Liverpool (loaned from K21) while still on display in the collection at K21, Ständehaus, in Düsseldorf. This is arguably irrelevant, since we already know that TV Garden exists in three different collections (New York, Düsseldorf, and Seoul). But can it exist more than one time in a single collection? Can a copy be identical to its model? Sameness and diversity can occur either synchronically or diachronically. This formulation implies that either at a particular time or over time an object

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can be marked by sameness in one respect and diversity in another.9 Thus the TV Garden on display at K21 would necessarily be different from the one loaned to the Tate Liverpool, yet at the same time they (it) would be recognized as one installation conceived by Paik and distributed across three (or more) collections throughout the world. According to Lacan’s theory of identity of the signifier and the signified, everything that occupies the position of TV Garden can be assumed to be TV Garden—a signifier—legitimated by oral or written instructions.10 Having laid out this brief explanation of the possible ways to understand the identity of artworks, given their (simultaneous) diversity and sameness over time, and having discussed, in the preceding chapters, what instigates change and how that change relates to time, I move on to the final questions of this discussion. If the identity of artworks endures through changes, that is, both during and even by means of them, where does that endurance reside? What is the locus of an artwork’s potential to change, and what is the basis on which artworks maintain their identity through time? How do we identify what the artwork is? The answer lies, I propose, in the archive.

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8 THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL ARCHIVE

W H AT I S A N A R C H I V E ?

In common parlance, the archive is a large repository of paperwork no longer in bureaucratic circulation.1 Archives can be seen as active nexuses of unique documents that bear marks, objects, images, and inscriptions and enable researchers to recall and revisit individual and shared memories and histories.2 Archives confront the impossibility of storing everything. Traditional archives are usually organized by dominant powers, able to decide what is preserved and what is excluded.3 The archive often occupies a physical space where documents are gathered and organized; a space whose dimensions and systems of access often stagger the imagination; a space that becomes comprehensible only when destroyed (as happened when the municipal archive of the city of Cologne was partly damaged in 2011). The nineteenth-century objectification of linear time and historical process prompted a shift in the purpose of archives from legal depositories to institutions for historical research that were rooted in public administration.4 The word archive has roots in the Greek words archeion—meaning a government house, a house of archons or magistrates—and archē, or magistracy, rule, or government, and those roots were the point of departure for the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of the archive.5 Derrida saw the archive as a physical, destructible locus of records that would disclose its meaning only in the future. His view of the “archive” also suggests a link with archaeology and its search for foundations or a founding principle.

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Yet the archive is not only a physical space containing documentary materials; it is also memory, residue, and interpretation. Since Foucault, modern theories have extended the definition of the archive as a collection of records and the space that houses them to include a quasi-transcendental, metaphysical space.6 Thus the archive today can entail both a conceptual and a material approach to the formation of cultural memory. The media theorists and art historians Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel speak of “two bodies of [the] archive”—an institution and a conception, a working space and a method.7 Efforts to name the role of an archive as a research practice have recently produced such terms as archivology and archival sciences. According to the social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the archive is a site of memory, occupying a place between the physicality of the stored material—the archival body—and the spirit that animates it, “pastness itself.”8 Yet if the archive were synonymous with memory, would it require a physical space? In his anthropological view, Appadurai conceives of an archive as a “deliberate” social project, a work of imagination.9 If the archive is our cultural memory,10 exclusion from it must involve forgetting. So archiving could be linked with exclusion and forgetting as much as with memory, if we follow Friedrich Nietzsche’s directive: that we must forget in order to imagine.11 To destroy the archive would be the same as forgetting, which links us again to the archive as a physical space.12 The archive, conceived either as a theory or a physical space, is a dynamic space of exchange and actualization; in the words of Foucault, the archive regulates and generates statements, thus highlighting the distinction between an archive and a library: the archive produces knowledge; the library stores it.

T H E M U S E U M A R C H I V E A N D I T S D O C U M E N TA RY D I M E N S I O N

Contemporary art museums, as places where artworks are created, re-created, and reinstalled, have a unique role in forging and maintaining archives. The museum archive includes documents, files, and images related to the acquisition, maintenance, exhibition, conservation, insurance, and loan of artworks. Museum archives contain information not only about the objects in the museum but also about the professional group engaged with the institutional life of those objects. Often institutions that collect or exhibit multimedia artworks either participate in their technical development or facilitate their reinstallation, giving rise to a vast amount of material and nonmaterial data derived from these projects and ultimately processed by the museum’s archive and preserved in its records. The museum archive reflects simultaneously the impulse to archive everything and the impossibility of doing so. Although all institutions have archives, the archive of a museum— charged with caring for cultural, visual heritage—has a particular role in preserving records of the artifacts in its custody. Whereas many contemporary art museums adopt this role gradually, museums of modern and traditional art have long-established archival practices. The museum archive—and the museum as an archive—play a dominant role in creating the identity of the artwork.

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The role of the archive in the museum may explain why archival work is so closely associated with musealization, the process of separating artworks from the “immediacy of life”—their previous vital function—and preparing them for their afterlife as museum objects.13 In his essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” Theodor Adorno discusses the association between a museum and a mausoleum, ascribing to the two words more than a phonetic analogy.14 Adorno echoes both Heidegger’s contention that artworks placed in a collection have been “withdrawn . . . from their own world,” and Hegel’s remark that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.”15 Adorno, in juxtaposing Valéry’s and Proust’s views on art—Valéry emphasized the autonomy of the artwork, and Proust gave primacy to experience and memory—suggests that artworks must be sentenced to “death” in order to live. With the Adornian death and rebirth of objects in mind, and divorcing the archive from its exclusive “pastness,” one might conceive of the museum archive as a place where conservators and curators undertake the process of de- and re-activating artworks.

DISPERSION OF THE ARCHIVE

The museum archive consists of a network of microarchives housed in the departments of the institution. The archives of the museum’s director, as well as those of departments in the museum, including curatorial, conservation, registration, and technical, gather an ever-expanding quantity of information and knowledge about artworks and their performance in the museum environment. Additional archives might also be formed: MoMA, for example, maintains an archive documenting the history of the museum itself as an institution. A microarchive, consisting of part of a museum’s larger archive, is made accessible to researchers outside the museum according to conditions that are not always spelled out in a written policy. That microarchive omits material designated “for internal use only” (or containing confidential information). Moreover, the archives in a research library (like the ones at MoMA and the Stedelijk Museum) and sometimes an archivewithin-an-archive at a museum (like the Nam June Paik Art Center)—including artists’ correspondence, memorabilia, or even multiples of the artists’ works—contribute to the rhizomatic complexity of the archive.16 Consequently, the museum itself, as a locus of many heterogeneous repositories, can itself be seen as an archival space. Both the museum as an archive and the museum’s archive (specific to its institutional culture, collection policies, and the size of the institution itself ) shape the identity of an artwork in the museum’s custody by determining what is—and can be—known about it. In the day-to-day practices of an institution, microarchives in its departments are constructed simultaneously, with each department maintaining its own appropriately focused record of specific aspects of the work (such as its conservation record, registration record, and so forth). In other words, the separate repositories of object-related documentation disperse the archive throughout the museum. The museum pins down all possible evidence related to an artwork. Conservators are noted for their professional dedication to documenting artworks, and to preserve their

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findings, the conservation department creates its own specific archive (in the case of large departments, this can even be split into subdepartmental archives). The conservation department of the ZKM, for instance, maintains an extensive record of conservation, condition, and damage reports; exhibition and collection maintenance reports specific to each work (detailing daily maintenance procedures as well as reports of special requirements for works on display); and loan, storage-surveillance, and climate-control reports. My experience in various museums suggests that the conservation archive is often a repository of remnants: leftovers from an artwork’s installations, spare parts, replacement materials, and assembly instructions for pieces fabricated by the artist or disassembled in the course of maintenance. The conservation lab commonly retains elements of contemporary art and art created in situ that are not built into the exhibited piece; these often become a part of the material archive of a work. The conservation archive files may be accessible only in part, and sometimes only those with special permission or clearance are permitted to view them. The department responsible for exhibitions provides a vast amount of contextual information on artworks. It might maintain a record of an artwork’s past display and bibliography, correspondence with the artist, documents related to the context of the planned exhibition and provenance of the artwork; loan negotiations; ephemera such as flyers, exhibition posters, and notes; and even floor plans and drawings from past exhibitions and technical documentation on lighting, traffic flow, and room capacity. Exhibition staff might also draw on (and contribute to) curatorial archives that reveal details about the creation of an exhibition or artwork, correspondence documenting the often close relationship between artists and curators, and material remnants of these partnerships and collaborations. Curatorial archives can also include records of an artwork’s prior owners and exhibitions; documents of the acquisition process that might include information on an artist’s galleries and agents and the donors and prior owners of artworks. Researchers value these bits and pieces of information for the insight they offer into the artistic attitudes and processes guiding the realization of a piece and the circumstances of its exhibition or acquisition. Only rarely are these archival materials accessible to people outside the museum. The archive maintained by the registration department records the artwork during its time in the collection of the museum, including its commission, loans to external exhibition venues, storage, logistical issues such as transport and crating, and insurance data. The registration archive provides an overview of data on the artwork. Ideally, the collection management database is created in conjunction with the registration department’s records. The registration archive (or a part of it) can sometimes be made available to researchers outside the museum. The artwork can also be documented by photographs, notes, and the art-handling registers that record the unpacking of an artwork and its placement in a gallery or its crating and removal to storage. The photographic registry of the art-handling department

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is a source of site-related information about the condition of a work when it is unpacked or crated, its location in the exhibition space, and the institution’s handling practices. Institutions that collect media artworks have established departments that maintain playback and display equipment. A separate audiovisual department can preserve the artwork’s video and film carriers, including backup and/or digitized copies. These technical records can be incorporated into the conservation archive or kept in the technical department. Again, the information is often accessible internally in a database (ideally interdepartmental). The digitizing of artworks and the archiving of digital-born artworks, moreover, has led to the establishment of a hybrid archive and repository for digital works. Because the field of media art conservation is just emerging, the ideal form for this archive has yet to be developed.17 Microarchives will continue to develop to house records relevant to artworks, including those of even such seemingly unrelated departments as building services, which might have records relevant to the effect of security, building maintenance, climate control, and the illumination of spatial settings in the galleries where large-scale multimedia artworks are installed; and departments of education, public relations, and event management, as well as research institutes, museum libraries, or the so-called media library (Mediathek in German), all of which can provide invaluable information. In smaller institutions, a microarchive might take the form of a personal archive gathered according to the professional orientation and interests of its creator. The interrelation of the individual microarchives of a museum and the institutional archive as a whole is similar to the relation between the institutional archive and the larger cultural archive to which it contributes. Although the admitted “messiness” of the archival structures in a nascent discipline such as media-art conservation is defensible, there is no plausible explanation for the blurred boundaries of departmental archives in many museums. It appears to be caused by the conflict between the drive to classify and organize knowledge and the impossibility of classifying archival records clearly in accord with the temporal, cultural, economic, and political factors that condition them.18

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Research on the institutional history of an artwork requires that the researcher know how the microarchives of diverse departments function and what kind of information can be gathered from them. My research on Arche Noah was facilitated by my employment at the ZKM and my practical involvement in the recovery of the artwork from the vault. I gathered information that was scattered throughout the institution: photographs and reports about the condition of the artwork; art-handling sheets giving details about the wrapping, crating, and securing of the work for transportation and storage; data about its relocation; and playback and display equipment, which was stored in the museum’s external technical storage facility.19 I located traces of Arche Noah throughout the museum: disassembled planks, animals, and technical equipment in storage; documents in many archival registries; oral

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accounts and memories. All these findings—truly scattered, diffuse, and fragmentary— did not initially add up to anything physically identifiable as Arche Noah. Gradually, however, as I tracked diverse references and gleaned information from many departments, my image of the work began to crystallize. Its (re)materialization as an installation required help from and the creative involvement of conservators and, later, during the test reinstallation, a curator, technicians, and Paik’s assistant. This process drew on a combined creative and interpretative use of archival documents and tacit knowledge. The archive I describe here contradicts the ideal of a centralized, single, easily consulted locus of documents and materials, for I mined a dispersed system of institutional departments whose heterogeneity affects the construction of an artwork’s identity. Recovering the diverse fragments of a work from such a dispersed archive necessitates a more flexible and multi-locational effort to define what the artwork is in the institutional domain of a museum. This decentralization is reflected in other ways as well. Artworks are registered not only in the collection that houses them but also in other institutions that lend and borrow works for temporary exhibitions. As a result, material traces and information about an artwork can be found outside the museum. When pursuing research on a particular artwork, one often has to investigate the archives of the artist and track down information from his galleries, collaborators, estate, family, and friends. The archival research on Arche Noah involved consultation with Paik’s assistant and the ZKM’s technicians and curators. The archival research for TV Garden was more complex: the archives of three different institutions contained information on it, and each of those institutions, in its reinstallation, collaborated with different actors.20 Scattered and fragmented, the archive appears to be distributed across continents. When it is impossible to track down all the documents related to a work that has experienced a rich history of display and acquisition, no investigation into that artwork can be exhaustive; it can provide information on only a fragment of that artwork’s existence. Any reconstruction of an artwork’s biography based solely on its museum life or the documentation of its origins, moreover, can only be incomplete and fragmentary. According to Foucault: “The archive cannot be described in its totality. It emerges in fragments, regions and levels, more fully, no doubt, and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separates it from us.”21 A work’s identity is created on the basis of what the archive offers and what it withholds because of ruptures in its record, its belatedness, and its heterogeneity, and for this reason a researcher, curator, and conservator also confront a lack of documentation during their archival work. What lies between and beyond a gap in information, what is retrievable from it, may provide its own useful information. The construction of the identity of a multimedia artwork always depends on the information that is retrievable and accessible—within limits. This identity is formed on the basis of the archive, filtered through the present cultural context. The interesting question here remains: What do the archives make possible and what do they repress? Is all the materiality of an artwork archivable?

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T H E S YS T E M O F A C C E S S I B I L I T Y

Access to museum archives is highly controlled, first, because some information, for political, economical, and strategic reasons, is not meant to leave an institution; second, because the fragmented, scattered structure of museum archives hinders accessibility; and third, because some museums do not give conservators full access to the curatorial archive, and vice versa.22 The collection management database—if one exists—often gives limited, protected access to different departments. In the course of my research for this book, I encountered archives that, though inaccessible, nonetheless provided invaluable insights into their workings. For instance, my field research at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin (in October 2012) yielded no physical data on Paik’s installations in their collection, but I was able to glean a wide range of possibilities for interpretation by observing the works in situ and conducting discussions with members of the staff. On further reflection, I realized that even if the archives in Korea and Japan I consulted in my research had been wholly, formally accessible, culture and language would have imposed a significant barrier to eliciting information from them. Another aspect of accessibility depends on the organization and storage of documents and other archival information in the museum archive, which can often become more relevant than the content of the archive itself. An archivist has authority over the configuration of the archive. In the conservation archive, the conservator controls and maintains power over the organization and content of the archive. The archive is heterogeneous, both because it is created from physically diverse materials and because it implements different technologies to accumulate and maintain its contents.23 These technologies change not only the process of archiving but also the content archived.24 To use the archive effectively, one must learn how it is structured and how it functions—knowledge seldom obtained by individuals who do not work in the museum and have daily dealings with the archive. For example, my firsthand experience of the archive as a museum insider facilitated my research on Arche Noah, whereas with TV Garden, I could construct my knowledge on the basis of only the information made available to me as an external researcher. Knowledge of the system of the archive—the metadata, as it were, of archival knowledge that exists beyond the physical holdings—is key to accessing archival data effectively. A work reconstructed from a selection of incomplete documents results in imperfect records that can shape the work’s future manifestations. For instance, the earliest realizations of Arche Noah (with and without the plants, with and without banners) led to later versions (such as the one in the exhibition at the Energie BadenWürttemberg) that permitted greater change and more modification. In this way the accessibility of archival data on a multimedia installation shapes its identity; a work reinstalled on the basis of a fragmentary archive enters the archival domain as a possible model for future materializations. The museum archive / museum-as-archive is an ever-evolving space in which the flux of information is constant—a heterogeneous space with many points of access, all of

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which can affect the meaning of objects. The serendipity and unpredictability of retrieved information are interesting aspects of searching through an archive: we always find something other than what we are looking for—and what is to be found in the archive depends on where we enter it, that is, on our physical (location) and nonphysical (mentalcognitive) access. The greatest challenge in a well-functioning archive is the meta-structure of description and reference that enables users to retrieve information. The archive unveils its arcana only to those who engage with it on a conceptual level, where the information is created, where the resource is analyzed, and where one can learn about the economy of its function. The archive is a dynamic entity involving constant reorganization, addition, and loss. More than a physical realm of papers, files, and objects, it is also a conceptual realm of thought and interpretation, of tacit and embodied knowledge, and a condition of possibility for a multitude of readings.25

T H E V I RT U A L A N D T H E R E A L

Written material is a privileged kind of archival information, but must an archive be purely material? Is it merely the material sphere of the archive that shapes the identity of media installations? Boris Groys (following Derrida) calls writing a process that aims to compensate for the loss of origins; it is always insufficient in relation to the oral statement that precedes it, and always additive.26 Because archives are activated by interpretation, the archival sphere of nonphysicality that underlies the construction, understanding, and maintenance of the physical archive is as relevant as the physical contents of the archive. The material archive, as a collection of static documents, is incomplete (and inaccessible) unless supplemented by unarticulated, implicit knowledge and memory. Accordingly, even the most detailed archival record in the physical repository has to be completed by implicit knowledge. At the time of the test reinstallation of Arche Noah in 2008, for example, neither drawings for the work nor documentation of it existed, and the ZKM team had to assemble parts of the artwork gradually, from memory, with guidance from Paik’s assistant, on the basis of what he knew and remembered. Observing the team at work, I realized that Arche Noah was emerging from its fragmented physicality as a construction of memories and knowledge becoming explicit. Here the archive existed in the minds of those who knew which elements fit together and how they should be assembled. In their collective effort, these members of the team constructed the work’s identity in situ on the basis of data only they could view; no outsiders could access or view the memories or knowledge that guided their work. The archive, simply put, was in their heads. Arche Noah is not the only example of this dynamic. Close examination of other multimedia artworks makes it clear that all museum reinstallation practices are based only partly on physical archival documentation; they are completed by knowledge drawn from the nonphysical sphere of the archive.

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Thus thinking about archives and their role in shaping the identity of works of art requires taking into consideration dimensions beyond the material. Archives are more than physical repositories. They exist on other, intangible, impalpable, and nonphysical, levels of being.27 This existence is not, as some suggest, metaphorical, abstract, and conceptual; rather, I suggest, it is virtual and real.28 The virtual, implicit sphere of an archive is neither fully expressed and demonstrated nor clearly classified. Beyond the privilege of a haptic experience, the archive’s virtual sphere is silent. This implicit, virtual sphere of the archive is constituted by subject-oriented tacit knowledge (that is, the knowledge of individuals), memory, nonembodied skills (including the relation between body and mind), competencies, and systems of knowledge; it concerns information that is not formulated in any written instruction. The nonphysical archive is linked to its tangible counterpart by the potential of the nonphysical sphere to enter the tangible sphere in a process of explication and formulation. Like the physical archive, the virtual archive, constituted by interconnected terminals (knowledge that people might exchange) and permeating spheres (of memory and recollection), is essential in creating the identity of artworks. Arche Noah did not exist as a physical object until its reinstallation; it existed instead in the virtual dimension of the archive. The scholar of performance studies Diana Taylor posits that the archival document must be supplemented in embodied cultural practices (such as ritual, dance, and cooking) that are not commonly or formally considered “knowledge.”29 My concept of the nonphysical archive and Taylor’s repertoire of embodied cultural practices, both unquestionably necessary for the endurance of art forms (performance and multimedia), highlight the insufficiency of the physical archive alone. For Taylor, the repertoire enacts embodied memory and all sorts of ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.30

M E M O RY, TA C I T K N O W L E D G E , A N D T H E N O N P H YS I C A L A R C H I V E

During my research travels for this book, I had my most significant encounter with the virtual archive in Tokyo. It took place at the Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art, where I interviewed Etsuko Watari, the daughter of Paik’s mentor, the gallery owner Shikusho Watari. This interview revealed how much knowledge of Paik and his artworks resides solely in the memory of the Watari family.31 Their relationship with the artist was close, and they regarded him as a member of the family. The spontaneous events, long telephone calls, and creation of works that marked Paik’s visits to Japan reflect a situation common among members of a family—they treasured the memory of those visits and seem to have felt no need to document them. And according to Watari, such documentation was not necessary— they managed affairs from day to day without keeping records. For years Watari-Um was a family affair; only in the 1990s did the gallery become a museum. This history helps explain why the family’s knowledge of Paik’s

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artworks—including their number, components, mode of assembly, and other details— has never been written down. It has been passed on orally instead and will cease to exist once the person who “knows” it passes away. Scholars have related memory to the archive, usually contrasting it with the physical archive but also referencing memory to emphasize the archive’s role in constructing cultural memory.32 Sigmund Freud’s essay “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad” illustrates the workings of memory in the virtual sphere of the archive. In this essay Freud distinguishes between the materialized portion of his mnemonic apparatus as a permanent trace of memory and the sphere imprinted at the deeper level of his consciousness.33 To help his readers visualize his example and to explain the function of the layered perception of the human mind, Freud recalls ancient writing, on tablets of clay or wax, and its modern translation into the contrivance of a Mystic Writing Pad. To use the pad, well known as a children’s toy, one uses a stylus or a finger to inscribe marks on a plastic sheet that covers a thick waxen board. The marks are erased when the cover sheet is lifted away from the board. It is the contact between the sheet and the board, effected by the pressure of the stylus or fingernail, that renders the mark visible. Now, Freud asks, have the notes been removed entirely? If one inspects the deeper layer, the notes still exist although they do not manifest themselves on the surface. If the metaphor of the Mystic Writing Pad is applied to the concept of the virtual sphere of the archive, the deeper layer, which preserves earlier marks despite the addition of subsequent inscriptions, is an archive’s deep sphere of memory, suggesting that that there can never not be a (physical) trace (so that there always is a trace). New practices of reinstalling artworks generate inscriptions (for instance, descriptions of the installation that become instructions for future installations) that supplement the “deep” virtual archival sphere, which grows in response to them. So even if the surface might be temporarily “rewritten,” the deep archive “remembers” all the marks. There is a dark side to this supplemental growth, however. The ever-expanding body of archival information and inscriptions can stifle the artwork, blocking future materializations. Archival erasure to make room for new experiences might give a reconstruction the freshness it needs. The means by which memory makes recollection possible is related to tacit knowledge, which is the process of constant becoming. Memory is distinct from tacit knowledge in being oriented to the past.34 The historian and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi argues for the existence of tacit knowledge: unarticulated, nonverbal knowledge.35 Unlike explicit knowledge formulated in words, numbers, and figures, tacit knowledge has not been codified; it is subjective and related to experience. Explicit knowledge, transferred by sharing data, specifications, and procedures, stands in opposition to tacit knowledge, which is difficult to capture. Most important, however, Polanyi posits that all knowledge is rooted in tacit knowledge. If we accept this proposition, the logical consequence is that the archive is rooted in tacit knowledge, which is then explicated in written narratives. Unlike propositional knowledge, tacit knowledge is contained in prefatory phrases that express its personal nature—for example: “I believe” or “Some-

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thing tells me.” Polanyi, in his formulation “We know more than we can tell,” captures the tacit dimension of this knowledge.36 Scientific models cannot account for it—this knowledge is “known” without being articulated. The person who possesses tacit knowledge discloses it in his or her judgments, so that it is always personal and related to the person who “knows it.” Because tacit knowledge is constituted by the relationship between the person who knows and what is known, it is not easily transferable. In the presentation and conservation of multimedia art, tacit knowledge occupies a similar position and is not transferable to the written domain—a place reserved for explicit knowledge (according to the logic that to record knowledge in a document necessarily renders it explicit).37 This is not to say that tacit knowledge is knowledge that has not yet been written; instead, tacit knowledge refuses formulation. In everyday museum practice, the creators and users of the archive are engaged tacitly in a dimension of it that is never consciously knowable. In the archive, tacit knowledge constitutes the meta-level of archival awareness and encompasses simple practicalities, such as locating and storing information, and more complex efforts, such as mastering the complexities of an artwork’s function and meaning. Often, tacit knowledge is concealed from direct observation and introspection. Thus if a member of a conservation department receives an instruction from an artist about the installation of his work in an upcoming exhibition, a record of that instruction is created and printed and/or stored in a designated folder in the physical archive or in a database. These records are retrievable by means that are known internally yet rarely articulated or put into writing. The receipt of the artist’s instructions also prompts a range of actions that are not related to the archive—the head of a department is consulted, a technician is informed, and preparations for executing the instruction are undertaken. As Polanyi puts it, “In an act of knowing we attend from something for attending to something else; namely, from the first term to the second term of the tacit relation.”38 Actions are undertaken unconsciously and records are formed and deposited in a certain way. When the work requires technical assistance—the update of a data format, a particular cabling, the adjustment of a plug to local standards, or the calibration of a display, the related data and resources are retrievable in various locations and with the help of specialists in the museum. This retrieval system is an internal tacit knowledge inherent in the professionals of the particular museum in which the archive is located. Tacit knowledge is constituted by the (nonembodied, virtually present) skills, attitudes, and social relations of persons involved in creating the archive. If we think about the object and its environment as an ecological system—one involving organisms and their environment and all sorts of relations and interactions—this sphere of the archive would involve what Félix Guattari has classified as social, mental, and environmental ecologies.39 Institutional hierarchy and social relations, like the mental constitutions (affection or disapproval) of the persons involved and environmental circumstances, shape what an individual knows about an artwork. How records are gathered and how specialists approach the artwork manifest the emotional dimension of the archive. For

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example—and despite the premise in conservation that all objects should be treated with the same degree of attention—the personal preferences of actors involved in the re-creation or installation of a work cannot be denied. These preferences have an enormous impact on the handling and shaping of works. Because tacit knowledge, being personal, belongs to and characterizes those who possess it, it is impossible for the archive, on either its virtual or its physical level, to be conceptualized as a central body. Knowledge, whether tacit or explicit, is by nature dispersed and reaches beyond the museum. The archive consists, then, of the atomized knowledge of many individuals—artists’ assistants, curators, and technicians. Implicit knowledge manifests itself in the practical dealings of these individuals with artworks. I have often encountered such knowledge, which has refused to become explicable on any formal level. Observing the test reinstallation of Arche Noah, for instance, Paik’s assistant responded to questions about his methods and decisions from members of the reinstallation team by saying, “One just has to understand how Paik worked.” The tacit knowledge of Paik’s long-term collaborators cannot be grasped by experiencing his work; only an intensive engagement with Paik’s practices, attitudes, and methods can provide a picture of the impact of this knowledge on reinstallation procedures. Here, the process of “black boxing” put forward by the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour— a sociological process in which professionals and institutions hide detailed information about objects and processes once they become obvious to insiders—can help us understand the situation and link us again to the issue of accessibility.40 For Paik’s assistants, however—and, similarly, for others involved with the artist’s oeuvre—maintaining the arcane mystery ensures that their involvement in his works remains an exclusive right. Ongoing engagement with Paik’s oeuvre can have a financial (perhaps even narcissistic) motive. It is important here to draw a line between the mystified and the real. The real aspects of tacit knowledge, such as skills and attitudes, should be distinguished from the mystifying ones detectable in a generalized statement such as “That is how Paik would do it.”

C O N S E RVAT I O N N A R R AT I V E B E T W E E N A R C H I VA L R E A L M S

The archive contains diverse factual data, documentation narratives, descriptions of materiality, and remnants of works, but also—and equally—the oral accounts and tacit knowledge, skills, and competencies of those involved in shaping the lives of artworks. The archive, according to Sven Spieker, “oscillates between embodiment and disembodiment, composition and decomposition, organization and chaos.”41 In these inbetween spaces of the immaterial and physical archive, and in the archive’s charge to collect knowledge about artworks, conservation plays an important role in making decisions based on the archival record, in a reciprocal, continuous exchange. The rise of new, concept-based art forms and multimedia installations brought about new conservation practices in which documentation began to stand metonymically for conservation.

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Conservation, like archival intervention, has to do with the storytelling that accompanies the activation of the record. Tacit knowledge and memory, as well as physical records, are related to storytelling—the conservation narrative—at different stages of the narrative’s creation. Although tacit knowledge can never be fully explicated, it can sometimes be encoded in the language of conservation reports and other documentation. When writing a report, a conservator presents his or her personal perspective and affect (favorable regard of or apathy toward the object, for instance), translates his or her skills and abilities, and proposes an interpretation of the work. The conservation narrative becomes, to borrow a phrase Appadurai used in a different context, a “deliberate project”42 of imagination and interpretation, an amalgam of the translation of the physical and virtual spheres of the archive at different stages of the narrative’s formulation. In collecting, classifying, and interpreting traces of an artwork, the conservation narrative transforms the pile of loosely connected documents into a meaningful story, thereby depriving the archive of its naïveté. Because an archive is available only in fragments and regions, and at different stages, the conservation narrative is based on an interpretation of this archive and is thus never objective. The relation between the conservation narrative and the archive is reciprocal: the conservation narrative both draws from the archive, basing its content on archival traces and documents, and contributes to it, becomes part of it. The conservation narrative thus establishes a sense of history, of the time and circumstances in which it is created.

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9 ARCHIVAL IMPLICATIONS

T H E A R C H I VA L P OT E N T I A L I T Y

The archive—as a physical repository and a virtual sphere—constitutes what the artwork is in the present and determines its potential for a future realization. It plays a key role when curators and conservators become involved in the creative task of actualizing the artwork. Moreover, the archival potentiality of each new realization of an artwork is retroactive. Not only does each new actualization emerge on the basis of the archive, but every new actualization of a work enriches its archival potentiality and generates subsequent realizations. So the archive, far from being a static and distant entity, merges with the work, becomes part of it—so much so that, in certain works, the archive itself becomes an artwork.

A R C H I VA L J U D G M E N T S

Physical and virtual archives are the foundation of any reinstallation of multimedia artworks. In practice, the reinstallation process commences when the curator or conservator in charge of it consults archival resources: artist’s instructions and interviews, photographic and textual documentation, reports, and all available material evidence. Curators, conservators, technicians, and, if possible, artists’ living assistants and persons engaged in the work’s earlier realizations are mobilized. These individuals bring to the process their knowledge and skills, drawing on memory and translating their subjective tacit

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knowledge into tangible actions. Conservators are essential in this process. Selecting from the archive’s abundance of information requires sound judgment. This is a two-way process: curators and conservators also decide which information enters the archive to become the potential basis of an artwork’s future reinstallations. Although conservation in recent decades has sought to distance itself from the tradition of restoration, the field still lacks rules to govern reinstallation and regulate documentation practices. Frequently, conservators making decisions follow earlier decisions, either documented in archival records or embodied in the practices of various actors (such as other conservators, curators, technicians, and artists’ assistants). They apply rational thinking to the interpretation of facts and to the implementation of their own knowledge of the tenets and ethics of conservation practices. Practical knowledge guides the decision making of conservators and legitimates what they draw from and contribute to the archive. Aristotle introduced the notion of practical knowledge—phronesis—in his Nicomachean Ethics (350 bc).1 In his analysis of wisdom and intellectual virtues, Aristotle distinguishes between theoretical wisdom, sophia, an ability to discern reality, and episteme, knowledge that is built up logically and is teachable. Accordingly, phronesis, the capacity for rational consideration, can deliver tangible results. Like the conservator’s role in making judgments related to the archive, phronesis involves deciding how to achieve a certain end. But more than sheer skill (technê), phronesis is the ability to reflect upon good ends, which are consistent, in Aristotelian terms, with “good living.” Aristotle placed sophia above phronesis on the scale of wisdom and contended that the highest pursuit of wisdom requires both virtues, for phronesis facilitates sophia. The judgment implemented in the conservation of multimedia art is reflective judgment—to use a term from Kant—which starts with the particular and seeks a concept that fits it according to community consensus, or “common sense.”2 Thus when we say, “This is beautiful,” we anticipate the agreement of others, even though that expectation arises primarily from our own sensuous experience of some particular thing rather than from a universal concept. To find the rule that fits best, we begin with the particular and judge the fitness of the rule in the context of a social discourse instead of starting with the rule and imposing it. Reflective judgment in conservation resembles what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt understood as practical (as opposed to theoretical) reason. Combining the Aristotelian and Kantian notions of judgment, Arendt posits phronesis, the measuring of proportion in political and artistic matters, as a forerunner of judgment.3 For Arendt, phronesis is judgment in a particular situation. Along lines similar to Arendt’s idea of phronesis as judgment in a particular situation, the law, according to legal theory, cannot determine its own application; that is the role of the judge and jury. They decide whether a law applies to a particular situation and whether there are mitigating circumstances. For instance, in the British system of justice, cases themselves establish precedents and become part of the law. Conservation decisions based on the archive that shape an

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artwork’s identity likewise mobilize both rational and practical knowledge and also the precedent of earlier decisions. In Arche Noah, for example, the closed-circuit video feed of the canal that runs beside the museum has not been part of the work since its initial installation at Weisses Haus; its absence has not been an issue because Arche Noah, after that first exhibition, has not been installed again at that site. (One might well ask, however, whether including a video of any local canal in Arche Noah in the subsequent reinstallations of the work would not be a sensible solution.) The plants in Arche Noah, which were not present at Weisses Haus, are now perceived as intrinsic to the composition and are likely to remain a permanent element of the artwork’s installations. Yet the papier-mâché animals—once considered integral elements of the work—were absent from reinstallations in 2008 and 2009, making their future inclusion uncertain (or at least not obligatory). Judgment and precedent played key roles when TV Clock, Moon Is the Oldest TV, Arche Noah, and TV Garden were adapted to spatial conditions in the place where they were reinstalled. The situation of the Stedelijk Museum’s TV Buddha was similar. (The original Buddha statue was supposed to be replaced temporarily—during a construction and renovation project that would have affected the gallery’s climate control—by a surrogate statue.) The curator’s request to replace the statue of Buddha there was grounded in cases involving multimedia installations whose identity and validity were not tied to a particular sculptural or technical element. In Canopus, however, the reconstructed hubcap could not be used, owing to the value assigned to the painted inscriptions on the original damaged hubcap; yet Canopus‘s monitors, chassis, and playback device (together with its data) were all modified or replaced. The case of Canopus might have had a different outcome had there been a precedent for reconstructing the work’s Wirkung rather than preserving a fetish of historical material. A complicating factor in decisions about multimedia installations is the impossibility of applying scenarios and principles drawn from traditional works. As policies governing installation artworks continue to develop, judgments rely increasingly on comparative methods. Conservation, instead of depending solely on the scientific knowledge of general truths and technical know-how, links knowledge, virtue, and reason in judgments and interpretations of the archive.4 Accordingly, in actualizing the work of art from the archive, conservation balances technê and episteme and contextualizes them in the present temporal situation.

F R O M T H E V I RT U A L TO T H E A C T U A L

In Bergsonian philosophy the virtual and the actual coexist; Deleuze has discussed the two ideas in relation to possibility and virtuality.5 For Deleuze, possibility refers to the somehowalready-known physical state of before, whose realization presupposes a certain form. For Bergson, who differentiates between something real and something possible, although the real action has already passed, the possible action has not (yet). Realization presupposes a

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dependence on limitation and resemblance, meaning that the image of the possible that is being realized must be mirrored in the real. The exception to this requirement is the concept itself, to which the difference between the possible and the real does not apply. Therein, as Deleuze observes, lies the problem. In realization only some “possibles” “pass” into the real; others are repulsed because of some implied limitation.6 The preexistence of the possible—its preformed, ready-made form—passes over into existence following the order of successive limitations.7 By contrast, virtuality lacks preexistence in any possible form; it exists in a state of potentiality located in the sphere of the unknowable. Both virtual and actual states are real states. An argument following Deleuzian thought might be made that in the archive, artworks exist in states that are virtual and real (without being actual and ideal, and without being abstract). Although the virtual must be actualized, it does not have to be realized, thus following the rules of difference and creation rather than of limitation and resemblance. Deleuze points to another consequence of the division between the virtual and the real: whereas the real resembles the possible that it realizes, the actual does not resemble the embodied virtual. Bergson, eventually turning against the concept of the possible as a false problem, bases his notion of evolution precisely on the transfer between the virtual and the real. Moreover, he equates actualization with creation. According to these arguments, the Deleuzian virtual, as a pure qualitative differentiation, might be comparable to the (changeable) multimedia artworks ready to be drawn from the archive, to be actualized. In other words, the potential of these artworks to change rests in the ability of the virtual to become actualized, including all modifications and differences that the passage from virtual to actual brings about. Not only are conservators responsible for this transfer, but they must also be creatively involved in the process of actualization—which, according to Bergson, is creative by nature. The virtual presence of an artwork in the archive awaits its actualization anew as one of the artwork’s many virtual potentialities. Actualization never exceeds the potential of the virtual. The potential for many different actualizations that inheres in an artwork’s virtual quality, ready to unfold on the basis of the archive, is nothing other that the artwork’s inherent changeability. In other words, what we perceive as the changeability of artworks is their potential to become different in their transformation from the virtual to the actual. The archival form of a multimedia artwork thus stands for its identity—which persists through time, the changeability of actualizations to which it is open notwithstanding. Its identity admits no linearity, can convey no sense of progression or regression, and renders each actualization of an artwork equally significant. The openness of an artwork to change guarantees the occurrence of future actualizations based on and drawing from the virtual type and the constant enhancement of the characteristics of the type in its continuous actualizations. Hence the archive, in its heterogeneity and temporal equivalence, accommodates both the virtual type ready to be actualized and the (historical and evidential) token of its actualizations.8 Because actualization from the archive always takes place in the present, its only obligation is to the present. Here the Bergsonian notion of a virtual past in, or coexistent

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with, the present is relevant. For Bergson and Deleuze, the past is not behind the present on a timeline but coexists with it, as illustrated by the cone (see fig. 20): if the present did not contain the past, and the past, the present, the present would not have become the past. From a different perspective, the actualization of the archive might be seen as a driving force behind what Doane calls the “ ‘presencing’ of the past moment through the expansion of its length to present.”9 Presencing, in other words, is the process of actualizing the past as an experience of the present. This definition of presencing has two implications: first, archiving is equivalent to being deactivated from the present, the loss of an actual state; and second, actualizing is, of necessity, always something new, something that emerges by creation.

A R C H I VA L A C T U A L I Z AT I O N A N D C R E AT I V E C O N S E RVAT I O N

In recent installation practices, the archive has become increasingly a realm of creative implementation of conservators’ skill and knowledge. Their creative work can best be observed in examples of multimedia artworks that incorporate perishable, recoverable, and ephemeral materials that require a continual cycle of exchange and rearrangement. The conservators’ creative activities, as they draw from and contribute to the archive, differ from those of the artists who create a work. The point here may lie in the distinction between creation and re-creation. That this creative side of conservation and restoration has for decades been banned from the day-to-day repertoire of conservators’ and restorers’ activities, may recall the Brandian prohibition on entering the “restricted sphere of the creative process.”10 The roots of the restriction can be found in the history of conservation, which, before it achieved the status of a science, was a craft in which artists, artistic restorers, and craftsmen “refreshed” or “re-created” an artwork (their own or that of another) by overpainting a canvas or, in a sculpture, adding new elements to replace lost ones. A set of norms in Capitolato (1777), by Pietro Edwards, the director of restoration of public paintings in Venice, was among the first signs that conservation was moving away from creative intervention. Edwards’s norms prohibited the removal of old inpainting and proclaimed areas of lacunae (areas of paint loss) as the only places where new inpainting was allowed.11 Other voices relevant to the development of conservation as a discipline were those of the Austrian and German art historians Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and Georg Dehio (1850–1932), who advocated conservation instead of restoration.12 The shift from “restoration” to “conservation” reflects a tendency to divorce the profession from its creative aspects. Emerging in part from the Romantic appreciation of age and decay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the critique of restoration was elaborated most extensively in John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).13 Ruskin believed that restoration falsifies the object (an object being, according to Ruskin, a relic of a past that communicates with the future) and renders illegible the trace of history that Ruskin saw as the most valuable feature of an object.14

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By contrast, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc advocated a permissive attitude toward reconstruction. He believed that a building should be restored “in a condition of completeness which might never have existed at any given time.”15 This approach implies some creative license. The conservator Hanna Jędrzejewska acknowledged conservation’s interpretive capacity in 1976, writing, “The whole work of a conservator is a constant sequence of interpretations, as this is what guides his decisions and procedures.”16 Helen Glanville reconfirms both Viollet-le-Duc and Jędrzejewska in her commentary on Conti’s History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (1988) when she writes: “Restoration cannot but modernize, interpreting according to its own frames of reference, so that these re-creations by the conservators tell us more about the time in which they were carried out than the times and concerns of the original artist.”17 Lowenthal, in criticizing preservation as the process of turning works into relics and thus disabling new creation, sees it as crippling the creative use of the past: “We further isolate what we preserve.”18 His critique clearly addresses the dismissal of creativity in traditional conservation, which focuses on saving properties and artifacts rather than ideas and culture.19 D. E. Cosgrove takes creativity in conservation a step further, claiming that conservation, because it intervenes in the life of an object, may be regarded as “creative intervention, subject to the same individual and social negotiations and struggles over meaning and representation as any other action.”20 Among writings published in the twenty-first century, Muñoz Viñas’s Contemporary Theory of Conservation acknowledges conservation as a creative profession, pointing to its “fabrication of heritage.”21 Frank Hassard calls conservation-restoration a “creative practical discipline,” following in the footsteps of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who argued that the restorer, the preserver of tangible heritage, is necessarily an artist of his time.22 The history of conservation has been marked by taboos and restrictions, proving the aptness of Nietzsche’s observation that a profession is defined by things its practitioner is forbidden to do.23 With multimedia installations conservators can no longer withdraw from creative intervention; the many examples scrutinized in this book confirm that every actualization or reinstallation necessarily involves creativity. This is not to say, however, that the creativity of conservation appeared only with these media, for it has always been present in conservation, in the stories it tells about its objects (conservation narratives), interpreting and actualizing them according to the cultural context of the time in which the installation operated. Moreover, the creative aspects have long been manifested by conservation in transferred murals; lined, reframed, and recontextualized paintings; and the restored sculptures and ethnographic objects that populate our museums.24 Thus the creative aspects of conservation were not an invention of postmodernity but merely became more explicit with the introduction of multimedia art and contemporary works governed by the logic of recurrent materializations and engagement with the archive. And conservation has not shunned restraint in its encounters with the supposed “original”; rather, it has crystallized its role and sharpened its capabilities in confronting the openness of artworks that change over much shorter periods of time than “traditional”

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paintings and sculptures. In that sense (to amend a phrase borrowed from Bruno Latour), we have always been creative.25 Conservation’s encounters with multimedia installations have taught the profession to express its creative side more openly. As Lowenthal has stated: “Nothing ever made has been left untouched, nothing ever made remains immutable; yet these facts should not distress but emancipate us . . . since to appreciate the past is to transform it.”26 History is a way of activating the past, and any object of inquiry can be read differently by applying different discursive practices; the only commonality of these possible readings is the difference that characterizes them over time and space.27 In creating its narratives, conservation creatively invests in the history of artworks and must be seen, according to Paul Eggert, “as a competing and complementary authorial (or editorial) agency, occupying a place in the work. This has effects on how we view the concept of the work and how we understand each individual one.”28 The productive acknowledgment of the creative power of conservation and the decisions made in the process of conservation may abet its emancipation as a discipline, ultimately freeing conservation from the habit of latching onto new developments in the arts and curatorial practice. That belatedness is especially apparent in conservation’s preoccupation with the meticulous capture of the “singular condition” of artworks according to countless protocols pursued with clockwork discipline. Ultimately, Viollet-le-Duc’s idea of restoration is not entirely foreign to the view of conservation proposed in this book. Acknowledging the creative aspects of conservation that recall his sense of restoration as re-creation, however, entails no obligation to remove traces of the life the object has already lived or to re-create the work in an idealized version. Instead, the Viollet-le-Ducian perspective allows conservators to approach the archive creatively, to actualize a multimedia artwork without abandoning responsibility to its identity. Conservation, by creatively “presencing” the past—making the past present by extending its duration into the present and thus rejecting the isolation of the past from the present—shifts the locus of importance from the physical artifact to its signification, its embeddedness in discourse and intertextuality. Conservation draws from the multiplicity of a multimedia artwork’s virtual existence in the intangible dimension of the archive to actualize the work.

F R O M A R C H I V E TO A RT W O R K A N D A RT W O R K A S A R C H I V E

Conceiving of an artwork apart from its archive is unthinkable because the artwork is irreversibly bound to its archive, which shapes its identity, and because its actualization is dependent on the archival realm. The archive is, in fact, an active part of the artwork, rather than some distinct and static repository of documents. This dynamic is especially clear when the archive becomes or replaces an artwork. Paik’s deactivated participatory installations, such as Random Access and the deactivated TV Cello (Museum Bochum), are often displayed in archival form, that is, as information on

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the past activity of an artwork in archival photographs or films. In such a display, the archive assumes the entire identity of an artwork; it stands for the artwork, displaying its records and relics. Can this relationship be reversed? Can an artwork become an archive? I propose that it can. Paik’s Untitled (Piano), created in 1993, is a closed-circuit multimedia installation with sound that is now in the collection of MoMA in New York (plate 23). It consists of an upright piano, fifteen television sets, two cameras, two laser disc players, a floppy drive, and an electric light.29 The work also exists in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a slightly different title, Piano Piece, and at the Guy Pieters Gallery in Knokke, Belgium, has taken another form and a new title: Video Piano (1999). Like their titles, MoMA’s and AlbrightKnox’s “Pianos” are similar. In both, the upright piano is presented with an opened lid lit by an electric light. On top of the piano, a compact bank of traditional cathode-ray-tube monitors transmits moving images. In MoMA’s Untitled, on both sides of the keyboard and on the floor sit four smaller television sets. The Albright-Knox installation includes a stool; MoMA’s does not. In both works a cascade of black cables falls from the monitors to the floor at the sides of the piano. They connect the televisions with their playback devices— laser disc players placed on the floor symmetrically to the left and right of the piano. At MoMA the piano plays generic music—show tunes—whereas at the Albright-Knox it plays a piece of music composed by Richard Teitlebaum especially for this work. Some of the monitors show images of John Cage, accompanied by Paik’s hands playing the piano, and pictures of Cage’s partner, the dancer Merce Cunningham, as a child and an adult. The other monitors show two videos, one a live video feed of the piano playing itself (from the floppy disc), and the other a real-time video of the piano’s hammers striking its strings. The playback and display apparatuses are essential to the instantiations of Paik’s artworks, not only in their compositional role, but also in the ever-shifting balance between their sculptural presence and technical function. Here is the problem: What should be done if the equipment succumbs to wear and tear and technical obsolescence? The obsolescence of U-matic and laser disc players parallels the obsolescence of TV sets and raises questions: Are these audio-visual devices important primarily as the carriers of image and sound? Or is their chief significance sculptural? Paik authorized the replacement of the earlier U-matic players with newer laser-disc equipment at the time MoMA acquired (Untitled) Piano in 1993. Now the time has come to find a newer technology to replace the laser disc players and floppy discs from which the piano plays the show tunes. After extensive research, MoMA added a new device (IQ Intelligent Player), which would take over the function of the floppy disc, and placed it next to the old (floppy-disc) player.30 Thus the old apparatus, with its documentary value, would be retained, making the generational replaceability of playback equipment a moot issue and avoiding the consequences of removing the older elements. Would this approach work with laser disc players? The evidence suggests that it would not. The Stedelijk Museum recently replaced the playback apparatus—which had a certain sculptural value—in Paik’s Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn, of 1984 (plate 24). This

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solution, while radical, is consistent with Paik’s attitude toward the medium. For Paik, according to John Hanhardt, senior curator for media arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “The medium was fundamental to the experience of the work. At the same time, he’s open to the reality that media has changed, and that his work has to change with it.”31MoMA considered maintaining the appearance of Untitled (Piano), with the old, obsolete equipment on either side of the piano and the new playback device (DVD or computer hard drive) concealed from the viewer. This solution poses questions about honesty with the viewer and renders the deactivated apparatus a relic. Here again is an instance in which changeability, reflecting the traditional conservation culture of preserving physical artifacts, allows a profound change that finds precedent in historical practice. In this instance the relic was deactivated yet retained for its aesthetic, sculptural value and as a record of historical instrumentation.32 This solution is no less problematic than the outright replacement (in the absence of the artist) of the old equipment with new, state-of-the-art technology. For the museum, the decision to reduce a changeable work to its institutional histories—within which, and on the basis of which, it may be further reinterpreted and modified—seems rational and defensible. Untitled (Piano) suggests how the history of an installation can be an institutional one (related to MoMA’s history of this artwork, rather than to all its extant variants outside the museum, such as the Albright-Knox’s Video Piano, or variants from before its entry into the museum). Untitled (Piano) collects traces of generational shifts in technology and mirrors the cultural-economic context of the times in which it is conserved. Here, the shift is seen not only in the migration of the artwork’s hardware but also in the migration of its data. MoMA transferred the video data of Untitled (Piano) from laser disc to the Digibeta (Digital Betacam) format for archival purposes and to uncompressed QuickTime files for its exhibition. In searching for the best and earliest version of the tape, MoMA’s conservation department strove (with the support of Paik’s estate) to retrieve the earliest available U-matic three-quarter-inch tape. The multitude of data formats and forms of playback apparatus inherited by the work is further expanded by an additional Digibeta file that surfaced sometime in the history of the work. Untitled (Piano) is not the only example of an artwork that accumulates traces of its history. Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (see fig. 24) not only discloses the heterogeneity of its temporal strata, but also illustrates aptly how a painting can “archive” its strata. Although that idea lies beyond the scope of this book, it can be pursued further and tested in relation to a range of traditional media, such as cut, framed and reframed, lined and relined paintings; repainted canvases; and polychrome sculptures—and perhaps even examples of architecture. The many musealized forms of early conceptual art provide examples of such “accumulative” artworks. For instance, in reconstructing the exhibition history of Joseph Kosuth’s Glass (one and three) from 1965, Sanneke Stigter points to the materializations its instructions have generated.33 The artwork consists of a large rectangular sheet of glass, a photograph of the glass (of approximately the same dimension, it reflects the site in which the work is exhibited), and a glossary definition of the

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word glass presented on a panel—three elements installed next to each other. As the work moves through sites and contexts, new instantiations of the sheet of glass leaning against a wall challenge conservation, with questions about not only the re-performance of the instructions in the absence of the artist, but also the new photographs that will inevitably become part of the work; the presence of photographs of previous instantiations that have acquired historical value are a further complication. This work exemplifies its own archival capabilities. Rather than a singularity occurring in space and time “accompanied” by documentation, Glass (one and three) is an ever-expanding archive of residual objects. Discussing the large site-specific project Drifting Producers (2004) by Flying City, the art historian Tatja Scholte introduces the concept of an expanding artwork—one that accumulates objects and stories as it moves through geographically distant locations.34 Elsewhere, proposing that the idea of an artwork as a self-archiving entity be expanded to computer-based art, I have shown how the source code of an early vanished example of Dutch computer-based artwork became archived in subsequent artistic projects.35 The artwork—in its ability to store the physical variants of diverse executions and equipment and the mental, economical, and political attitudes of the parties involved— thus becomes an archive of its own changeability, an evolving container of information with a guarantee of future extension. Artworks, according to Heidegger, do not simply disappear into the world but create their world.36 They become archival entities where past, present, and future blend. It might also be said that as artworks involve protentions and retentions of their instantiations, they accumulate the past in the present. These characteristics refuse to be contained in a single instance of an artwork; instead, they extend to all variants of a work in multiple collections, introducing yet another record of the changing characteristics of artworks.

T E M P O R A L M AT E R I A L I T Y, E N D U R A N C E , AND CONTINUITY IN THE ARCHIVE

The physical and virtual archive takes an active role in creating and harboring the identity and maintaining the continuity of works of art. It contains the potentiality to transform changeable artworks. The singular form of “the archive,” often used in common language (or as it occurs in an illusory picture of archival centrality), is contradicted by its scattered and dispersed character, for it is an entity that is—in both its physical and nonphysical spheres—heterogeneous and always subject to reorganization and reclassification. Owing to this complexity and apparent messiness, the archive—and thus available information on the artwork—is accessible only in part and its contents are often fragmentary. Just as decisions about future embodiments of artworks are made on the basis of the archive, the resulting embodiments reciprocate by contributing to the archive. The archive does not reduce objects to their past manifestations. It is not a static domain of records documenting an artwork’s retrospective changeability but a dynamic entity

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directed to the future. New iterations of artworks produced from the archive immediately enter and transform it; thus the formation of the archive is itself recursive. The archive becomes a condition for the possibility of change in an artwork, maintaining relationships that evolve, slowly but continuously, with everyone involved with the artwork: conservators, custodians, and also observers. The archive resolves the dialectic of concept and material explored at the beginning of this book. In this understanding of the archive, the concept ceases to be something transcendental and beyond the reach of methods of practice, but is contained within the archive. The archive is also the key to the enduring identity of a multimedia artwork: instead of guarding a homogeneous sequence of sameness, it maintains the identity of artworks while allowing the change to persist. The limits on the extent to which these artworks can change—the limits of their changeability, as well as whatever restrictions are specified or prescribed by documents in the archive—are determined by the judgment of those involved in the process of reinstallation, conservation, presentation, and archiving of multimedia art. But the conservation of multimedia artworks relies on Aristotelian phronesis—a rational consideration of a specific situation to achieve tangible effects—rather than a top-down application of rules. The conservator’s role is to maintain the work’s identity by interpreting and actualizing the archive creatively according to the rules and values of the culture of conservation. In a Foucauldian sense, these conventions and this culture set limits on what can be said or made. The conservation of multimedia installations is intended, not to return to a past “original state” or to yield to a preoccupation with the distant past, but to effect an active and creative “presencing” of artworks; it is the creation of the archive that will guide future iterations of the work. Because changeability shifts the discourse to the dimension of time and the material of multimedia artworks is temporalized, an archive that is temporal and “contains” time allows us to conceive of a certain kind of temporal materiality of artworks. In other words, the changeability recorded in the archive is a foundation of an artwork’s temporal materiality. Because the documentary work of the archive has made it the basis of decisions that shape an artwork’s identity, it is no longer the artist exclusively who shapes that identity. The archive relativizes the weight of the artist’s intentionality, making space for the involvement of others—conservators, curators, and technicians—in the creative actualization of the artwork, thus making it a realm of social investment.

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Is there a point when the archive ceases to be the realm of an artwork’s actualization and the work becomes something different? In other words, what are the archive’s limitations? At the simplest level, we can conceive of an artwork completely detached from its origins, an occurrence that is at least theoretically feasible somewhere on the cultural and geographic periphery beyond the influence of the archive (“dead objects” in ethnographic collections, for example). Certainly, the destruction or loss of the physical archive (to think of Derrida’s archive as only a physical, destructible locus of records) would expunge any

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information it contained. The virtual archive, however—tacit knowledge and memory— would exist as long as the “transmitters”—the artists’ collaborators and assistants—were alive and able to remember the artwork (the process of its making and the events surrounding its distribution and display). Their forgetfulness would result in a new identity for the artwork. This result implies that access to the archive is required for the actualization of a work. That access is given in the form of sanctioned information from those who have tacit knowledge and memory, whereas after artists die, their estates and the institutions that house their work often control their physical archives. The archive may also be limited by what is permitted to enter it and what is excluded.37 And access to the archive may depend on policies, written or unwritten, by those in charge of the archive or even on something as mundane as the ability or inability to read instructions or understand the language of technical drawing. Depending on the cultural context and the time when decisions are made, the physical archive may not hold enough information for conservation to actualize an object as a genuine instance of an artwork. This problem brings up again the question of what can and cannot be conserved. Western conservation culture does not acknowledge a reconstruction (which would generally be based solely on the virtual archive) as a legitimate instantiation of an artwork. For this reason exhibition objects and replicas are a subject of debate—they exceed the limits of conservability, in that the quality (virtual or physical) and quantity of the available archival information fail to justify their status as legitimate works of art. What to make, then, of Paik’s prophecy that in the future, the only artworks that survive will have no gravity at all? I believe that the response to that prophecy lies in turning what looks like a problem into an opportunity to rethink the value of the physical traces of the artwork in relation to the open horizons of nonmaterial preservation. In the slow transformation of conservation culture—the transformation of media cultures happens with far greater speed—Paik’s media have already begun to instigate changes.

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CONCLUSION The Many Archai of Conservation and Curation

To conserve an artwork today requires that the conservators understand what it is. Traditional approaches to conservation, presentation, documentation, and storage have ceased to serve artworks that are not simple objects but heterogeneous assemblages of things processing, and being processed by, time. The questions that inspired this book— What is the object? and What we are conserving?—became as I wrote it a more general inquiry into the identity of artworks. Specific problems in the conservation of multimedia installations inevitably led me to broader considerations of art, culture, and, in particular, time, confirming that the theory and practice of conservation belong to a broader study of material culture that considers how humans engage with objects in general. New thinking about the persistence of identity in artworks that experience change addresses the virtual and material evidence of the archive—cultural, social, and political matter ready to be unfolded in the ever-changing context of the present. One of the contributions of this book is that it conceives of conservation as a set of intertwined discursive and physical practices related to the archive. Such an understanding of conservation modifies and shifts its meaning from the management of physical works to the discourse about them and their interpretation. Just as the archive can have many arches (that is, many origins, beginnings, archē being a root of the word archive), Arche Noah—the Ark— carries its own rich history of material traces, ephemeral media, and the evidence of people reacting to and acting upon it.1 The Ark / Archē is a vessel of archival knowledge carried into the future and ready to be interpreted. To support the argument for the artwork itself as an archive, I turn again to the assertion of Peter Weibel, the chairman of

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the ZKM, quoted at the beginning of this book. According to Weibel, Arche Noah represented “the first storage of information, the first human hard drive—a kind of . . . firstever database.” That Weibel saw in Arche Noah the storage of information means that he assumed artworks can indeed be repositories of events, facts, and materials, and it is up to us to discover how to think with and about them. This book argues that an engagement with the conservation and presentation of multimedia art is one route to that discovery. In our postmodern—or post-Internet—times, conservation must look beyond the purely material and affirm the continuity of art through change. “Material preservation,” according to Lowenthal, “is an illusion. . . . What matters in preservation may be continuity of form, of substance, of texture, of color.”2 Such thinking about the continuity of forms opposes the gravity of the authentic object that is prized in traditional approaches to museology and conservation. Indeed, objects—either recovered, reinstalled, or actualized—never remain the same, and the search for authenticity (as Taruskin argues in the context of musicology) must be replaced by the definition and maintenance of identity. Another innovative idea of this book is to present conservation as a temporal intervention in a work that inevitably adds something new to it; conservation redefines its value as a creative endeavor with the artwork even as it also discovers its culturally contingent limits from its involvement with the archive. The conservator and custodians, as archons of the archive (magistrates of archival origins in the Derridian sense), go beyond any preoccupation with the physicality of artworks and reach into the realm of creative—and also perhaps controlling—power. The argument of this book, although it focuses on Paik’s media art, applies to other artworks characterized by continual rematerialization, changeability, heterogeneity, and temporal materiality. The search for the identity of artworks can be extended to, and become intrinsic to, any branch of curatorial and conservation studies concerned with art forms—including performance, web-based and software-based art, conceptual art, and land art—and the archive offers a point of departure and arrival for a wide range of artworks. Moreover, a better understanding of multimedia installations and the aspects of time they involve can teach us how to approach other, traditional, art forms, such as painting and sculpture, more fruitfully. All media respond variously to time and inherit different forms, degrees, and rates of changeability. In forging these concepts, this book aims to stimulate a reconsideration of museological approaches in general, by pushing beyond the debates that seem to keep museum professionals locked in traditional paradigms. This book acknowledges that custodians, conservators, and museum professionals already re-create and reinterpret works of art to communicate their multiple meanings. When media technologies becomes obsolete as a result of the very progress that gave rise to them, the question whether the medium is more important than the message is more urgent than ever. The conservator’s task, based on the knowledge derived from the archival domain, is to scrutinize the artworks with which he or she is engaged and weigh the dependencies of the medium and the message in and according to the present cultural context. The task also involves leaving future interpretations open, not in the inter-

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est of reversibility or authenticity (questionable notions), but in the acceptance of other future interpretations of the archive. Archival reinterpretation has its rationale and foundation in the archive, which henceforth remains a condition of change in multimedia artworks in another present, or in a different future. Nam June Paik, in a letter to Edy de Wilde, director of the Stedelijk Museum from 1963 to 1985, wrote as follows on September 25, 1977: “As for the eternity of my work, you don’t need to worry at all. . . . It will last longer than Vermeer or Rembrandt. You simply repair or replace the picture tube when it gets old, which is cheaper than [a restorer].”

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

Canopus was assembled in Paik’s workshop, run by the gallery owner Carl Solway in Cincinnati, and acquired by Heinrich Klotz in the early 1990s for the emerging media art collection of the ZKM. Along with a large part of the ZKM’s Paik holdings, it was displayed at Energie Baden–Württemberg (EnBW), Karlsruhe (in Nam June Paik: Werke aus der Sammlung des ZKM, October 23, 2008–January 18, 2009). Throughout this book, unless relevant in the context, the term conservation replaces conservation-restoration, often used in South and Central Europe. Charles Merewether and John Potts, After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press 2010), 5. Hanna Hölling, Revisions— Zen for Film (New York: Bard Graduate Center; dist. University of Chicago Press, 2015), 79. I introduce the term proto-new media to denote media characterized by the anticipation of technologies, including the Internet and new forms of global communication. Paik was a forerunner in the use of new media (connectivity, networks, and global communications) in the visual arts in such works as his seminal video Global Groove (1973), the project Electronic Superhighway (submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974), and satellite broadcasts such as Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) and Bye Bye Kipling (1986). For the definition of emulation and migration, see Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, “Variable Media Glossary” (2003), accessed April 12, 2015, www.variablemedia. net/pdf/Glossary_ENG.pdf. For the difficulty in establishing definitions regarding these media, see Hanna Hölling, “Versions, Variations, and Variability: Ethical Considerations

1 71

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

and Conservation Options for Computer-Based Art,” in Electronic Media Review of Historic and Artistic Works, vol. 2, ed. Jeffrey Warda (Washington, DC: American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 2013), 33–45. For a related topic, agency mediated by artworks, see Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Paik died in Miami on January 29, 2006. I refer to the concept rather than the contemporary literal sense of the word artist; instead, Vasari’s subject is referred to as an artefice (artificer). Paul Philippot, “Restoration From the Perspective of the Humanities,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1996), 217. Brandi’s Theory of Restoration outlines the theoretical and practical framework for restoration and included guidelines on the ethical issues of restoration. This work also assigns a high value to the historical, material authenticity of the artwork. Using the principles of Gestalt psychology, Brandi describes an artwork as a set of related constituent parts rather than their sum, and bases his theory on the presumption of the univocality of artistic intent. Brandi, in succinct axioms, advocates, for example, that decisions in restoration should not be dictated by the randomness of taste and subjectivity, declares creative conservation unacceptable, and because for him only the artist can enter the time when the artwork was created, prohibits the conservator from doing so. He further maintains that all restoration work should be reversible and that the conservator should respect the history of the artwork. The founding principle of his theory was the unity of an artwork (which cannot be divided into its constitutive elements); he further conceived in an artwork a relation between “aspect” (aspetto, or image, which must be preserved unaltered) and structure (struttura, which is subject to restoration). Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2005), 62. See also Helen Glanville, introduction to The History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art, by Alessandro Conti, trans. Helen Glanville (London: Elsevier, 2007), xx. Salvador Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation (Oxford: Elsevier, 2005). Muñoz Viñas speaks of “classical” rather than “traditional” conservation. In the field of conservation of time-based media installations, Pip Laurenson, in “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations,” critiques the traditional “conservation object.” See Tate Papers 6 (2006), www.tate.org.uk/download/file /fid/7401 (accessed December 12, 2014); and Laurenson, “Shifting Structures, Identity and Change in the Conservation and Management of Time-Based Media Works of Art” (PhD diss., University College London, 2011). Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham examine the challenges posed by the presentation and preservation of recent media in their volume Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Although the intellectual work of the heritage theorist David Lowenthal is not strictly a conservation theory, I would like to acknowledge its influence on current thinking in conservation. For more on the “methodological moment,” see Brandi, Theory of Restoration, 48.

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

Installation art, as a term related to both the medium and a set of practices, is a hybrid notion that can be related only tentatively to what Erika Suderburg describes as a genre informed by set design, Zen gardens, soft architecture, Happenings, bricolage, spectacles, multimedia projections, shrines, earthworks, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century panoramas, Wunderkammern, cabinets de curiosité, and Arte Povera. See Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–22. I avoid the term video sculpture, which suggests the normative museum tradition related to traditional art such as painting and sculpture. Paik himself dismissed this term, associating it with sculpture, which he found appropriate for works “enclosed” in themselves, such as those by Shigeko Kubota. Although for him the word installation was also “not really chic”—he associated it in German with plumbing (in German, Installation means “sanitary installation”)—I nevertheless use it throughout this book. For the terminology Paik used, see David Ross, “Im Gespräch mit Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time—Video Space, eds. Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1991), 58. Suderburg addresses the relation of the noun installation to the verb to install. Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention, 4. For the term technology-based installation art, see William A. Real, “Towards the Guidelines for Practice in the Preservation and Documentation of Technology-Based Installation Art,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 40 (2001): 207–25. For the term time-based media installation in relation to works that incorporate a video, slide, film, audio, or computer-based element, see Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss.” Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss;” Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 3. According to Muñoz Viñas, science “became the primary way to reveal and avail truths,” only during the Enlightenment, a development that coincided with public access to art and culture. Muñoz Viñas explains that Romanticism gave further recognition to artists and artworks (attributing to the artist the role of special individual and exalting the ruin as an epitome of beauty) and to nationalism (establishing the cult of monuments as symbols of national identity). Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss.”

P A RT 1

1.

Boris Groys, “Introduction: Global Conceptualism Revisited,” e-flux 29 (November 2011).

CHAPTER 1

1. 2.

Nam June Paik, “Input-Time and Output-Time,” in Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (New York: Raindance Foundation, 1976), 98. While Arche Noah can be associated with water, Canopus can be associated with air, Candle TV (1975) and Eine Kerze/One Candle (1989) with fire, and another of Paik’s works from the Planets series, Earth (1990), with earth.

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Heinrich Klotz, “Nam June Paik,” in Moving Image: Imatges en Moviment—Electronic Art, ed. Heinrich Klotz (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró; Karlsruhe: ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie; Stuttgart: Oktagon Verlag, 1992), 106. Peter Weibel, “Nam June Paik Arche Noah, 1989,” in Johannes Brümmer et al., Nam June Paik: Werke aus der Sammlung des ZKM (Karlsruhe: EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG and ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 2008), 22. Fulfilling the dream of any connoisseur of new media, the gallery was equipped with its own U-matic players and floor sockets to plug in video hardware. Maria Troy, “Video Preservation: A Report From the Trenches,” Afterimage 23 (1996), www.experimentaltvcenter .org/video-preservation-report-trenches (accessed February 17, 2015). Elke von Radziewsky, “Kunst ist Lebensstil,” http://www.zeit.de/1989/23/kunstist-lebensstil (accessed April 17, 2015). Weisses Haus issued an invitation to the exhibition in the form of panoramic postcards along with a toy TV set—a “Plastiskop”—that enabled the viewer to see images of every installation in the exhibition by looking through a viewfinder and turning a knob. Archive of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Erik Andersch Collection, Archive of the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin. Photographs of the Weisses Haus exhibition, however, depict the monitors with a blue image, presumably static. A possible explanation for this oddity is that one channel of the installation was not receiving a video signal at the moment the photograph was taken. A CRT monitor receiving no signal displays a monochrome blue image, unlike newer LCD and plasma televisions that remain black. Wulf Herzogenrath, in discussion with the author, March 2010. In his archive, Wegner still has the video camera that captured the live feed of the river. Thomas Wegner, in discussion with the author, December 2012. The pupils are said to have created the animals to finance the class’s study trip to Italy. The animals were made with chicken wire, wheat paste, and waste paper and painted in acrylics. Grau recalls that he proposed creating the animals with his class when he heard about Paik’s project. Although Paik approved the ensemble, Grau remembers his own disappointment that the artist did not acknowledge the work of his pupils during the exhibition opening. Christoph Grau, in discussion with the author, December 2012. MultiMediale 2 Karlsruhe took place as a festival from May 28 to June 2, 1991, and as an exhibition from May 28 to July 7, 1991, at the Opel factory in Karlsruhe. Paik purchased his preferred acrylic-based paint in tubes, often using it directly from the tube, unmixed. Translation by Yunjun Lee. Inscriptions also appear on other works by Paik, notably Canopus, which features black calligraphy, and Passage (1986), which is decorated with silver calligraphy. This modification bears a striking resemblance to what Paik did with the electronic garden of the earlier work TV Garden. According to Jochen Saueracker, the number of plants in the 1992 Barcelona installation far exceeded the number in the 2009 ZKM/ Energie Baden–Württemberg (EnBW) Karlsruhe ensemble. Jochen Saueracker, in discussion with the author, June and August 2010. Brümmer et al. Nam June Paik, 23–25.

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18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

The plant ensemble is never retained at the museum; it is replaced each time the work is installed. Peter van Mensch, “Museology and Management: Enemies or Friends? Current Tendencies in Theoretical Museology and Museum Management in Europe,” in Museum Management in the 21st Century, ed. E. Mizushima (Tokyo: Museum Management Academy, 2004), 3–19. For Martha Rosler, installations can live only in museums, thereby undergoing “museumization.” Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment (1985–86),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1996), 472. Adorno discusses the museum in terms of the life and death of artworks. Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum: In Memory of Hermann von Grab,” in Prisms (London: Garden City Press, 1967). For a related critique, see Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005; originally published 1934). Deborah Cherry, “The Afterlives of Monuments,” South Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (2013): 1–14. TV Sea is also regarded primarily as a form of presentation of the video Global Groove, which Paik had just created. Grace Glueck, “About Nanda Bonino,” in Nam June Paik: Eine Database, eds. Klaus Bussman and Florian Matzner (Ostfildern-Ruit: Edition Cantz, 1993), 53. The American engineer John J. Godfrey helped Paik edit the video material in the TV Lab of the WNET New York Public Media and was acknowledged as a co-author of this work. John J. Godfrey, in discussion with the author, February 2013. Glueck, “About Nanda Bonino,” 51. Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1997), 95–96. Wulf Herzogenrath, “What Is the Original in Video Art,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidemann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 27–37. Unlike Paik’s other videos, in which the pace and quick change between the sequences of the visual content were prevalent, TV Garden’s Global Groove required the viewers’ prolonged attention—and that requirement explains why Paik wanted to construct a barrier, a railing, on which spectators could lean. Herzogenrath, in discussion with the author, March 2010. For an analysis of installations invoking sensory perceptions, see Deborah Cherry, “A Sea of Senses,” in Right About Now: Art and Theory since the 1990s, eds. Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), 16–25. ‘Second nature’ was introduced by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács. Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 13–31. See also Paik’s comparison of video and nature mentioned in the context of Arche Noah. Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeology: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 250. Herzogenrath, in discussion with the author, March 2010.

NOTES TO PAGES 22–26

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33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

Dan Flavin, quoted in Greg Allen, “The Dark Side of Success,” New York Times, January 5, 2005. According to the Variable Media Network (VMN), it is uncertain whether in Wellington, New Zealand (when the work was installed for the exhibition The World Over: Art in the Age of Globalization, at City Gallery, in 1996) the Oriental Paintings were involved. See the transcript of Preserving the Immaterial, a conference held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, March 31, 2001, http://variablemedia.net/e/preserving /html/var_pre_session_one.html (accessed December 10, 2014). The titles Video Fish and TV Fish, often used interchangeably, can cause confusion. Whereas Video Fish (1975) consists of a varying number of aquariums containing live fish placed in front of TV sets playing video, TV Fish (2004), as shown at the James Coleman Gallery in 2009, involves only two fish tanks with monitors. Paik also created Real Fish / Live Fish (1982), consisting of two elements, a fish TV tank and a TV monitor, in which a camera films a live fish and displays it on the monitor. In the sentence that follows in the text, Vitiello, for instance, refers (if obliquely) to TV Fish, having in mind the multiple-monitor installation Video Fish (1975). See Preserving the Immaterial, ibid. Preserving the Immaterial. Paik’s Moon Is the Oldest TV (1965) and Video Fish have been loaned to his Düsseldorf and Liverpool retrospectives with similarly loose instructions. Initially a scrim or curtain was considered to enclose the space and protect it from the dispersed light of the rotunda. Neither Global Groove nor Oriental Paintings is considered part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum. When I researched the work in 2010, the museum, in order to play the video, had to request permission from the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to include it in the installation. The museum staff recall that this manifestation of TV Garden was arranged in a space protected, at least at some point, by a scrim, and the volume of the audio was set too low. Archive of the conservation department, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. The installation comprised 60 monitors and 260 plants. The assistant curator at Tate Liverpool, Eleanor Clayton, recounted the process: “[Huffman] gave us a shopping list of all the things we would need, including three people to help him install the work over five days . . . he specified the type of plants and we basically started Googling to research the best place to get them from.” Clayton is quoted in Laura Davis, “Creating Nam June Paik’s TV Garden and Video Fish at Tate Liverpool,” Liverpool Daily Post, January 27, 2011, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Recreating+a+pr evious+piece+of+art+can+be+a+fishy+business.-a0247598127 (accessed April 18, 2015). Nam June Paik Art Center online database, http://njpac-en.ggcf.kr/archives/artwork /n006-tv-garden (accessed January 10, 2015). Sang Ae Park (archivist at the Nam June Paik Art Center), in discussion with the author, October 2012. The certificate is housed in the archive of the Nam June Paik Art Center.

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NOTES TO PAGES 26–29

CHAPTER 2

1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

The sources that follow helped me develop my thinking about conceptual art: Jon Bird and Michael Newman, introduction to Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Jon Bird and Michael Newman (London: Reaktion, 1999), 1–10; Camiel van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2005); and the genealogies based on Duchamp’s idea of the readymade; see Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). I explore Paik’s connections to conceptual art only in installations that can be rematerialized with the addition of new elements. Unlike TV Garden, Arche Noah, with its “permanent” elements of the vessel and, theoretically, also animals and photographs, does not follow this logic. I do not suggest that Paik conceived his works in the spirit of eliminating the art object or with Joseph Kosuth’s emphasis on art-as-idea. See Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972), xi; and Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International (October 1969). To my knowledge, Paik’s multimedia works never existed as a pure set of instructions unconnected to their realization— unlike the conceptual works of Lawrence Weiner (Declaration of Intent, 1968) and Sol LeWitt (Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1969). See Benjamin Buchloh, ed., Lawrence Weiner: Posters November 1965–April 1986 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Toronto: Art Metropole, 1986); and Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” ArtLanguage 1 no. 1 (1969). Stephen Vitiello, in conversation with John Hanhardt, in Preserving the Immaterial, transcript of the conference held at the Solomon T. Guggenheim Museum, March 31, 2001, http://variablemedia.net/e/preserving/html/var_pre_session_one.html (accessed May 10, 2015) . Osborne, Conceptual Art: Themes and Movements (London: Phaidon, 2002), 21. Ibid. Ibid. Camiel van Winkel, “The Obsession With a Pure Idea,” in Conceptual Art in the Netherlands and Belgium, 1965–1975: Artists, Collectors, Galleries, Documents, Exhibitions, Events, eds. Susanna Héman, Jurrie Poot, and Hripsimé Visser (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2002), 30. The art historian Edward Shanken posits that the correspondences between the practices of conceptual art and art-and-technology, as reflections of each other that are inseparable from their temporal context, offer grounds for rethinking them in relation to the broad cultural transformation from the machine age to the so-called information age. Shanken cites Jack Burnham’s System Esthetics (1968), drawing from that work a parallel between conceptual art and developments in system theory and computer information processing. See Edward Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002): 433–38; and Shanken, “The House that Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of Software as a Metaphor for Art,” in Reframing Consciousness: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era, ed. Roy Ascott (Exeter: Intellect, 1999), 156–61. See also Theodore H. Nelson and Les Levine, “From Software— Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art; Exhibition at the Jewish Museum,

NOTES TO PAGES 30–31

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

1970,” in New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 247–57. The relation of the conceptual tendencies in art of the 1960s and 1970s to media art in general is beyond the scope of this book, but it is an area ripe for future consideration. For example, the influence of Fluxus on the genesis of conceptual art has recently been reconsidered; see Osborne, Conceptual Art, 19–20. Steve Dietz also has drawn parallels between LeWitt’s instructions and new media— which I argue Paik’s media works anticipated. See Dietz’s “Collecting New Media: Just like Anything Else, Only Different,” in Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce Altshuler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 89. Vitiello, in Preserving the Immaterial. Saul Ostrow, “Interview With Sol LeWitt,” Bombsite, www.bombsite.com/issues/85 /articles/2583 (accessed January 27, 2012). Archive of the Nam June Paik Art Center. For the use of certificates in art practices, see Martha Buskirk, “Certifiable,” in In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art, eds. Susan Hapgood and Cornelia Lauf (Amsterdam: Roma Publishers, 2011), 98–102. Bart Rutten (curator, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), in discussion with the author, November 2012. The composer and musicologist Michael Nyman recalls that in a letter to Cage, Paik expressed pride that he did not work with “graphically notated scores.” Michael Nyman, “Nam June Paik, Composer,” in Nam June Paik, ed. John Hanhardt (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), 86–87. Susanne Neuburger, “Terrific Exhibit: ‘Time Art’ Alias Music in the Exhibition Genre,” in Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, Revisited, ed. Susanne Neuburger (Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 37. In fact, according to Neuburger, only one of Paik’s performances was re-enacted—by George Maciunas: One for Violin Solo (1962). One of Paik’s scores, Danger Music for Dick Higgins, proposes that the performer “Creep into the vagina of a living whale.” John Cage, Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969). According to Noël de Tilly, an artwork completes the process of socialization with its exhibition, distribution, and preservation. Ariane Noël de Tilly, “Scripting Artworks: Studying the Socialization of Editioned Video and Film Installations” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2011), 12. These instructions ensure that the manipulated TV set will continue to operate after the model becomes obsolete. For the instruction, see Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection /Addenda II (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology and Baxter Art Gallery, 1983), 285–88. Created for the traveling exhibition Electronic Superhighway: Nam June Paik in the Nineties (1994–96, Fort Lauderdale, FL; Indianapolis, IN; Columbus, OH; Philadelphia, San Jose, CA; San Diego, Jacksonville, FL; Kansas City, MO; Honolulu; Copenhagen). Archive of Carl Solway, Cincinnati. The instructions were presumably prepared by Paik’s fabricator Mark Patsfall in 1999.

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

Andreas Kreul, “[Stille und andere Geräusche, re:] Hamlet de Brooklyn. Conversing With(e-)out . . . ,” in “John Cage und . . . :” Bildende Künstler, Einflüsse, Anregungen, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Barbara Nierhoff-Wielk (Cologne: DuMont, 2012), 284. Nam June Paik, “Random Access Information,” Artforum 19 (September 1980), quoted in Vitiello, Preserving the Immaterial. On art produced by “the others,” see Michael Petry, The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011). The video Global Groove, which became a component of TV Garden, emerged from a collaboration at the TV lab at WNET in New York. The term collaborator has often been used in relation to Paik’s mentor John Cage; notwithstanding their influence on each other beginning in the 1950s, they did not, to my knowledge, work together over a longer period to realize ideas. Nam June Paik, “De-Composition in the Media Art,” in Nam June Paik: Eine Database, eds. Klaus Bussmann and Florian Matzner (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1993), 21. Shuya Abe, a Japanese engineer and Paik’s collaborator in Tokyo, dismissed Paik’s assessment and maintained that the artist was well acquainted with technical matters and relentlessly studied books on technology. Shuya Abe, in discussion with the author, October 2012. Gene Youngblood maintains that in the Vasulka archive, “there’s a rare 80-minute interview with Nam June Paik in which the patriarch of video uncharacteristically talks tech.” Youngblood, “A Meditation on the Vasulka Archive,” La Fondation Daniel Langlois, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php? NumPage = 179 (accessed April 18, 2015). Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 74. Eleanor Lyon, “Behind the Scenes: The Organization of Theatrical Production” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1975), 89, quoted in Becker, Art Worlds, 70. Becker, Art Worlds, xxiv. Paik, “De-Composition in the Media Art,” 18. For a collaboration between Paik and Moorman, see Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Paik, “De-Composition in the Media Art,” 21. These musical and performance connotations, which occur with relative frequency in Paik’s language, receive more focused attention later in this book; see Chapter 3. Paik, “De-Composition in the Media Art,” 15. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press 2004), 561–64. The artist Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), Paik’s spouse, in discussion with the author, December 2010. Glenn Downing (Paik’s collaborator), in discussion with the author, February 2013. The colorful and somewhat accidental assemblages of Paik’s robots recall what the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage, or making as thinking, that is, putting things together and working with existing materials and elements. See Claude LéviStrauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). This idea seems especially apt with regard to the relation between the concept and materiality in Paik’s works.

NOTES TO PAGES 34–37

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

Mark Patsfall (Paik’s collaborator), in discussion with the author, April 2011. Tak Akira, Sol LeWitt’s long-time collaborator and assistant, insists that the work of the collaborator has creative aspects: “We are making art. We are not copying.” Simone Miller, “ ‘You Can Take Liberties!?’ Material und Idee—Konzepte zeitgenössischer Künstler und ihr Einfluss auf Erhaltungsstrategien” (conference paper, presented to the German Association of Conservator-Restorers, Cologne, November 18–19, 2011). Nam June Paik, “De-composition in the Media Art,” 21. Camiel van Winkel, During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed: Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2012), 168. The Paik-Patsfall collaboration commenced in 1983–84 with a portfolio that included a set of prints Patsfall was commissioned to create so that Paik could sell them and repay Carl Solway, to whom Paik was indebted for financing one of his satellite projects. Mark Patsfall and Carl Solway, in discussion with the author, December 2010. Patsfall designed a number of installations and sent them to Paik for approval or discussed them with Paik when he visited Cincinnati. For example, Patsfall executed in its entirety the large installation 32 Cars for the 20th Century: Play Mozart’s Requiem Quietly, created on the occasion of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1997. He recalls that Paik was able to view the installation only during the opening and disliked the silver color Patsfall had painted the cars. Patsfall, in discussion with the author, December 2010. K456, a twenty-channel remote-controlled anthropomorphic robot, could walk and excrete beans. Eduardo Kac, “Foundation and Development of Robotic Art,” Art Journal, Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology 56, no. 3 (1997): 61–62. Solway, in discussion with the author, December 2010. While acknowledging Solway’s involvement in the development of the robot series, John Hanhardt suggests its genealogical link to Paik’s non-anthropomorphic installations such TV Cross (1966) or TV Bed (1972). John Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000), 175. Paik’s assertion relates to his satellite projects, such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap around the World (1988). Paik, “De-Composition in the Media Art,” 20. Paik used the term factory for his studios in two locations—Cincinnati and New York. Nam June Paik, “Nam June Paik: Is Paik Fake?,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com /watch?v = rtJR6NLcWLg (accessed April 18, 2015). The emergence of the factory in Cincinnati and the studios in New York was mirrored in Paik’s increased productivity in the 1980s and 1990s. Eunji Kim calculated that Paik created eighteen videotapes and fifteen video installations in the 1970s and forty-five video installations and sculptures in the 1980s; in the 1990s the number of works increased to more than a hundred. Eunji Kim, Nam June Paik: Videokunst in Museen; Globalisierung und lokale Rezeption (Berlin: Reimer, 2010), 216. Warhol’s Factory embodied larger cultural changes in the role of the artist. See Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 189–267. The shift from traditional art making to art as “industry” evident in Paik’s practices was later echoed in Hans Haacke’s

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NOTES TO PAGES 37–39

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

argument that, rather than mystify artistic production (the distribution and consumption of art), we should use the term industry to describe it. Haacke quoted Martina Weinhart, “The Making of . . . Art,” in The Making of Art, eds. Martina Weinhart and Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 61. Van Winkel, for instance, speaks of the artist as a manager rather a “maker.” Van Winkel, During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed, 209–11. Ursprung here addresses Olafur Eliasson’s studio practice. Philip Ursprung, “Narcissistic Studio: Olafur Eliasson,” in The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work, eds. Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice, Antennae Series (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009), 164–83. See also Wolfgang Ullrich, “Art as the Sociology of Art,” in The Making of Art, eds. Martina Weinhard and Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Köln: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 98–101. In addition to the Mercer Street loft where Paik and Kubota lived, Paik maintained at least three other studios in New York—on Grand Street, Broom Street, and Green Street. Kubota, in discussion with the author, December 2010. Paul Garrin (Paik’s collaborator), in discussion with the author, May 2012. A large part of Paik’s studio was donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Wulf Herzogenrath, in discussion with the author, March 2010. The German word Wirkung aptly conveys how an object appears and appeals, operates and behaves. For a related notion of the artwork as a social process, see Bruce Altshuler, ed., Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Hans Ulrich Reck, “Authenticity in Fine Art to the Present Day,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable Is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidermann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 98. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 96.

CHAPTER 3

The epigraph to this chapter is from Nam June Paik, “Artificial Intelligence vs Artificial Metabolism,” in Nam June Paik Fluxus/Video, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Sabine Maria Schmidt (Bremen, Germany: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), 252–53. All spellings and capitalizations are per the original. The translations of German words are my own. 1.

2.

Paik’s difficult relationship with the country of his birth is implied by his leaving the country during the Korean War—an absence interrupted only some thirty-four years later by his first satellite television show, Good Morning Mr. Orwell. See Jieun Rhee, “Reconstructing the Korean Body: Nam June Paik as Specular Border,” Oriental Art 48, no. 4 (2002): 47–50. See Yongwoo Lee, “Information e comunicatione, Information and Communication,” in Nam June Paik: Lo sciamano del video (Milan: Editioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1994), 70.

NOTES TO PAGES 39–43

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

See Wulf Herzogenrath, “When the Future Was Now: Wulf Herzogenrath on Nam June Paik,” Tate Etc., http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue21/namjunepaik.htm (accessed December 23, 2014). Paik acknowledged his debt to Cage, claiming that he had left Germany to come the United States only because of Cage. Moreover, he used to refer to the time before his encounter with the avant-garde composer as “BC”—“Before Cage.” See Holly Rogers, Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8. For the philosophical relation of Cage to Zen Buddhism, see Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats (New York: Penguin, 2012). Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1997), 31. L’arte dei rumori , by Luigi Russolo was published in English as The Art of Noise (Futurist Manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou, as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press, 1967. Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, 29–30. See Wulf Herzogenrath, Nam June Paik: Fluxus-Video (Munich: Silke Schreiber Verlag, 1983), 10. See Jacquelynn Baas, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus Reader (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Academy Editions, 1998); and Thomas Kellein, Fluxus (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel; and Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1994). Paik, quoted in Manuela Ammer, “In Engineering There is Always the Other—The Other: Nam June Paik’s Television Environment in Exposition of Music. Electronic Television, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal 1963,” in Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, Revisited, ed. Susanne Neuburger (Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 65. Paik, in Calvin Tomkins, “Video Visionary,” New Yorker, May 5, 1975, quoted in Ammer, ibid., 74. The inclusion of twelve TV sets alludes to Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4—where each of twelve pairs of performers operates one radio—which Paik believed may have been the beginning of media art. See Dieter Daniels, “John Cage and Nam June Paik ‘Change Your Mind or Change Your Receiver (Your Receiver Is Your Mind),’ ” in Nam June Paik, eds. Sook-Kyung Lee and Susanne Rennert (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 107–26. Paik, quoted in Susanne Neuburger, “Terrific Exhibit: ‘Time Art’ Alias Music in the Exhibition Genre,” in Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, Revisited, ed. Susanne Neuburger (Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 32. These concerts include Hommage à John Cage (1959), Etude for Pianoforte (1960), participation in Stockhausen’s Originale (1961), and One for Violin Solo (1962). See Paik, “Artificial Intelligence vs Artificial Metabolism,” 252. For instance, TV Garden is dated to 1973, 1974, 1977; TV Clock appears in archival resources dated to 1963, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1989, 1991, and 1963–81. Paul Garrin points out that old pieces involving video tapes of other artists, TV broadcasts, and recordings of dance and of Paik’s own performances with Charlotte Moorman were reused and remixed in subsequent video productions. Garrin, discussion with the author, May 2012. Herzogenrath, Nam June Paik: Fluxus-Video, 10–11.

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NOTES TO PAGES 43–46

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

“Ich dachte bis jetzt: Variabilität und Intensität lassen sich vereinbaren. Jetzt weiss ich: Variabilität ist eine notwendige Folge aus Intensität.” Paik, quoted in Herzogenrath, Nam June Paik: Fluxus-Video, 10. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). The feminist theorist Judith Butler contends that understanding gender as a condition of ‘doing’ something is an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script. The actors involved in that understanding make gender as an act a reality by repeating its performance in agreement with their own belief. J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 233–52. Performative work would thus differ from what David Davies calls performed work (or performance-works) and work-performance. See David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 210–35. Although I use the words props and leftovers interchangeably in this book, in performance they can differ. Props are objects intentionally created for a performance (and can emerge before the performance); leftovers are objects produced during or after a performance and can emerge in a chance situation. Not all leftovers of a performance are props, and not all props remain after a performance ends. So Cage, for instance, declaring 4′33″ a performance, transforms what a piece of music is and what it means to listen; every sound that occurs during that performance is music, to be listened to with attention. Here, Paik switches his method from music performance to the performative and transforms media performance into performative visual objects. In her quantitative study, Eunji Kim notes that about a third of Paik’s artworks that entered museum collections had already been reproduced (54 of 154 objects) by the time of their acquisition and that now one of every two works by Paik (a total of 76) cannot claim to be a unique object. Kim also calculated that 53 percent of art museums worldwide hold his reproduced works. Kim, Nam June Paik: Videokunst in Museen; Globalisierung und lokale Rezeption (Berlin: Reimer, 2010), 64. Denis Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerold Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Dutton follows the idea of twostage and one-stage works described by Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1976), 114. Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” 265. Davies, quoted in Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” 265. For the relation of musical performance to interpretation, see also Davies, Musical Works and Performances. On the implementation of his theory in conservation studies, see Pip Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations,” Tate Papers 6 (2006), http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7401 (accessed December 12, 2014). Tina Fiske, in her essay “White Walls,” pursues Derridian reflections on repetition and difference to devise an alternative view of, and a model for, conserving and re-creating installations, based on iterability and an “ethics of otherness.” Fiske, “White Walls: Installations, Absence, Iteration and Difference,” in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas,

NOTES TO PAGES 46–48

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

and Uncomfortable Truths, eds. Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2009), 229–40. For a discussion of values, see Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Development,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1996), 69–83; and Barbara Appelbaum, “Values Analysis, the Timeline, and the Ideal State,” in Conservation Treatment Methodology (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2009), 194–231. Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss.” Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “continuum,” http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english /continuum?q = continuum (accessed February 2, 2015). Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” 267. See also Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” 266. Taruskin associates the emergence of such an objectified musical work-thing with the time when storage in museums became possible. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10. Ibid., 102, 143. Cesare Brandi seems to share the skepticism about “historical” performances. Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2005). For another association of musical ontology with the visual arts, see Howard S. Meltzer, “Constant Change, Constant Identity: Music’s Ontology,” in (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time, eds. Judith Schachter and Stephen Brockmann (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, Center for the Arts in Society, 2008; dist. Pennsylvania State University Press), 51–58. This dispensation might be withheld when display equipment plays a significant role in the aesthetic appreciation of the piece—so that it becomes an object, a sculpture, rather than an “instrument.” See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 112, who equates the allographic with the nonautographic. Jerrold Levinson criticizes Goodman’s classification because it fails to account for—and seems unaware of—the history and context in which the non-autographic arts, music and poetry, are bound up. Levinson, “Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited,” in Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 38, no. 4 (1980): 367–83. Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss.” Kirk Pillow, “Did Goodman’s Distinction Survive LeWitt?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61, no. 4 (2003): 379. The production history of supposedly allographic architecture may present the same problem; see Kirk Pillow’s improbable suggestion that the Chrysler Building be rebuilt somewhere else on the basis of its original plans. Pillow, “Did Goodman’s Distinction Survive LeWitt?,” 376. Some years after the EnBW exhibition conservators at the ZKM did actually reproduce photographs from earlier prints.

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NOTES TO PAGES 48–50

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76, 88; Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 232. Randall R. Dipert, “Types and Tokens: A Reply to Sharpe,” Mind 89 (1980): 587–88; see also Davies, Musical Works and Performances, 231–32; Dipert, “Towards a Genuine Philosophy of the Performing Arts,” Reason Papers 13 (1988): 182–200; and Dipert, Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Davies, Musical Works and Performances, 232. Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, ed. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 23. Duchamp’s gesture aimed to show that the conditions for a work of art are not intrinsic but appear only with the artist’s signature. Paik, in contrast, signed Zen for TV to hold up for aesthetic contemplation an object—a TV set—not normally considered an art object. On the monitor case of Zen for TV in the Silverman Fluxus Collection at MoMA, however, Paik inscribed (at the request of the collector) the number of the work’s “edition”: 4/12. This inscription determines how the object is treated and preserved—as “unique” rather than repeatable. LaMonte Young, quoted in Neuburger, “Terrific Exhibit,” 42. Paik’s Zen for Head was one of a series of performances of Young’s score by other artists. Simon Anderson, in discussion with the author, May 2012. In this context, closure can also refer to the limits of conservability. For closure as a central question in contemporary philosophy, see Hilary Lawson, Closure: A Story of Everything (London: Routledge, 2001). Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). See David Robey, introduction to Eco, The Open Work, ix and x–xi. Eco, Open Work, 1. Eco, Open Work, 3. Stephen Vitiello, quoted in John Hanhardt, “Case Study Nam June Paik—TV Garden 1974,” Permanence through Change, http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/271.php (accessed January 21, 2015). See also Preserving the Immaterial. Quotations are from the Notes on Equipment (undated, but presumably 1999), Archive of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Eco, Open Work, 86. Eco, Open Work, 21. Eco’s concept was inspired by the philosopher Luigi Pareyson, whom Eco quotes (in Open Work, 21): The work of art . . . is a form, namely of movement, that has been concluded; or we can see it as an infinite contained within finiteness. . . . The work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just “parts” or fragments of it, because each of them contains the totality of the work, and reveals it according to a given perspective. So the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the performer’s individuality and in that of the work to be performed. . . . The infinite points of view of the performers and the infinite aspects of the work interact with each other, come into juxtaposition and clarify each other by a reciprocal process, in such a way that a given

NOTES TO PAGES 51–55

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point of view is capable of revealing the whole work only if it grasps it in the relevant, highly personalized aspect. Analogously, a single aspect of the work can only reveal the totality of the work in a new light if it is prepared to wait for the right point of view capable of grasping and proposing the work in all its vitality.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

Eco, Open Work, 16. Sartre contends that the essence—as a concatenation of appearances and itself an appearance—and existence of a phenomenal being (object, being something or someone) is nothing but a connected series of its manifestations. These manifestations stand in relation to the changing object and are infinite. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), xii. Kevin Hermberg, Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity and Others (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 6. For a critical assessment of Eco’s theory and its failure to specify either the extent or nature of the spectator’s creativity, see Gustaf Almenberg, Notes on Participatory Art: Toward a Manifesto Differentiating It from Open Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse, 2010), 92–97. Opera Aperta must be understood in the context of the polemics that marked the dominance of Crocean aesthetics in the Italian academic world of the 1960s. Benedetto Croce understood art as a mental phenomenon communicated directly from the mind of the artist to that of the reader, viewer, or listener. The (material) medium of the artistic work was irrelevant to Croce, for the work’s significance lay in the possibility that the reader, viewer, or listener would reproduce in him/herself the artist’s original intuition. Robey, introduction to Eco, Open Work, 9. On the role of the viewer, see Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and October Magazine, 1996), 109. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5–6 (1967): n.p.; reprinted in Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontanta Press, 1977), 142–48. Barthes, Death of the Author. Dutton, “Authenticity in Art,” 269. Citing the example of audiences attending opera performances in Milan’s La Scala, he suggests that their reception of a work (informed by connoisseurship) renders the spectacle complete; he differentiates their reception from that of a hypothetical audience of tourists. See Herzogenrath and Schmidt, eds., Nam June Paik: Fluxus/Video, 32–33. Ammer, “In Engineering There Is Always the Other—the Other,” 64. Nam June Paik Paik, “About the Exposition of the Music,” Décollage: Bulletin aktueller Ideen, ed. Wolf Vostell, no. 3 (1962). Maciunas, too, rejected the traditional division of roles that separated performers from director and producer from the audience, propagating instead the concept of space-time art. Paik, “About the Exposition of the Music.” For Kuba, see Wulf Herzogenrath, Videokunst der 60er Jahre in Deutschland (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 2006). See also Nam June Paik, Bärbel Otterbeck, Wulf Herzogenrath and Christian Scheidemann, “Nam June Paik: An Interview With the Artist,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidermann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 104–5. The “exhibition objects” were shown on several occasions, including the exhibi-

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NOTES TO PAGES 55–57

71.

72.

tion Music for All Senses at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (February 13–May 17, 2009) and the show The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, Schunck Heerlen (September 3–November 28, 2010). Paik wished to relinquish control: “I don’t like to have complete control; that would be boring. What I learned from John Cage is to enjoy every second by decontrol.” Paik quoted in Glenn Wharton, “The Challenges of Conserving Contemporary Art,” in Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce Altshuler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 171. For instance, for a painting—paint applied to a flat surface of a particular shape, according to Clement Greenberg’s concept of medium specificity. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4:85–93.

P A RT 2

The epigraph is from Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 53. 1. J. J. A. Mooij, Time and Mind: The History of a Philosophical Problem, trans. Peter Mason (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 24–35.

CHAPTER 4

Parts of this chapter were published in the exhibition catalogue accompanying an eponymously titled exhibition Revisions—Zen for Film. See Hölling, Revisions—Zen for Film (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015; dist. University of Chicago Press). 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

The title Zen for Film sometimes appears with the subtitle Fluxfilm No. 1. The Third Mind exhibition also included the projection of the film, which I do not discuss. EAI online database, http://eai.org/title.htm?id=11976 (accessed January 2, 2014). According to EAI, Fluxfilm Anthology (1962–70, 120 min, b&w and color, sound) is “a document consisting of 37 short films ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in length.” George Maciunas probably manufactured the version of Zen for Film included in the Fluxfilm Anthology, which was distributed as a package of about thirty-seven to forty-one films. Even this version of the artwork destabilized its initial logic by “freezing” it in a singular print of the film. EAI created the digital variant of Fluxfilm Anthology from a VHS tape acquired from Re:Voir. The absence of a master complicates the distribution of the film—perhaps the reason that the EAI has limited access to the digitized file of Fluxfilm Anthology to educational use only. EAI online database, ibid. Although the digitized Zen for Film cannot gather new scratches, dust, and chance events, it is subject to digital forms of decay. John Cage, “Zum Werk von Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time—Video Space, eds. Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1991), 22.

NOTES TO PAGES 57–68

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, acquired by MoMA in 2008, is considered one of the largest and most significant in the world. Hendricks recalls that he created a video version of Zen for Film, which he classifies a posteriori as a radical misinterpretation. Jon Hendricks, in discussion with the author, December 2010. The multiple—a boxed film leader produced by Maciunas as an unlimited edition from 1965—was part of the exhibition Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978, at MoMA, New York (September 21, 2011–January 16, 2012). I examined the multiple of Zen for Film held in the Erik Andersch Collection, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin. The degradation process of a film relates to its composition. Whereas polyester stock is fairly stable and becomes brittle when exposed to certain atmospheric conditions (such as ambient light), in acetate stock, the tri-acetate deterioration includes a “vinegar syndrome” (the acetic acid affects the film base) and a shift on the color spectrum toward red. “Revision—Zen for Film,” http://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/gallery-at-bgc/past-exhibitions /revisions.html (accessed March 30, 2016). An archived version of the digital interactive can be accessed at http://bgcdml.net/revisions/interactive.htm. See also Jeffrey Weiss, “Event Horizon: Jeffrey Weiss on Revisions—Zen for Film,” Artforum 3 (March 2016): 111–12. Bruce Jenkins indicates that the first public screening of Zen for Film took place on May 8, 1964. See Jenkins, “Fluxfilm in Three False Starts,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, 2008), 68–69. According to Hendricks’s listing of Fluxus events, the Fluxus festival at Fluxhall that Jenkins notes, titled Twelve Fully Guaranteed Fluxus Concerts (March– May 1964), featured Zen for Film on April 25, 1964, as Concert No. 5. Hendricks’s Fluxus etc. mentions that another film of Paik’s was screened at the American Students and Artists Center in Paris during the Festum Fluxorum: Poesie, Musique et Antimusique Événementielle et Concret, on December 6, 1962; that film might have been Zen for Film. See Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, 1981), 369. Film Culture, no. 43 (Winter 1966), mentions that Zen for Film was realized in 1962–64; Jon Hendricks, ed. Fluxus Codex (Detroit, MI: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in association with Abrams, New York, 1988), 438, quotes that mention. Jenkins, “Fluxfilm in Three False Starts.” Brecht made this distinction, which has been taken up by Jacques Rancière. In an interview by Christian Kobald and Richard Steuer, Rancière claims that the pure gaze perceiving the appearance of the artwork is distinct from the act of seeing that has access to reality. Christian Kobalt and Richard Steuer, “Nobody Ever Thought That Art Would Be Somewhere outside the Class Struggle: Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Spike 21 (2009): 28–35. Cage’s assertion echoes Gilles Deleuze’s argument that “re-petition opposes re-presentation: the prefix changes its meaning, since in the latter case difference is said only in relation to the identical, while in the former it is the univocal which is said of the different” (Difference and Repetition, 1968). Accordingly, if there was no difference in repetition, things would be identical: repetition is opposed to the fixity and identity of

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NOTES TO PAGES 68–70

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

representation. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57. Intermedia include visual poetry and performance art. Higgins was inspired by Duchamp’s blurring of the boundaries between media and the value he placed on continuity over categorization. See Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” in Dé-coll/age, ed. Wolf Vostell (Frankfurt: Typos; and New York: Something Else Press, 1967). Brecht’s conviction also recalls the discussion of performed and sculptural qualities in the preceding chapter. See also Herman Asselberghs, “Beyond the Appearance of Imagelessness: Preliminary Notes on Zen for Film’s Enchanted Materialism,” Afterall Autumn/ Winter (2009), https://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.22/beyond.the.appearance.of. imagelessness.preliminary.notes.on.zen.for.films.enchanted.materi (accessed April 20, 2015). See David Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 93. Nam June Paik, interview by Otto Hahn, in Nam June Paik: Eine Database, eds. Klaus Bussman and Florian Matzner (Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1993), 171. See Slavko Kacunko, Closed Circuit Videoinstallationen: Ein Leitfaden zur Geschichte und Theorie der Medienkunst mit Bausteinen eines Künstlerlexikons auf DVD (Berlin: Logos, 2004), 170. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 70. Paik once criticized Suzuki, arguing that “cultural patriotism [by which he meant the attachment to Zen] is more harmful than the political patriotism.” See Jieun Rhee, “Reconstructing the Korean Body: Nam June Paik as Specular Border,” Oriental Art 48, no. 4 (2002): 48. Nina Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 313. Nam June Paik and Justin Hoffman, “Interview in a Station Restaurant: Nam June Paik in Conversation With Justin Hoffmann, Wiesbaden, May 22, 1989,” in Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, Revisited, ed. Susanne Neuburger (Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2009), 84. One of these Fluxus film experiments was Jackson Mac Low’s Tree Movie (1961), in which a still camera records a tree for an undetermined length of time; in another, Dick Higgins explored the possibility of projecting a blank film that burns away while it is displayed. See Ina Blom, “Boredom and Oblivion,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 83. Cage’s notorious 4′33″ consists of three tacets indicating silence on the part of the performer. During the first performance, at Woodstock, New York, August 29, 1952, the young American pianist David Tudor, himself a composer of experimental music, divided the piece into three sections marked by closing and opening of the piano’s lid at intervals of 33 seconds, 2 minutes 40 seconds, and 1 minute 20 seconds. See also Asselberghs, “Beyond the Appearance of Imagelessness,” for another discussion of the empty image.

NOTES TO PAGES 70–72

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28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

Cage, “Zum Werk von Nam June Paik.” White Paintings were opened to re-iteration as artworks based on instruction with the possibility of re-executing the paintings, “all white,” on one, two, three, four, and seven panels. For the instruction, see Yve-Alain Bois et al., The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2010), 178. Cage, quoted in Nam June Paik Fluxus-Video, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Sabine Maria Schmidt (Bremen, Germany: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), 150. The capturing of Paik’s silhouette in Moore’s photograph has led Christopher Eamon to interpret Paik’s movements within the frame of the projected image of Zen for Film as intended. Eamon also claims that the performer is necessary to complete the work, associating Paik’s film with Robert Whiteman’s Prune Flat (1965) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (Howls in Favour of Sade, 1952). Christopher Eamon, “An Art of Temporality,” in Film and Video Art, ed. Stuart Comer (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 66–85. John Cage, On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 98–109. See Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 21. Cage, quoted in Joseph, Random Order, 21. Ralph Rugoff, Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957–2012 (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012). László Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Joseph, Random Order, 36. The idea of subtraction put forward by the French theorist Alain Badiou in his book The Century (2005) can be helpful in understanding Paik’s film. Badiou, discussing Malevich’s White on White (1918), sees this work as the epitome of purification, where color has replaced geometrical allusion, creating a minimal difference, a subtraction of what was already there. Paik similarly takes away the photograms, subtracts the content of the image and makes it about deterioration. Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 55–57. See Jeffrey Levin, “Time and Change: A Discussion about the Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art,” Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 17, no. 3 (2002): 11–17. According to White, most, if not all, versions of White Painting have undergone such a process of “touching up.” The repainting follows the artist’s exact instructions. Personal email correspondence with the curatorial staff at the Barbican Art Gallery, April 23, 2013.

CHAPTER 5

Nam June Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television,” fluxus cc fiVe ThReE (June 1964): n.p. 1. 2.

In statistics, for instance, variability refers to how ‘spread out’ a group of scores is. “The Variable Media Network,” Variable Media Network, http://www.variablemedia .net/e/welcome.html (accessed February 12, 2015).

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

Fiske, “White Walls: Installations, Absence, Iteration and Difference”; Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 53. Rembrandt Automatic was reconstructed in 1976 and is now in a private collection in Bremen, Germany. Zen for TV was lost in 1967 and reconstructed by Paik for the collector Wolfgang Hahn in 1975. It is now part of the MUMOK collection in Vienna. The Vienna version of Zen for TV carries the label of the original and was a basis for the creation of two further replicas. See Nam June Paik’s notes (1983) in Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection / Addenda II (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology and Baxter Art Gallery, 1983), 285. For Zen painting techniques and the Zen philosophy of art making, see Clare Pollard and John Stevens, eds., Zen Mind Zen Brush: Japanese Ink Paintings From the Gitter-Yelen Collection (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2006); and Albert Lutz, ed., Mystik. Die Sehnsucht nach dem Absoluten (Zürich: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2011). The line is also is a source of spiritual power, meditation, and teaching, as in Barnett Newman’s Zip Paintings (starting in the 1940s), which provide the viewer with a full experience, a totality. The extreme reduction of the visual image in Zen for TV might also be associated with the death of the image. Dieter Daniels, “Television—Art or Anti-Art? Conflict and Cooperation between the Avant-Garde and the Mass Media in the 1960s and 1970s,” Media Art Net, http:// www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/massmedia/ (accessed January 27, 2015). A viewer, however, can still see the image by rapidly moving his or her head to the left and then the right while watching the line. The viewer’s shaking head deflects the line, and the image of the TV broadcast reappears. Paul Garrin, in discussion with the author, May 2012. For the instructions, see Hendricks, ed., Fluxus etc. / Addenda II, 285–88. Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1997), 71. Garrin, in discussion. Herzogenrath recalls that Paik also considered whether digitized laser disc versions of his manipulated TVs would generally be more suitable for permanent presentation in a museum. Herzogenrath, “What Is the Original in Video Art?,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidemann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 29. The participatory aspect of these works is an inheritance, not of the twentieth century, but of the nineteenth, when the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé anticipated it, as the German art historian Inke Arns puts it, in his notion of process-based art, and it became programmatic in the open works of avant-garde art. See Inke Arns, “Interaction, Participation, Networking: Art and Telecommunication,” Media Art Net, http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/communication/ (accessed June 26, 2015). The idea was to move from the “static object to the dynamic process, from contemplative reception to active participation.” See also Dieter Daniels, “Strategies of Interactivity,” in Media Art Interaction: The 1980s and 1990s in Germany,

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

eds. Dieter Daniels and Rudolf Frieling (Vienna: Springer, 2000), 170–97. The participatory aspect also recalls the movement to extend authorship, divorced, however, from its demagogy, which Barthes demolished in “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5/6 (1967). See http://collection.whitney.org/object/6139. Paik, “About the Exhibition of the Music,” Décollage: Bulletin aktueller Ideen, ed. Wolf Vostell, no. 3 (1962): n.p. Nam June Paik, “Video Synthesizer Plus,” in Radical Software 1/2 (1970), http://www .radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr2/pdf/VOLUME1NR2_0027.pdf (accessed August 25, 2012). Paik, quoted in Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, Nam June Paik: Video Time—Video Space (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1991), 12. Nam June Paik, as quoted by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Kunst-Skandale: Über Tabu und Skandal, Verdammung und Verehrung zeitgenössischer Kunst (Cologne: DuMont, 2000), 147. In Dialectic of Enlightment (originally published in 1944), the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term cultural industry in arguing that mass culture, like a factory, produced standardized cultural goods—such as films, radio programs, and magazines—that were used to manipulate society into passivity and obedience. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–95. Nam June Paik, “Random Access Information,” Artforum 19 (September 1980). Spelling per original. Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television,” fluxus cc fiVe ThReE (June 1964): n.p. Jon Ippolito, “The Art of Misuse,” http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/overview_ ippolito.html (accessed August 21, 2012). Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “relics,” accessed April 19, 2015, http://www.newadvent.org /cathen/12734a.htm. David Lowenthal, “Material Preservation and Its Alternatives,” Perspecta 25 (1989): 67–77. These points apply to ethnographic artifacts, too. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 386–443. According to the wall text, the exhibition objects came from the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. The legal and ethical issues of reconstruction are beyond the scope of this book, but I relate some aspects of this theme to the idea of the archive in Chapter 9. Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, 97–98. The twenty-four-monitor version is widely known (and was exhibited in Paik’s Whitney retrospective in 1982 and other venues), but the twelve-monitor version, less well known, is mentioned in the instructions Mark Patsfall created for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1999). Paik, “Artificial Intelligence vs Artificial Metabolism,” in Nam June Paik Fluxus/Video, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Sabine Maria Schmidt (Bremen, Germany: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), 252. Spelling and capitalization per original.

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NOTES TO PAGES 82–86

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

It would be wrong, however, to underestimate the role of installations in shaping exhibition spaces. For the performative aspects of exhibiting, see Katharina Amman, Video Ausstellen: Potenziale der Präsentation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). A skilled eye can discern differences in the degradation process of different media. For instance, digital video reveals pixilation of the image and “lossyness” in repeated cycles of compression and decompression, whereas an analogue video can be scratched and its image blurred, and it can experience dropouts, noise, and oscillations. The spatial and temporal distortions in digital video can be sudden and dramatic when the digital signal is disrupted, whereas analogue video degrades in a more continuous, gradual way. In Solway’s certificate, “software” is used metonymically to describe the data transformed by a playback device to the visual form of a moving image. Archive of the author. The digitizing of Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up is discussed in an interview by Pip Laurenson, an excerpt of which is published in Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations,” Tate Papers 6 (2006). http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7401 (accessed December 12, 2014). Bruce Nauman, quoted in Laurenson, ibid. In 1986 TV Garden also took the form of a single 1940s Motorola cabinet equipped with Sony Watchman televisions and silk plants; it was titled Antique Mini TV Garden. Hans Belting refers to Paik’s serial realizations as “variation[s] to a theme.” See Belting, “Beyond Iconoclasm: Nam June Paik, the Zen Gaze, and the Escape From Representation,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM; and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 410. Shigeko Kubota, in discussion with the author, December 2010. This assertion contradicts Grace Glueck’s account of the earlier sale of Participation TV to the collector David Bermant, arranged by the Howard Wise Gallery. See Glueck, “About Nanda Bonino,” in Nam June Paik: Eine Database, eds. Klaus Bussmann and Florian Matzner (OstfildernRuit, Germany: Edition Cantz, 1993), 52. Although TV Buddha later existed in multiples, the work proved unsalable in the 1960s. Bonino finally found a collector interested in acquiring it, with the intention of donating it to MoMA, but the museum refused it. Nam June Paik to Edy de Wilde, the former director of the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, September 25, 1977. Archive of the Stedelijk Museum. Dieter Daniels, “Nam June Paik: Buddha, 1989,” in Contemporary Art: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, ed. Heinrich Klotz (Karlsruhe, Germany: Prestel, 1997), 204. Further examples of the expansion of the concept of TV Buddha are TV-Buddha III: McLuhan's Grave (1984, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal), TV-Buddha—Shigeko Kubotas Buddha (1986, Museum Ludwig Cologne), Buddha Duchamp Beuys (1989, private collection), Lächelnder Buddha (1992, Staatliches Museum Schwerin), Buddha eine Kerze betrachtend (1992, Block Collection, Berlin). The German term Digitalisat reflects well the character of the transposed medium of film. An analogue film transposed to a digital carrier undergoes a dramatic change, acquiring an artificiality, a quality that inheres in the German formulation. As I have mentioned, when Arche Noah was expanded by a plant ensemble in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in June 1992, the artist himself was not directly involved in the installation, but his assistant was.

NOTES TO PAGES 86–92

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CHAPTER 6

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1998 (1911), 4 and 15. 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

Although outside the scope of this book, traditional artworks and built heritage can also, to a degree, be classified as heterotemporal (supplementations and reconstructions in sculpture, new framing and lining of paintings, completions and additions in built heritage). I interchangeably refer to chronological time and the convention of metrical time as a method of its measurement. Both follow the sequential understanding of time. See Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans, Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2005), 61–64; Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Antonio Rava, “Time, Originality, and Materiality in Contemporary Conservation: The Theory of Restoration by Cesare Brandi; Between Tradition and Innovation,” in ICOM-CC 15th Triennial Conference Preprints, 22–26 September 2008, vol. 1, ed. J. Bridgland (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2008), 484–88; Albert Albano, “Art in Transition,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1996), 183; Hans Ullrich Reck, “Authenticity in Fine Art to the Present Day,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable Is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidermann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 86–90; Miriam Clavir, “Social Contexts for Conservation: Time, Distance, and Voice in Museums and Galleries,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Conservation 34 (2009); Jeffrey Levin, “Time and Change: A Discussion about the Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art,” Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 17, no. 3 (2002): 11–19. For a volume about perspectives on time, arts, and culture involving issues of conservation, see Judith Schachter and Stephen Brockmann eds., (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); and see F. Cramer, “Durability and Change: A Biochemist’s View,” in Durability and Change: The Science, Responsibility, and Cost of Sustaining Cultural Heritage, eds. W. E. E. Krumbein et al. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 19–25. These issues were the focus of my research project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, conducted in October and November 2015. I have reflected on them extensively in Hanna Hölling, “Conservation and Contingency: On Realms of Theory and Cultures of Practice,” paper presented at the colloquium Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe, Max Planck Institute for the History of Knowledge, Berlin, November 23, 2016. An expanded version of this paper: Hanna Hölling, “The Technique of Conservation: Hands and Minds, Science, and Humanities,” is available on the author's personal website http://www.hannahoelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ Hanna-Ho%CC%88lling_The-Technique-of-Conservation_draft-October-30.pdf. Albano, “Art in Transition,” 183. Ibid. Francesca Valentini, “Cesare Brandi’s Theory of Restoration: Some Principles Discussed in Relation with the Conservation of Contemporary Art,” http://193.175.110.9 /hornemann/german/epubl_txt/hildesheimsito.pdf (accessed January 25, 2015).

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NOTES TO PAGES 94–96

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 17. For an alternative view on “original state,” see Lowenthal, “Changing Criteria of Authenticity,” 131. Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 17. The definition of restoration given in the online Oxford English Dictionary is similar. Muñoz Viñas contends that the goal of conservation, in classical theories, is the “truth-enforcement” operation that serves to reveal and preserve an object’s true nature or condition (91). Caroline Villers, “Post Minimal Intervention,” Conservator 28 (2004): 5. Jonathan Ashley-Smith, “The Ethics of Conservation,” in Care of Collections, ed. Simon J. Knell (London: Routledge, 2005), 19. My emphasis. Carol Stringari, “Installations and the Problems of Preservation,” in Modern Art: Who Cares?, eds. Ijsbrand Hummelen and Dionne Sillé (London: Archetype, 1999), 273. For “freeze strategies,” see Ijsbrand Hummelen, Vivian van Saaze, and Matthijs Versteegh, “Towards a Symmetrical Approach in Conservation?,” in ICOM-CC 15th Triennial Conference Preprints, 22–26 September 2008, vol. 2, ed. J. Bridgland (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2008), 1041–47. For “freeze frame paradigm,” see Vivian van Saaze, “Doing Artworks: A Study into the Presentation and Conservation of Installation Artworks” (PhD diss., Maastricht University, 2009), 52. See W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954); Steven W. Dykstra, “The Artist’s Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 35, no. 3 (1996): 197–218. See Cesare Brandi, “ ‘The Cleaning of Pictures’ in Relation to Patina, Varnish, and Glazes,” Burlington Magazine 91, no. 556 (1949): 183–89; and Steven W. Dykstra, “The Artist’s Intentions,” 201. The Cleaning Controversy was also called the “RuhemannGombrich debate.” David Lowenthal, “Changing Criteria of Authenticity,” in Nara Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention, ed. Knut Einar Larsen (Paris: UNESCO, ICCROM, and ICOMOS, 1995), 121–35; David Lowenthal, “Authenticity: Rock of Faith or Quicksand Quagmire?” Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 14, no.3 (Fall 1999); Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation; Joanna Phillips, “Kunstmaterial oder Elektroschrott?” in Wann stirbt ein Kunstwerk?, ed. Angela Matyssek (Munich: Silke Schreiber Verlag, 2010); van Saaze, “Doing Artworks”. For a similar discussion of the “privileged physical state of the object” at the time when it is almost completed, see Sherri Irvin, “The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 317. Helen Glanville, introduction to The History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art, by Alessandro Conti (London: Elsevier, 2007), xxi. Barbara Appelbaum, Conservation Treatment Methodology (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2009), 176–77. Susan M. Pearce, Archaeological Curatorship (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), 106. Ibid. Miriam Clavir, Preserving What Is Valued: Museum Conservation and First Nations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 32.

NOTES TO PAGES 96–98

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195

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

Minimal intervention and reversibility derive from a positivist belief in objectivity. Reversibility, regarded as a fundamental principle in the 1970s, has strongly guided conservation practices ever since. For a critique of minimal intervention, see Salvador Muñoz Viñas, “Minimal Intervention Revisited,” in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, eds. Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker (Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann, 2009), 47–59. For a critique of reversibility, see Villers, “Post Minimal Intervention.” Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 40. For a critique of reversibility in relation to the notions of retreatability, see Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 183–88. Chris Caple, Conservation Skills: Judgment, Methods, and Decision Making (London: Routledge, 2000), 64. Glanville, introduction to The History of the Restoration and Conservation, xxi. See Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (London: Routledge, 2011), 140–41. Viollet-le-Duc sets off the modern meaning of restoration from the rebuilding tradition in Asia and the Roman practice of replacing structures. Viollet-le-Duc points to the Latin words instaurare, reficere, renovare, which in his account mean precisely to reinstate, to make anew, rather than restore. His concept was to bring a building to a condition of completeness that might never have existed before. M-F. Hearn, The Architectural Theory of Voillet-le-Duc: Readings and Commentary (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999), 269–70. Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 54. For pivotal texts of both Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin, see Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandra Melucca Vaccaro, eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1996). Jukka Jokilehto, “Authenticity in Restoration Principles and Practices,” Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology, 17, nos.3 and 4 (1985): 7. Bazon Brock, in discussion with the author, July 2010. Alessandro Conti refers to the story of the Garden of Eden as a wish “to return to a primitive state that is better than the present one.” For him this wish, rooted in mythology and Western religious tradition, can become dangerous when it induces one who wishes to return to ignore the aging of materials and pursue the return to the original at all costs. Alessandro Conti, The History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art, trans. Helen Glanville (London: Elsevier, 2007), 1. For a similar view applied to heritage, see David Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 5–24. Lowenthal, “Changing Criteria of Authenticity,” 131–34. According to van Saaze, “Authenticity is ‘done’ or enacted in practice.” Van Saaze, “Doing Artworks,” 95. Conservation subjects time to space, as it were. Subjecting space to time—precisely the reverse—echoes the First Critique of Immanuel Kant, in which the philosopher maintains that time is the “inner sense,” whereas space is the “outer sense,” giving priority of the inner sense of time over the external.

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NOTES TO PAGES 98–100

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

The commonsense definition of time as a method of its measurement—a clock—was introduced at the end of the thirteenth century. This introduction also marked the inception of modern homogeneous time, which replaced traditional methods of time measurement based on calculating the length of daylight as it varied through the year. For concepts of time, see Hans Ruin and Andrus Ers, eds., Rethinking Time: Essays on History, Memory, and Representation, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 9 (Södertörn, Sweden: Södertörn University, 2011). Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Elibron Classics, 2005 [1889]), 107. Bergson laid out and refined his critique mainly in three projects: Time and Free Will (1889; first English edition published 1913), Matter and Memory (1896; first English publication 1911) and Creative Evolution (1907; first English edition published 1911). Intuition, for Bergson, presupposes duration. See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1966]), 13. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 101. Ibid. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 38–47. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta (London and New York: Continuum, 2012 [1985]), 80. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 10. Movement is thus expressed in numbers, defining the ends of intervals, but failing to reconstruct movement, which is a qualitative change that takes place in what would otherwise be the intervals between two external points. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin; and New York: Macmillan, 1919), 209–19, quoted in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 48–49. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 48; Bergson, Time and Free Will, 107. In Creative Evolution, Bergson applies duration to the entire universe, maintaining that “the universe endures.” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 11. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 48. Deleuze uses the expression quoted in relation to space as a form of exteriority that “denatures duration.” Ibid., 49. Ibid., 59–60. Bergson quoted in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 51. My emphasis. Bergson quoted in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 51. Deleuze maintains that any difference between recollection and perception is illusory—the image cannot actualize a recollection without adapting it to the requirements of the present. Deleuze refers to contraction and recollection memory. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 52. Ibid., 58–59. “How otherwise could we understand that it passes through distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its age—in short, that it has a history?” Bergson, Creative Evolution, 15. For Deleuze’s view on the virtual past, see his Bergsonism, 55. See also Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 187–88.

NOTES TO PAGES 101–104

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197

56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

According to Lowenthal, the differentiation of past and present is a recent development and can be associated with chronological time. The past as a state of things no longer extant emerged during the Renaissance when the remoteness of ancient Rome and the vast difference of more recent medieval times became apparent. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 390. Much of my thinking here and in the subsequent section is inspired by Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time. See Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 266–329. Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 94. Brandi, Theory of Restoration, 48. Brandi uses restoration in his text, however, where I use conservation. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 390. Ibid., 412. Marey, a physicist who studied locomotion rather than a photographer by profession, invented chronophotography in 1882. It is said to have been a precursor to the Lumières brothers’ cinematograph, which perfected the illusion of motion. Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” October, no. 5 (1978): 113–25. This declaration conflicts with the concept of an artwork that transcends time, which goes back to the Renaissance and to a Platonic idea of perfection of form and transcending history. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 412.

CHAPTER 7

Nam June Paik and Paul Schimmel, “Abstract Time,” Arts Magazine (December 1974): 52–53. 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

“Jedenfalls muss man betonen, dass es weder Malerei, noch Skulptur, sondern ein “Zeit-Kunst” ist.” Nam June Paik to Rudolf Jähring, December 22, 1962, Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection; Nam June Paik and Edith Decker, Niederschriften eines Kulturnomaden: Aphorismen, Briefe, Texte (Cologne: DuMont, 1992), 54. Paik’s German original, my English translation. See Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). Anne-Marie Duguet, quoted in Michael Rush, New Media in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 13. Marie Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. Ibid., 14. Ibid.

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NOTES TO PAGES 104–111

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” October 5 (1978): 113–25. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 4. Ibid., 88. For related issues of space and time in film, see Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). In the theory of color, Goethe referred to afterimages as “psychological colors.” See Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 70; see also Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 147. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2012 [1983]), 1–3. Jud Yalkut (1938–2013), artist and filmmaker, in discussion with the author, June 2012. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). That the deathbed photograph replaced the death mask, for example, confirms Bazin’s definition of photography as a preserving gesture. See also Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 59. Mulvey, Death 24× a Second, 15. In Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning, the vandalism of effacing de Kooning’s drawing is set against the value of the composition that emerged. The negation becomes a creation and a kind of conservation gesture. Duchamp, speaking before the American Federation of Artists in 1957, declared that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adding his (her) contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” ARTnews 56, no. 3, May 1957. The sense of nondirectional time is rather new in Western culture. On Zen philosophy, see Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage, 1989). Shigenori Nagatomo, “Zen Buddhist Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2010), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/ (accessed April 17, 2015). Benjamin continues: “Moreover, in those later times its impact on older works constantly changes, too. Nevertheless, this medium is always relatively fainter than what influenced contemporaries at the time it was created.” Walter Benjamin, “The Medium through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later Ages,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 235. See Federico Windhausen, “Assimilating Video,” October 137 (2011): 69–83. Krauss described the medium’s redemptive quality in relation to Marcel Broodthaers’s Voyage on the North Sea (1974). See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). See also Michael Newman, “Salvage,” in Tacita Dean (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Steidl, 2003), 11-page exhibition catalogue, n.p.

NOTES TO PAGES 111–116

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199

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Both translation and suppression are often irreversible. See “Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking,” Malcolm Turvey, Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs, Lynne Sachs, Mark Street, and Federico Windhausen, participants, October 137 (2011): 51–68. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). According to McLuhan, “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. . . . For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 23–35 and 63–67. Bolter and Grusin, in Remediation, describe McLuhan’s proposition as a more complex “borrowing” (45), in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium. Bolter and Grusin, ibid. This subversion of artistic structures was characteristic of Fluxus. The German artist Wolf Vostell, who was associated with Fluxus, created Fluxus films such as Sun in Your Head (Fluxfilm No. 23, 1963), in which the 8mm film camera is focused on a television screen to record televised images from the screen. See Michael Rush, Video Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 69. See Paul Virilio, in the interview by Louise Wilson titled “Cyberwar, God, and Television: Interview With Paul Virilio,” http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=62 (accessed August 28, 2012). On the relationship of Paik and McLuhan, see Andreas Broeckmann, “Machine–Paik– Medium: Einige Resonanzen zwischen Nam June Paik und Marshall McLuhan,” in McLuhan neu lesen: Kritische Analysen zu Medien und Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert, eds. Derrick de Kerckhove, Martina Leeker, and Kerstin Schmidt (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2008), 338–44. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Video, Flows and Real Time,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 283–85. For the technology of video and television, see Kittler, Optical Media, 209–10; and Siegfried Zielinski, Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders (Berlin: Spies, 1986), 330. Paul Garrin recalls recording Paik’s Moon Is the Oldest TV on videotape. Garrin, in discussion with the author, May 2012. Other artists besides Paik also implemented TV and TV monitors as a medium, but in a manner more distant from the aesthetics of the manipulated image. Among them were Wolf Vostell, Tom Wesselmann, Günther Uecker, César (Baldaccini), Isidore Isou, and Karl Gerstner. Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 47–48. Lynne Sachs, in the “Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking,” 52. Paik was not the only one experimenting with video at that time, however. Andy Warhol did so, too, but with video equipment that was said to use a technology that was exquisite—and astronomically expensive.

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39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

The conceptual origins of video are sometimes located in the Futurists’ early electronic experiments (“Teatro Totale”) and the idea of a video wall in George Brecht’s Television Piece from 1959. See Friedmann Malsch and Dagmar Streckel, Künstler-Videos: Entwicklung und Bedeutung. Die Sammlung der Videobänder des Kunsthauses Zürich (Zürich: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 18. Zielinski, Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders, 155. Michael Rush, however, in Video Art (213), indicates that Paik did use a Portapak to make his recording. Christoph Blase suggests that Paik must have used the Sony TCV-2010. See Blase, “Willkommen im Maschinen-Labyrinth: Vom Bandlauf der Videoformate zwischen 1960 und 1980,” in Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst.de Teil 2, eds. Christoph Blase and Peter Weibel (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 329–30. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64. Lazzarato, “Video, Flows and Real Time,” 288. Nam June Paik, Du cheval à Christo et autres écrits (Paris: Lebeer Hossmann, 1993), 110, quoted in Lazzarato, “Video, Flows and Real Time,” 288. Nam June Paik, “Electronic Video Recorder,” Café au Go Go, flyer publicizing performance, 1965. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Paik, quoted in Anja Osswald, “Electronic Collages: Paiks Videobänder,” in Nam June Paik Fluxus/Video, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath and Sabine Maria Schmidt (Bremen, Germany: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), 167. Paik, quoted in ibid.: “Man spielt einfach und man sieht den Effekt.” Benjamin continues: “for that [the original] contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. . . . Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the significance of the mode, call for it?” Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Routledge, 2000), 76. Benjamin’s thinking about translation, in its complexity, goes far beyond my discussion of translation in this book. For conservation in the context of (literary) translation, see Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009); and Jonathan Rée, “Auto-Icons,” in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, eds. Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2009), 2. Translation derives from the infinitive to transfer, thus legitimating the understanding of remediation as the transfer from one medium to another. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” trans. E. C. Breasley (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853). Paik continued: “Video is preemptive. If you are watching NBC, you cannot watch CBS . . . or if you are watching Ira Schneider, you are not watching Frank Gillette (or vice versa).” Paik, “Input-Time and Out-Put Time,” in Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (New York: Raindance Foundation, 1976), 98. McLuhan questioned Lessing’s division between spatial and temporal art as soon as he became aware of Einsteinian physics. His concept of writing as a spatializing and arresting speech (which echoes Bergson’s idea of writing as spatialization of thought that halts duration and flow) complicates Lessing’s notion of the temporal aspect of poetry. See

NOTES TO PAGES 119–121

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201

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

Richard Cavel, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 118. The understanding of objects according to their temporality reminds us of a traditional philosophic discussion in which objects are understood as continuants and are different from occurrents—events and processes. This distinction holds much potential for exploration in conservation studies. In conservation and museum studies, a mention of objects as slow events can be found in Glenn Wharton, “Heritage Conservation as a Cultural Work: Public Negotiation of a Pacific Hero” (PhD diss., Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2004), 18; and in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Museum as Catalyst,” Keynote address, Museums 2000: Confirmation or Challenge, organized by ICOM Sweden, the Swedish Museum Association and the Swedish Travelling Exhibition/Riksutställningar in Vadstena, September 29, 2000, https://www.nyu .edu/classes/bkg/web/vadstena.pdf (accessed May 30, 2016). (Both Wharton and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett refer to a lecture by Stanley Eveling, professor of existential philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland). I have pursued the topic of events, performances, and processes in my book Revisions—Zen for Film (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015; dist. University of Chicago Press), 78–86. Naomi Stead, “The Ruins of History: Allegories of Destruction in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum,” Open Museum Journal 2 (August 2000), http://naomistead.com /wp-content/uploads/2008/09/stead_ruins_of_history_2000.pdf (accessed January 12, 2015). Smithson was speaking of the specific architectural settings in New Jersey. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, 1967,” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; and London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), 49. Speer intended the architecture constructed by the Third Reich to turn into ruins that would be aesthetically pleasing for thousands of years to come. See also Mats Burström, “Creative Confusion,” in Rethinking Time: Essays on History, Memory, and Representation, eds. Hans Ruin and Andrus Ers, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 9 (Södertörn, Sweden: Södertörn University, 2011), 119–28. The “more brutal” appearance of new ruins was a central idea in Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value (Ruinentheoriewert, 1969). That malfunction can offer another perspective on things is exemplified by Bruno Latour’s classic example of an overhead projector. See Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 183. Litter or scrap reverses the value of things. In Paik’s technological graveyard that reversal is doubled—the equipment is discarded and becomes scrap, and it is given new value as an artwork. How then to think about the work’s conservation? Should the “scrap value” prevail over the “art value”? For the reversal of values in discarded things, see George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008 [1962]). Nam June Paik, interview by Joan Simon, in Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego, eds. Mary Livingstone Beebe et al. (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), 115.

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60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

Mathieu Gregoire (project manager, Stuart Collection, UCSD), in discussion with the author, May 2011. Göran Schildt, “Ruin Memories,” accessed August 28, 2012, http://ruinmemories.org/, quoted in Burström, “Creative Confusion,” 121. Göran Schildt (ibid.) ascribes to conservators the archaeological attitude that acknowledges the historical value of ruins and tries to conserve them, even if it means obliterating other material evidence from an excavation. The acknowledgment of the historical conditions of objects and the inclination to honor the effects of time can be seen in Ruskin’s approach to the built heritage. For that approach, see Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (London: Routledge, 2011), 174. Schildt, quoted in Burström, “Creative Confusion,” 121–22. Dipesh Chakrabarty purports similarly that the present is a containment of heterotemporalities. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Time of the History and the Time of the Gods,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 35–60; quoted in Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 256. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 242–51. Three Standard Stoppages became a key point of reference in the aesthetic theories of art based on random decisions. Duchamp, when he was interviewed by the curator Katharine Kuh, admitted that issues of contingency were central in his career. See Herbert Moderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xi–xvi. Recent examinations of Three Standard Stoppages, however, have cast doubt on the role of contingency and chance in its creation. Gell, Art and Agency, 247. Ibid, 249. For the explanation of Husserl’s idea of retention and protention, see the section of Chapter 6 titled “Bergson’s Duration.” “Heterochronies” accompany heterotopias,” a term that in human geography describes spaces of otherness, portrayed as being here and there, physical and mental, simultaneously. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces (1967): Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, http://foucault.info/doc/documents/heterotopia/foucault-heterotopia-enhtml (accessed January 10, 2013). My “outer time” is analogous to Cesare Brandi’s “extrachronological time.” Brandi recognizes the damaging potential of the outer time when it intrudes on a work’s time, where the inner time of the artwork—categorized here as “extrachronological time”— clashes with the historical time of the viewer. See Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2005), 62. The temporal adaptability of the work might be determined by economy: It is more economical to re-create an installation than to move its original elements around. Similarly, Hans Ulrich Reck discusses the “time structure of restoration” as differing from or being equivalent to the duration of time that the artist granted his work and involves Dieter Roth and Fluxus in “art calculated to last for a limited time.” See Reck,

NOTES TO PAGES 124–130

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74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

“Authenticity in Fine Art to the Present Day,” in Wie haltbar ist Videokunst? How Durable Is Video Art?, eds. Bärbel Otterbeck and Christian Scheidermann (Wolfsburg, Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995), 81–101. California Institute of Technology, “Voyager: The Interstellar Mission,” http://voyager .jpl.nasa.gov/(accessed June 2, 2014). Johan Redin, “Social Dreams of History: Museum, Utopia, Mythology,” in Rethinking Time: Essays on History, Memory, and Representation, eds. Ruin Hans and Andrus Ers, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 9 (Södertörn, Sweden: Södertörn University, 2011), 97–108. Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory, and Post Fordism, Antennae series (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010), 89–108. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” Johan Redin and Peter Jackson, “The Crypt: Probing The Obscure Administration of Cultural Memory,” Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion (2011): 183–96. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010 [1927]), 227–55. Martin Heidegger and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Der Begriff der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004 [1924]). Bernard Dauenhauer and David Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2011), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011 /entries/ricoeur/(accessed April 27, 2015). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); see also Dauenhauer and Pellauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” Stiegler challenged the idea of an originary, nontechnological human in Western philosophy by arguing that technology is an ontological constituent of humans. Humans can access time only by means of supplements, including all technologies (time deploys technical prosthecity and is deployed within it), so technological time is a fundamental dimension of the human. For Stiegler’s “time of technics” (articulated in, and as technological development, technical prostheses, and technicity), see Ian James, “Bernard Stiegler and the Time of Technics,” Cultural Politics 6, no. 2 (2010): 207–28. As the Brandian understanding of time suggests, a viewer’s sense of his or her own temporality is most relevant to installations and multimedia artworks. The temporality of the viewer thus forms another strand of the conservation narrative and opens up a fascinating opportunity for future enquiry. For the biographical approach in conservation, see Renée van de Vall et al., “Reflections on a Biographical Approach to Contemporary Art Conservation,” in ICOM-CC 16th Triennial Conference—Lisbon 2011, ed. J. Bridgland (Almada, Portugal: Critério— Produção Gráfica, 2011), 1–8.

PA RT 3

Plato, Cratylus, 402A. 1.

Plutarch, “Vita Thesei 23,” trans. Wilhelm K. Essler, in “Was ist und zu welchem Ende betreibt man Metaphysik?” Dialectica 49 (1995): 281–315.

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

The paradox of the ship of Theseus was famously resurrected by the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In this context, the German language differentiates between dasselbe and das gleiche. Two further concepts pertaining to the unstoppable changeability of things in time are fluxism and four-dimensionality. Jacques Lacan, Seminars: Book IX: Identification, 1961–62, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-IX_identification .pdf (accessed October 29, 2012). For a discussion of Duchamp, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). The proof is reconfirmed by the apocryphal story about the hammer used to build the biblical Noah’s Ark; it maintained its identity despite the replacement of its parts. See George Brock-Nannestad, “The Rationale behind Operational Conservation Theory,” in Conservation without Limits: IIC Nordic Group, XV Congress 23–26 August 2000, Helsinki, Finland, ed. Riitta Koskivirta (Helsinki: IIC Nordic Group, 2000), 29. All materials used for the new temple are newly manufactured, and many of the instruments have changed and been replaced by their modern and more time-efficient equivalents, yet since the seventh century, the Ise Shrine has resisted major architectural change by maintaining the continuity of its rebuilding procedures and by transferring professional skills repeatedly from one generation of rebuilders to another, mainly in oral, but also in a number of written accounts. See Cassana Adams, “Japan’s Ise Shrine and Its Thirteen-Hundred-Year-Old Reconstruction Tradition,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 1 (September 1998): 49–60. John Bowin, “Aristotle on Identity and Persistence,” University of California, Santa Cruz, http://people.ucsc.edu/~jbowin/BOWAOI.1.pdf (accessed April 20, 2015); see also Christopher Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus: Solving Puzzles about Material Objects (London: Continuum, 2005). Here, the signifier has no function other than its own quality of being a signifier—a nomination fulfilling its function of naming. For a discussion of the role of the signifier in the age of the readymade and the issue of designating something an artwork, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism.

CHAPTER 8

1. 2. 3.

Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), ix. Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006. Eric Kluitenberg, “Towards a Radical Archive,” De Balie’s Eric Kluitenberg, Institute of Network Cultures Weblog, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/2010/09/09 /towards-a-radical-archive-de-balies-eric-kluitenberg/(accessed September 14, 2014). Foucault maintains that understanding the archive requires looking into the system of powers that determines what is archived and why, asking who created the rules

NOTES TO PAGES 137–141

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

governing the archive, and assessing the archive’s political and material conditions. Thus, understanding the archive is key to understanding the system that rules it. Foucault criticized the archive as a static entity, containing things that were no longer part of a living culture. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Spieker, The Big Archive, xii, 1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 9–10. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. The archive always has two bodies: it is as much an institution as a conception, meaning a working place and method. Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel, Archivologie: Theorien des Archives in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009), 10. Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, eds. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2 / NAI Publishers, 2003), 15. Ibid., 24. For the archive as a cultural memory, see Aleida Assmann, “Archive im Wandel der Mediengeschichte,” in Archivologie: Theorien des Archives in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, eds. Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009), 165–75; for the archive as a locus of memory, see Wolfgang Ernst, “Das Archiv als Gedächnisort,” in Archivologie: Theorien des Archives in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, eds. Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009), 176–200. Forgetfulness was essential to Nietzsche’s philosophical project as an upholder of psychic order. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980 [1874]). Derrida, Archive Fever, 14. See Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum: In Memory of Hermann von Grab,” in Prisms (London: Garden City Press, 1967), 175–85. See also Chapter 1 of this book. “The German word museal has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. . . . Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.” Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 175. For the relation of museum to mausoleum, see also F. Cramer, “Durability and Change: A Biochemist’s View,” in Durability and Change: The Science, Responsibility, and Cost of Sustaining Cultural Heritage, eds. W. E. E. Krumbein et al. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 23. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 39; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Vol.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. John Dewey, in Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), signals the negative effect that separating museum objects from the experience of everyday life can have on their perception. See Tom Leddy, “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deweyaesthetics/(accessed January 1, 2015).

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NOTES TO PAGES 141–143

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Deleuze and Guattari refer to Rhizome as a mode of research that allows nonhieratical entry and exit points in the interpretation and representation of data. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004 [1987]). The development of the digital repository at MoMA might serve as an example. For the implications of classification as a natural human compulsion, see Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1–32 and 319–26. As is often the case with media installations in large institutions, this equipment was not reserved exclusively for Paik’s work but was also used in other installations—for example, in the reinstallation of Marie-Jo Lafontaine’s and Fabrizio Plessi’s works. In the case of TV Garden, I consulted Paik’s curators: Hanhardt in the United States, Herzogenrath in Germany, Young Cheol Lee in Korea; Paik’s various technicians and assistants; and Paik’s galleries and their owners. Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 130. During my research for this book, the Paik archives, donated by Paik’s estate to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, were inaccessible because they were being processed and classified. The archive reflects the technical and technological status of the time when it was accumulated. Computerized and digitized records, although they held great promise, failed to make the archive accessible to outsiders; only rarely is an external researcher allowed to browse the databank of a museum. See Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narrative: The Meanings of Archives,” Archival Science 1 (2001): 134. Derrida maintains that every interpretation of the archive enriches it, and that is precisely why the archive is an anticipation of the future. Derrida, Archive Fever, quoted in Ketelaar, “Tacit Narrative,” 138. Boris Groys, Logik der Sammlung (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1997), 201. Nonphysical means not having a material existence that one can independently consult. For the concepts of the virtual and real, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2012), 96–98. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–32. Ibid. Although Taylor’s idea is similar to my proposition insofar as it involves people as “transmitters” of knowledge, my understanding of the nonphysical sphere of the archive assumes the actualization of artworks from the nonphysical to the physical archive that includes a transmission of knowledge in both directions (the nonphysical archive is necessary to actualize a work, and the actualized work produces new knowledge that enters the nonphysical archive). Etsuko Watari (curator of Watari-Um), in discussion with the author, October 2012. Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration;” and Kluitenberg, “Towards a Radical Archive.” Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,” in The Archive, Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (Cambridge MA: MIT Press; London:

NOTES TO PAGES 143–150

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34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Whitechapel Gallery, 2006), 20–24. Originally published as “Notiz über den Wunderblock, 1925: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.” Vol. 19, 1923–25. This distinction echoes to some extent the Deleuzian discussion of the pure ontological memory and its relation to the virtual. See Deleuze, Bergsonism, 57, 59. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Ibid., 4. Ijsbrand Hummelen and Tatja Scholte suggest that in the course of the reinstallation or production of a work of art, implicit knowledge can be obtained of installation techniques, instruments, and methods, which are eventually transmitted by way of a written record. Hummelen and Scholte, “Sharing Knowledge for the Conservation of Contemporary Art: Changing Roles in a Museum without Walls?,” in Modern Art, New Museums: Contribution to the 2004 IIC Congress, Bilbao, eds. Ashok Roy and Perry Smith (London: International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 2004), 208–12. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 10. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Continuum, 2005). Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 23 and 191. Spieker, The Big Archive, xi. For the archive as a “deliberate project,” see Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” 24.

CHAPTER 9

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

Phronesis is often translated as “prudence.” For an account of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis and ethics, see Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives /spr2012/entries/aristotle-ethics/ (accessed October 10, 2014,). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), sect. 4–7 and 74–75. Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman, eds., Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 352–53. Phronesis, in other words, is not simply knowledge, but an amalgam of knowledge, virtue, and reason that enables people to decide what they should do. David Coulter and John R. Wiens, “Educational Judgement: Linking the Actor and the Spectator,” Educational Researcher 31, no. 4. (2002): 16. For Bergson, difference is the same as duration, which may reveal itself in one of its aspects or nuances: “Duration is what differs, and what differs is no longer what differs from something else but what differs from itself. What differs has become itself a thing, a substance. . . . Real time is alteration, and alteration is substance. Difference in nature is thus no longer between two things or rather two tendencies, difference of nature is itself a thing, one tendency opposing itself to the other.” Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97.

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NOTES TO PAGES 150–157

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Bergson ends up suggesting that it is not the real that resembles the possible but the possible that resembles the real, because the possible has been extracted from the real “like a sterile double.” He later dismisses the notion of the possible in favor of the virtual. See Deleuze, Bergsonism, 96–98, on which I base the ideas set forth in the remainder of the paragraph. The concepts of type and token stem from analytic aesthetics, which distinguishes between them as realizations of objects (tokens) and ideas (types) and, more traditionally, between singular and multiple arts. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Linda Wetzel, Types and Tokens: On Abstract Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3. My idea of the virtual type expands the division between the type and token by taking the perspective of the archive and archival actualization. I suggest that the type can be constituted by tokens of many different pasts—type here being a virtual palimpsest of a work’s multiplicity. Marie Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 83. Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2005), 62. For Pietro Edwards, see Alessandro Conti, The History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art, trans. Helen Glanville (London: Elsevier, 2007), 181–220; see also Jilleen Nadolny, “History of Visual Compensation for Paintings,” in Conservation of Easel Paintings, eds. Joyce Hill Stoner and Rebecca Rushfield (New York: Routledge, 2012), 578. Katrin Janis, Restaurierungsethik im Kontext von Wissenschaft und Praxis (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2005), 20–24. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, 1849). See also David Lowenthal, “The Value of Age and Decay,” in Durability and Change: The Science, Responsibility, and Cost of Sustaining Cultural Heritage, ed. W. E. E. Krumbein et al. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 39–50. Jonathan Rée, “Auto-Icons,” in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, eds. Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2009), 2. Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (London: Routledge, 2011), 155. Hanna Jędrzejewska, Ethics in Conservation (Stockholm: Kungl. Konsthögskolan Institutet för Materialkunskap, 1976), 41, quoted in Miriam Clavir, Preserving What Is Valued: Conservation and First Nations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 41. Glanville, introduction to Conti, History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art, xxi. My emphasis. Lowenthal, “Material Preservation and Its Alternatives,” Perspecta 25 (1989): 71. Ibid. D. E. Cosgrove, “Should We Take It All So Seriously? Culture, Conservation, and Meaning in the Contemporary World,” in Durability and Change: The Science, Responsibility, and Cost of Sustaining Cultural Heritage, eds. W. E. E. Krumbein et al. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 259–66.

NOTES TO PAGES 157–159

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21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Creativity in conservation, according to Salvador Muñoz Viñas, is not only permissible but desirable. Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation (Oxford: Elsevier, 2005), 112–13 and 147–50. Frank Hassard, “Heritage, Hermeneutics, and Hegemony: A Study of Ideological Division in the Field of Conservation-Restoration” (PhD diss., Brunel University London, 2006). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), 138–39. For Nietzsche’s observation, see Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), ix. The practices of Anastilosis, the restoration of a building using a reconstruction technique that employs as many of the original parts as are available (e.g., the Acropolis in Athens), the issues of reconstruction, and the renewal of ethnographic artifacts might serve as examples. See Bruno Latour, We Have Always Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Lowenthal, quoted in Muñoz Viñas, Contemporary Theory of Conservation, 111. For a discussion of diverse interpretations of the past and the creation of different possibilities of historical account see Jenkins, Re-Thinking History. Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112. Emphasis in original. (Untitled) Piano might be seen as Paik’s continuation of his engagement—inspired by pianos manipulated by Cage—with modified musical instruments, as in his prepared piano work Klavier Integral (1958–63). (Untitled) Piano is a tribute to Cage, who died in 1992. For a video in which MoMA’s former conservator Glenn Wharton discusses the challenges encountered during a two-year project carried out by the museum to conserve Untitled, see Wharton, “Nam June Paik: Conservation of ‘Untitled,’ MoMA YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_lwjhoSiU (accessed April 30, 2016). See also a related blog post by Wharton: Glenn Wharton, “Conserving a Nam June Paik Altered Piano,” parts 1 and 2. Inside/Out: Behind the Scenes-Conservation (May 8, 2013), http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/04/15/conserving-a-nam-june-paikaltered-piano (Part 1) (accessed May 30, 2016) and http://www.moma.org/explore /inside_out/author/gwharton (part 2). John Hanhardt, quoted in Alex Pham, “Art That Goes on the Blink,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2004. Archive of the conservation department, Guggenheim Museum, New York. One aspect seems to remain unresolved. If, in this context, we were to consider Taruskin’s argument about the instrumentation of a musical performance (see Chapter 3), how would employing a deactivated instrument affect the perception of the “authentic” performance? Sanneke Stigter, “How Material is Conceptual Art? From Certificate to Materialization: Installation Practices of Joseph Kosuth’s Glass (one and three),” in Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the Care of Complex Artworks, eds. Tatja Scholte and Glenn Wharton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 69–80.

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34.

35.

36. 37.

Tatja Scholte, “The Impact of Conservation on Site-Specific Works of Art,” New Strategies in the Conservation of Contemporary Art, author’s archive. (The project’s website has been discontinued.) Hanna Hölling, “The Archival Turn,” in Data Drift: Archiving Media and Data Art In the 21st Century, eds. Rasa Smite, Lev Manovich, and Raitis Smits (Riga, Latvia: RIXC and Liepaja’s University Art Research Lab, 2015), 73–89. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 15–86. Entry into the archive and barriers to that entry can be dictated by political censorship, but also by the artist’s choice—I think here of Tino Sehgal’s prohibition of the archive, whereby the artist bans any process of documenting his performances.

CONCLUSION

1.

2.

Webster’s identifies the origins of the word ark in the Latin arca, meaning “chest,” “box,” “coffer;” the Latin word is “akin to the Latin arcēre,” meaning “to hold off, to defend”— designating something that affords protection, shelter. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, s.v. “ark,” http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource = Webster%27s&word = ark&use1913 = on&use1828 = on (accessed October 10, 2012). David Lowenthal, “Art and Authenticity,” in Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed. Irving Lavin (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1988), 637–41.

NOTES TO PAGES 163–168

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVES MUSEUM AND ART COLLECTION ARCHIVES

Archive of the conservation department, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Archive of the conservation department, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf Archive of the conservation department, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Archive of the conservation department, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe Archive of the Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, which also includes the following: Erik Andersch Collection Mary Bauermeister Collection, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul Archive of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California Archive of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Archive of the Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego

P R I VAT E A R C H I V E S

Archive of Carl Solway, Cincinnati Archive of Mark Patsfall, Cincinnati

L I B R A RY A R C H I V E S

The Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles MoMA Manhattan Research Library, Special Collections, New York

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O N L I N E A R C H I V E S A N D D ATA B A S E S

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Intermedia Art Institute (imai), Düsseldorf The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Vasulka Archive, Steina and Woody Vasulka

C O N V E R S AT I O N S

Between 2010 and 2013, in preparing this manuscript, I consulted fifty specialists in curatorial, conservation, and museum practice, as well as Paik’s family and close friends and artists whose practice related to Paik’s in some way. The parenthetical identifiers following each name are those that help explain the individual’s link to Paik and are not tied to the year of my conversation with each. Abe, Shuya (engineer, Paik’s collaborator, Tokyo; October 2012). Althöfer, Heinz (formerly head of Restaurierungszentrum Düsseldorf; May 2011). Anderson, Simon (Fluxus artist, professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; May 2012). Arcangel, Cory (artist, New York; November 2011). Brock, Bazon (Fluxus artist, philosopher, Wuppertal; July 2010). Buschmann, Renate (director, Intermedia Art Institute (imai), Düsseldorf; September 2010). Chin, Zeeyoung (conservator, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; October 2012). Churner, Leah (formerly Media Art Collection Manager, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York; December 2010). Clayton, Eleanor (assistant curator, Tate Liverpool; March 2010). Downing, Glenn (artist, Paik’s collaborator; February 2013). Furmanski, Jonathan (conservator, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; May 2011). Garrin, Paul (artist, Paik’s video fabricator; May 2012). Godfrey, John J. (leading engineer of the WNET, New York; February 2013). Goetz, Ingvild (collector, Sammlung Goetz, Munich; May 2010). Grau, Christoph (art teacher in Hamburg; December 2012). Gregoire, Mathieu (project manager, Stuart Collection of the University of California, San Diego; May 2011). Hanhardt, John (senior curator for media arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; December 2010). Harris, Mark (professor, School of Art in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, University of Cincinnati; April 2011). Hendricks, Jon (curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; December 2010). Herzogenrath, Wulf (art historian and curator, director of the Kunsthalle Bremen; March 2010).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heydenreich, Gunnar (conservator and professor, Cologne University of Applied Sciences; May 2011). Hilbig, Larissa (manager of the Harald Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg; August 2010). Himmelsbach, Sabine (artistic director, HeK Haus der elektronsichen Künste Basel, Basel; September 2010). Jodi (Dirk Paesmans) (artist, Paik’s student in Düsseldorf; December 2011). Jones, Caitlin, and Paul Kuranko (formerly employees of Guggenheim Museum, New York; December 2010). Kaiser, Philipp (formerly director of Museum Ludwig, Cologne; April 2011). Knowles, Alison (Fluxus artist, New York; May 2012). Krystof, Doris (curator, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; October 2010). Kubota, Shigeko (1937–2015) (artist, Paik’s spouse; December 2010). London, Barbara (associate curator in Media and Performance Art, MoMA; December 2010). Lui, Tien Lui (known as C. T. Lui) (Paik’s fabricator, owner of CTL Electronics, New York; December 2010 and June 2011). Müller, Werner (formerly head of conservation, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; October 2010). Nekes, Werner (artist, Paik’s friend and a collector of his works, Mülheim an der Ruhr; January 2011). Park, Manu (managing director, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin; October 2012). Park, Sang Ae (archivist, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin; October 2012). Patsfall, Mark (artist, Paik’s collaborator and fabricator, Cincinnati; December 2010 and April 2011). Phillips, Glenn (curator, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; May 2011). Phillips, Joanna (associate conservator, Guggenheim Museum, New York; December 2010). Rennert, Susanne (independent curator, Düsseldorf; August 2010). Rutten, Bart (curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; November 2012). Saueracker, Jochen (artist, Paik’s student, fabricator and collaborator, Düsseldorf; June and August 2010). Shirley, Raphael (artist, Paik’s collaborator, CTL Electronics, New York; June 2012). Solway, Carl (gallery owner, Paik’s mentor, Cincinnati; December 2010). Stringari, Carol (deputy director and chief conservator, Guggenheim Museum, New York; December 2010). Trowbridge, Cameron (manager, Research Services, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles; May 2011). Watari, Etsuko (curator of Watari-Um, Tokyo; daughter of Shikusho Watari, a gallery owner who was Paik’s mentor, Tokyo; October 2012). Wegner, Thomas (head of Weisses Haus, Hamburg; December 2012). Weibel, Peter (curator, artist, chairman of the ZKM, Karlsruhe; June 2010). Wharton, Glenn (formerly time-based media conservator, MoMA; December 2010). Woodman, Charles (professor, School of Art in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, University of Cincinnati; December 2010 and April 2011). Yalkut, Jud (1938–2013) (artist, filmmaker; June 2012).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Art Institute of Chicago. Surveying the First Decade. Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts Intermix, and Bay Area Video Coalition, Vol. 2, program 5. Chicago, Illinois, 1995. 4 DVDs, 8:27:11. Cage, John. “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now,” https://www.sfmoma.org/press/release/ sfmoma-presents-major-overview-of-participation-b/ (accessed June 14, 2016). LeWitt, Sol. Interview by National Public Radio (1991), http://www.npr.org/templates/story /story.php?storyId = 9481440 (accessed December 1, 2011). Paik, Nam June. Interview by Netherland Media Art Institute Amsterdam (NIMk), 1984, collection of NIMk, NIMk archive, http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/?page = %2Fsite%2Fart .php%3Fdoc_id%3D9073 (accessed January 10, 2013). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.” John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg in “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now” (audio guide), https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.308.A-C (accessed June 14, 2016).

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INDEX

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations. Abe, Shuya, 36, 38, 119, 179n27 accessibility, 119, 147–48, 152 Acconci, Vito, 40 “action music,” 43 actuality, 55, 59, 64; archival actualization, 158–60; Bergsonian dualism with virtuality, 102, 104; from virtual to actual, 156–58 Adorno, Theodor, 22–23, 143, 175n21, 192n20, 206n14 afterimages, 112, 199n11 afterlife, 19–23, 143 Albano, Albert, 96 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, N.Y.), 161 Allan ‘n’ Allen’s Complaint (Paik and Godfrey, 1982), 36 allographic/autographic distinction, 7, 49–50, 91, 95, 184n42; allographic logic of re-performance, 94; autographic moment in Paik’s works, 52–53; temporal adaptability and, 130 alteration, 5, 8, 61, 70, 129, 208n5

American Institute for Conservation, 98 analogue media, 65, 116; degradation of, 113–14, 193n33; digitization of, 87, 91, 94, 193n42; German TV broadcast, 80, 118, 120; processing of time and, 110; projectors/ projection, 67, 70, 78; viewer interaction with, 87; in Zen for Film, 65, 67, 70, 78, 80, 87, 91, 94 Anarchy of Silence, The (Schunck Heerlen exhibition, 2010), 85–86, 187n70 Appadurai, Arjun, 142, 153 apparatus, 26, 51, 101, 114, 139; archaeological character of, 116; deactivated, 162; display, 49, 78, 81, 161; exchangeable, 48; media-specific objecthood of, 58; mobile, 55; physicality of, 115; playback, 88, 121, 161, 162; projection, 91, 94, 112; soundproducing, 44; spectacle of viewing and, 110; as technological ruin, 122; temporality and, 123 Appelbaum, Barbara, 97 archaeology, 141

233

archē (rule, government), 141, 167 Arche Noah [Noah’s Ark] (Paik, 1989), 7, 17–19, 48, 92, 96, 177n2; afterlife of, 19–22; allographic/autographic distinction and, 50–51; archival judgment and, 156; archival research on, 145–46, 147; autographic moment of, 52, 53; changeability of, 76, 100; clash of different temporalities and, 129; degree of change in, 91; delegation of labor in, 35; Duchamp’s influence on, 128, 138; materializations of, 95; mereological theory of identity and, 139; modification of interior structure, 22; musealization of, 22–23; as “performance,” 49; reinstallations and modifications of, 40, 148–49, 152; reversibility paradigm and, 98; spatial circumstances and, 86; test re-installation at ZKM, 21; upgrading of playback equipment in, 87; as vessel of archival knowledge, 167–68; virtual archive and, 148–49 architecture, 99, 139, 162, 173n13, 184n42 Architecture de l’air (Klein, 1961), 72 archive, 4, 10, 45, 48; archivology, 142; artist’s prohibition of, 211n37; arwork as archive, 160–63; changeability and, 58; conservation narrative and, 152–53; dispersion of, 143–46; documentary dimension of museum archive, 142–43; etymology and definition of, 141–42; film and, 74; hybrid assemblages and, 10; identity and, 7; instructions and, 33, 36; interpretation of, 148, 169, 207n25; iterations and, 47; judgments and, 154–56; multimedia artworks and, 5, 9; multiple origins (arches) of, 167–69; museum, 55; open artwork and, 57; potentiality of artworks and, 154; system of accessibility and, 147–48; time and, 9; TV Garden and, 29; two bodies of, 206n7; virtual (nonphysical), 148–52, 163, 165, 207n30; of ZKM, 18 archons (magistrates), 141, 168 Arendt, Hannah, 155 Aristotle, 61, 102, 155 Arns, Inke, 191n14 Art and Agency (Gell), 125 Art by Telephone exhibition (Chicago, 1969), 31

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Arte dei rumori, L’ [The Art of Noise] (Russolo, 1913), 43, 182n6 Art Make-Up (Nauman, 1976), 88 artwork: adaptation to space, 86; authenticity of, 4, 172n10; autographic and allographic, 49–50; Bergsonian duration and, 104; changeability of, 8; conceptual level of, 78–80; deactivated and reactivated, 85–86, 125, 160, 162; further development (reworking) of, 88–90; hybrid, 6; identity of, 5, 6, 7–9, 140, 142; as interventions in time, 108; materialization of, 15; multiplicity of occurrences in time, 100; participatory, 81–86, 191n14; past manifestations of, 9; physical constituents of, 4; “retinal art,” 72; slow and fast, 121; spatial art and time-based art, 121; temporal, 120–22; temporalities of, 8 Art Worlds (Becker, 2008), 36 Ashley-Smith, Jonathan, 97 Austin, J. L., 46, 52 auteur theory, of filmmakers, 36–37 authenticity, 4, 32, 58, 118, 169, 172n10; “authentic condition” and, 97; continuous construction of, 100; historically authentic performance, 49, 75; interpretation and, 49; in musical performance, 7, 49, 168; spatio-temporal identity of objects and, 139 “Authenticity in Art” (Dutton), 47, 186n65 authorship, 51, 54–58 autographic works. See allographic/autographic distinction Bach, Johann Sebastian, 47, 49, 71 Badiou, Alain, 190n37 Baldini, Umberto, 10 Barthes, Roland, 56, 111 Bauermeister, Mary, 23, 44, 45 Bazin, André, 113, 199n14 Becker, Howard, 36 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 64 Belting, Hans, 193n38 Benjamin, Walter, 115, 120, 199n21, 201n48 Bergson, Henri, 8, 93, 101–104, 107, 117, 158, 197n39; on difference and duration, 208n5; on perception of motion, 112; on the real

and the possible, 156, 209n7; on writing, 201n52 Bergsonism (Deleuze, 1966), 102 Bild für Bild—Film und Zeitgenössische Kunst (Museum Ostwall, Dortmunder U.), 65, 65 “black boxing,” 152 Black Paintings (Rauschenberg), 74 Blase, Christoph, 201n41 Boito, Camillo, 10 Bolter, David, 116, 200n27 Bonino, Fernanda, 23, 24 Bonino Gallery (New York), 35 boredom, 70 Brandenburger Tor (Paik, undated), drawings as quasi-instructions for, 33, 33, 178n19 Brandi, Cesare, 10, 105, 110, 172n10, 184n36, 203n71 Brecht, George, 31, 44, 70, 188n14, 201n39 bricolage, 173n13, 179n36 Brock, Bazon, 99 Broodthaers, Marcel, 199n23 Buddha (Paik, 1989), 90 Burnham, Jack, 177n8 Busin, Laurent, 26 Butler, Judith, 183n21 Bye Bye Kipling (Paik, 1986), 171n4, 180n47 Cage, John, 6, 23, 31, 56, 161; 4′33″ (1952), 34, 71–72, 73, 74, 183n24, 189n26; Imaginary Landscape No. 4, 182n12; influence on Paik, 42–44, 182n4, 187n71; Klavier Integral (1958–63), 210n29; as Paik’s mentor, 179n26; on repetition and change, 70, 188n15; Silence (1973), 72; on Zen for Film, 67–68 Cahiers du Cinéma (film periodical), 36 Calder, Alexander, 55 calligraphy, East Asian, 1, 3, 19, 52 camera, 69, 106, 161, 189n25, 200n29; caméra-stylo (camera-pen), 37; as “clock for seeing,” 111; illusion of motion and, 112; Portapak, 119, 201n40; television, 119; video, 118, 119, 174n10 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 111 Candle TV (Paik, 1975), 173n2 Canopus (Paik, 1989), 94, 95, 171n1, 174n15; air associated with, 173n2; archival judgment

and, 156; autographic moment of, 52, 53; damaged in fall, 1–4, 2, 3, 51; mereological theory of identity and, 139 Capillary Tubes, 127 Capitolato (Edwards, 1777), 158 Caple, Chris, 98 captive moment, 8 causality, 96 Centre Pompidou, 67, 74 Century, The (Badiou, 2005), 190n37 César (Baldaccini), 31, 200n35 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 128, 203n64 chance, 6, 35, 78–79; Cage’s method of composition and, 71, 72; capture of chance events, 74; fragmentation and, 46; musical works and, 43. See also indeterminacy changeability, 7, 58, 61, 95, 125, 168; of actualizations, 157; Bergsonian duration and, 104–105; broadened horizons and, 90–92; changeable artworks, 5, 8, 34, 55; conservation narrative and, 133; degree of, 105; forms of, 76–77; instrinsic and extrinsic change, 8, 76; limits of, 8, 164; traditional conservation and, 162 Cherry, Deborah, 23 China, 71 chronophotography, 106–108, 106, 107, 111, 198n63. See also photography Clavir, Miriam, 98 Clayton, Eleanor, 176n43 “Cleaning Controversy” (1947), 97 collaboration/collaborators, 6, 7, 41, 146; authority exercised by collaborator, 40; interpretation and, 57; in multimedia artworks, 35. See also fabrication/ fabricators; technicians collectors, 34, 39, 87 common sense, 92, 105, 155 Composition 1960 #10 to Bob Morris (Young), 52 concept, 7, 15, 152; materialization and, 54; re-execution of works and, 41; score/set of instructions and, 31 conceptual art, 5, 30, 31, 32, 168, 177n2 conservation, 4, 8, 30, 73, 75, 171n2; artist’s intentionality and, 51; Bergsonian duration and, 103, 108; changeability and, 91, 102; clash of temporalities and, 130; conservation

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conservation (continued) narrative, 9, 132–33, 152–53; conservation objects, 5, 10–11; creative, 158–60; critique of time in, 93–96; culture of, 9; damage to Canopus and, 2–3; “ideal state” of artworks as goal, 97–98; measurable time and, 100, 196n37; as methodological recognition, 105; “minimal intervention” principle of, 8, 95, 98, 196n23; museum time and, 131; new, 96; “original state” of objects and, 97, 164; of outdoor ensembles, 124; scientific approach to, 100; scientific versus humanistic approaches, 97; spatial relationships and, 100; theories of musical performance and, 42; time and, 61, 96, 109; of Zen for Film, 68. See also preservation; restoration; traditional conservation Conservation Treatment Methodology (Appelbaum, 2009), 97 conservators, 7, 81, 122, 164; archival potentiality and, 154; archive and, 143; changeability and, 76; context and decisions made by, 92; degree of permissible change and, 91; interpretation and, 57; judgment of, 154–55; museum time and, 130; ruins and, 124; temporal awareness of, 96 Contemporary Theory of Conservation (Muñoz Viñas), 159 context, 9, 92 Conti, Alessandro, 10, 159, 196n33 contingency, 9, 35, 43, 46, 74, 79, 203n66. See also chance; indeterminacy continuum, 48–49 Cosgrove, D. E., 159 Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1907), 197n39, 197n48 creativity/creative act, 40–41, 79; creation–recreation distinction, 158, 159; creative conservation, 158–60; presencing and, 158; role of spectator in, 199n17 critical theory, 83 Croce, Benedetto, 186n62 CRT (cathode-ray-tube) monitors, 1, 17, 33, 174n8; in Global Groove, 24; in Magnet TV, 82, 117; in Rembrandt Automatic, 122; technological aesthetics of, 80; in TV Garden, 29, 47; in Zen for TV, 78

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Cua Lim, Bliss, 59 Cubism, 125 Cunningham, Merce, 23, 67–68, 161 curators, 7, 27, 35, 81, 123, 164; archival potentiality and, 154; artists’ instructions and, 34; changeability and, 76; context and decisions made by, 92; degree of permissible change and, 91; interpretation and, 57; judgment of, 154–55; knowledge of, 152; re-execution of works by, 41 Danger Music for Dick Higgins (Paik), 178n17 Dasein (“being-in-the-world”), 131 Davies, David, 183n22 Davies, Stephen, 47, 56 death: being-toward-death, 131; film and, 113, 114; museum archive and, 143; time in video and, 25 Death 24x a Second (Mulvey), 113 Debord, Guy, 190n31 Decasia (Morrison, 2002), 114 decay, 3, 5, 24, 101, 132; accumulated traces of, 114; artworks about, 9; durée as supplement to, 10; of film, 188n10; implicit linearity of, 95; linear progress of, 8; museum time and, 131; reversibility and, 98; Romantic appreciation of, 158; technology deprived of original function by, 122 Decker-Phillips, Edith, 23, 43 “De-Composition in the Media Art” (Paik), 179n32 Dehio, Georg, 10, 158 Deleuze, Gilles: Bergsonian theory of duration and, 8, 102–104, 156–57, 158, 197n53; Cage and, 188n15; on continuity in cinema, 112 dematerialization, 10, 29 Derrida, Jacques, 52, 141, 148, 164, 207n25 Descartes, René, 131 “destructive art,” 36, 43 Dewey, John, 23, 206n15 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944), 192n20 Dietz, Steve, 178n10 Digibeta (Digital Betacam), 162 digital media, 116 digitization, 87, 88, 113, 129, 145

Dipert, Randall R., 51 discourse, 9, 160 display, 4, 8, 64, 74; artworks withdrawn from, 23; fabricators and, 39; institutional, 93; materiality of, 67; reinstallation and, 49; of replicas, 21; of TV Garden, 25, 27, 48; upgrading of, 87–88, 92; of Zen for Film, 64, 67, 70, 75 Doane, Mary Ann, 111, 158 documenta 6 (Kassel, 1977), 23, 24, 26, 35 Downing, Glenn, 35, 37, 38 Drifting Producers (Flying City, 2004), 163 duality, 48, 49, 95 Duchamp, Marcel, 52, 56, 74, 81, 128, 185n48; 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), 72; fourth dimension and, 125; The Large Glass [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even] (1915–23), 73, 78, 125, 126, 127; Network of Stoppages (1914), 125, 126–27, 127, 128, 162; readymades and, 35, 138; on “retinal art,” 72; on role of spectator in creative act, 199n17; Three Standard Stoppages (1913), 125, 126, 126, 203n66; Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), 126, 128 Duguet, Anne-Marie, 110 duration (durée), Bergsonian theory of, 8, 10, 93, 101–104, 125; conservation and, 103, 108; decomposition of duration, 112; photography and, 105–106; as time of heterogeneity, 125 Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes) (Ray), 73 Dutton, Denis, 47, 49 Duve, Thierry de, 107, 111 Dykstra, Steven, 97 Eamon, Christopher, 190n31 Earth (Paik, 1990), 173n2 earthworks, 10, 173n13 Ebeling, Knut, 142 Eco, Umberto, 7, 54–58, 185n58 Edwards, Pietro, 158 Eggert, Paul, 160 Eine Kerze/One Candle (Paik, 1989), 173n2 Electronic Art (Gallery Bonino exhibition, 1976), 81 Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), 67, 187n3

Electronic Art show (Fundació Joan Miró, 1992), 19 Electronic Moon No. 2 (Paik, 1966–72), 117 electronic music and media, 6, 26, 44, 52, 80, 93 Electronic Superhighway (Paik, 1974), 171n4 “Electronic Video Recorder” (Paik manifesto, 1965), 119 emulation (migration, upgrading), 6, 8, 49, 92, 120 endurance, 4, 100, 102, 140, 149, 163–65 Energie Baden–Württemberg (EnBW), 20, 48, 147, 174n16, 184n43 Enlightenment, 11, 120–21, 173n16 entropy, 101, 124, 131 environmental art, 10 episteme (teachable knowledge), 155, 156 Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg, 1953), 114, 199n16 Ernst, Wolfgang, 26 event, 5, 44, 63, 75, 119; “authentic condition” and, 97; chance, 74, 79, 187n5; cinematic, 67, 70; Fluxus, 45, 81, 188n12; fractured moments of, 106; information storage and, 168; linear time and, 131; objects as slow events, 202n53; performative objects and, 46; residue of past events, 42; scores and instructions for, 31; singular (unique), 43, 52, 111; spectatorial experience and, 110; spontaneous, 149; time-based media and, 50; transitory, 125; uncompleted, 107; Zen for Film as, 8 Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (Paik exhibition, Wuppertal, 1963), 31, 44, 46, 56–57, 78; immediacy in, 117; participatory art in, 82; Peter Brötzmann Demonstrates “Random Access” (Paik and Montwé, photograph, 1963 [2004]), 83; technological dysfunction in, 122; “time-art” and, 109; Visitor at “Record Schaschlik” (Paik and Montwé, photograph, 1963 [2004]), 84 fabrication/fabricators, 6, 7, 36, 39, 52, 79; anonymous, 39; authority of, 40; autographic moment and, 52; collaborators’ distinction from, 35, 56; instructions and, 33, 37, 178n21; intentions of, 95; in

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fabrication/fabricators (continued) Warhol’s Factory, 39. See also collaboration/ collaborators; technicians factory (studios of Paik): Cincinnati, 37, 39–40, 180nn48–49; New York, 37, 40, 82, 180nn48–49, 181n53, 181n56 Factory, of Andy Warhol, 39–40, 180n50 Family of Robots (Paik and Solway, 1986), 38 Fernsehgalerie Schum (Television Gallery Schum, 1967–70), 117 50 cc of Paris Air (Duchamp, 1919), 72 film (cinema), 8, 42; blank, 71, 72, 189n25; cinematic time, 110–15; decay of, 67, 69; duration and, 67; flicker film, 113; Fluxkit and, 68, 69, 77, 91, 188n9; Fluxus, 44, 65, 67–68, 189n25; French New Wave, 36–37; of illusion and narrative, 70; materiality of, 64; Portapak camera, 119, 201n40; processing of time and, 110; sculpture and, 70; temporality of, 8. See also projectors/ projection film frame, 63, 72, 111, 112, 113; sequential division of time into, 117; singular image in, 118 Fiske, Tina, 183n29 Flavin, Dan, 26 Fluxfilm Anthology (1962–70), 67, 91–92, 187n3 Fluxhall festival (1964), 67, 69, 188n12 Fluxus, 32, 42, 43, 45, 53, 75, 178n9; culturaltechnological changes and, 93; “do-it-yourself” aesthetics of, 44; film and, 44, 65, 67–68, 68, 189n25, 200n29; repetition in, 70; time as duration and, 203n73; Zen Buddhism and, 71 Fluxus Codex (Henricks, 1988), 69 Flying City, 163 Focus Gallery (Bard Graduate Center, New York), 69 forgetting/forgetfulness, 131, 142, 206n11 Fortner, Wolfgang, 43 Foucault, Michel, 128, 131, 142, 146, 205–206n3 4′33″ (Cage, 1952), 71–72, 73, 74, 183n24, 189n26; changeability of, 76; instructionsscore for, 34 Frankfurt School, 83, 192n20 freeze-frame paradigm, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 150

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Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), 19, 40, 86, 193n43 Futurism, 43, 201n39 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 159 Gallery Parnass (Wuppertal, Germany), 44, 78 Garden of Eden, 99, 196n33 Garrin, Paul, 35, 36, 182n17, 200n34; New York studios and, 40; robot series and, 38; Zen for TV and, 81 Gell, Alfred, 125, 126–27 Germany, 6, 28, 36; Paik’s move to, 43; public TV network (Deutsches Fernsehen), 117 Gerstner, Karl, 200n35 Gestalt psychology, 172n10 Ginsberg, Allen, 23 Glanville, Helen, 98, 159 Glass (one and three) (Kosuth, 1965), 162–63 Global Groove (Paik and Godfrey, 1973), 23, 24, 36, 171n4, 175n24, 176n39; beginning announcement of, 25–26; music and, 64; presented on multiple screens, 30, 88 Godard, Jean-Luc, 36, 113 Godfrey, John, 23, 175n24 Goldberg Variations (Bach), 47 Goldsworthy, Andy, 77 Goodman, Nelson, 49–50, 184n39 Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (Paik, 1984), 171n4, 180n47, 181n1 Gould, Glenn, 47, 49 Grau, Christoph, 19, 174n11 Greenberg, Clement, 187n72 Groys, Boris, 15, 41, 148 Grusin, Richard, 116, 200n27 Guattari, Félix, 151 Guggenheim Museum (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), 27, 41, 47, 176n39; The Third Mind exhibition (2009), 65, 66, 187n2; TV Garden at, 91; Variable Media Initiative and, 77 Günzel, Stephan, 142 Guy Pieters Gallery (Knokke, Belgium), 161 Haacke, Hans, 180–81n50 Hahn, Otto, 70 Hahn, Wolfgang, 191n5 Händel, Georg Friedrich, 51

Hanhardt, John, 26, 50, 162, 180n46, 207n20 happenings, 5, 173n13 Hassard, Frank, 159 Hegel, G. W. F., 143 Heidegger, Martin, 98, 131, 143, 163 Hendricks, Jon, 68, 69, 188n8 Heraclitus, river metaphor of, 135, 138 Herzogenrath, Wulf, 18, 19, 26, 207n20; on visualization of time, 46; on Wirkung of installations, 41, 51 Hesse, Eva, 115 heterotemporality, 8, 10, 94, 194n1, 203n64; Bergsonian theory and, 109, 125; conservation narrative and, 132; heterochronies, 128, 203n70; temporal relativism, 125; time as duration and, 101 heterotopias, 131, 203n70 Higgins, Dick, 70 Hirst, Damien, 133 history, 99, 131, 153 History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (Conti, 1988), 159 Hoffman, Justin, 71 Hollywood films, 36–37 Hommage aan Stanley Brouwn (Paik, 1984), 161 Hommage à John Cage (Paik, 1959), 43 Hong Kong, 6 Horkheimer, Max, 192n20 Huffman, Jon, 35, 37 humans, 11, 110, 113, 150, 167; “being-towarddeath” and, 131; engagement with the past, 105; heterotopias and, 203n70; historical time and, 132; information storage and, 18, 168; interaction with nature and technology, 18; photographed in motion, 106, 107, 111; technology and originary human, 204n83; time dimension inaccessible to, 111, 112; time perception by, 101 Hummelen, Ijsbrand, 208n37 Hurlements en Faveur de Sade [Howls in Favour of Sade] (Debord, 1952), 190n31 Husserl, Edmund, 55, 104, 127 I Ching (Book of Changes), 71 identity: as archival form of multimedia work, 157; as archival continuity, 163–65; Lacanian theory of signifier/signified, 138,

140; mereological theory of, 137, 139; persistence of, 9, 138–39, 167; spatio-temporal continuity and, 138–39 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage), 182n12 immediacy, 79, 117, 118, 119, 143 improvisation/improvisers, 54, 56 indeterminacy, 43, 44, 57, 82. See also chance; contingency indeterminism, 8, 85 installation art, 5, 173n13; technology-based, 10; time-based, 18; Wirkung (effect of action) of, 41, 51, 139, 156 Installation Bible, 34 Instruction Paintings (Ono, 1961), 31 instructions, 9, 15, 48, 95, 130, 140; Arche Noah and, 19; authenticity and, 7; collaborators and, 37, 54, 56; in conceptual art, 31; in conservation archive, 144; interpretation of, 57; musical score as, 47; performance and, 47, 49; reformulations by curators/ conservators, 32–33, 34; rematerialization of works and, 41; TV Clock and, 55; TV Garden and, 27, 29–32, 129, 133, 140; unwritten, 36; variability and, 77; Zen for Film and, 133; Zen for TV and, 80 intention/intentionality, 9, 40, 50, 74, 91, 183n23; artist-as-genius and, 9; of conservators, 11; creative actualization as social investment and, 164; decay and, 130; disregard of artist’s intention, 67; high and low, 7, 51; interpretive activity and, 57; limits of agency of, 27; originality and, 95; upgrading of playback/display and, 87 interactivity/interactive element, 69, 82, 92, 123 interdisciplinary networks, 6 intermedia, 70, 189n16 International Summer School Courses for New Music (Darmstadt), 43 Internet, 168, 171n4 interpretation, 47, 49, 57, 153 intertextuality, 160 “invisible art,” 72 Ippolito, Jon, 50, 85 Isou, Isidore, 200n35

INDEX

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239

iterations, 29, 42, 101, 183n29, 190n29; archive and, 164; diversity of, 47; identity and difference in, 77; reiterations, 101. See also repetition Jackson, Peter, 131 Jährling, Rolf, 44, 109 Japan, 6, 71, 147, 149 Jędrzejewska, Hanna, 159 Jenkins, Bruce, 69, 188n12 judgment, 88, 92, 114; archival, 154–56; conservation and, 155, 156, 164; Hannah Arendt and, 155; Kantian and Aristotelian notions of, 155 of Paik’s assistants and collaborators, 27, 40, 54; phronesis as, 155; reflective, 155 Kagel, Mauricio, 43 Kant, Immanuel, 155, 196n37 Kaprow, Allan, 23 K456 robot (Paik and Abe, 1964), 38, 180n44 Kim, Eunji, 180n49, 183n25 Kittler, Friedrich, 117 Klavier Integral (Cage, 1958–63), 210n29 Klavierstück XI (Stockhausen), 54 Klein, Yves, 72 Kleines Sommerfest—Après Johan Cage (Gallery Parnass show, 1962), 44 Klotz, Heinrich, 19, 171n1 knowledge, 9, 32, 96, 154; ephemeral and nonreproducible, 148; explicit, 150, 151; people as transmitters of, 207n30; practical, 155; tacit (implicit), 150–52, 165, 208n37 Kobald, Christian, 188n14 Korea, 6, 42, 71, 147, 181n1 Korean calligraphy, 1, 3, 19, 52 Kosuth, Joseph, 162, 177n2 Krauss, Rosalind, 116, 119, 199n23 K21 Ständehaus (Düsseldorf ), 27, 28, 47, 50, 91, 139 Kuba TV (Paik, 1963), 57 Kubota, Shigeko, 35, 36, 37, 40, 90, 173n13 Kuh, Katherine, 203n66 Kunsthalle Bremen, 86, 91 labor, delegation of, 35, 71 Lacan, Jacques, 138, 140

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Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin, 1849), 158 language(s), 9, 132 Large Glass, The [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even] (Duchamp, 1915–23), 73, 78, 125, 126, 127 Latour, Bruno, 152, 160, 202n57 Laurenson, Pip, 48, 50 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 117, 119 LCD televisions, 80, 92, 174n8 Lee, Young Cheol, 28, 207n20 leftovers, 38, 46, 85, 144, 183n23. See also props; relics Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 120–21, 201n52 Levinson, Jerrold, 184n39 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 179n36 LeWitt, Sol, 31, 32, 35, 178n10 Ligeti, György, 43 linearity, 96–100, 105 Livre (Mallarmé), 55 Lowenthal, David, 100, 159, 172n11, 198n56; on alteration, 105; on material preservation as illusion, 168; on relics, 85 Lumière brothers, 111, 198n63 Lyon, Eleanor, 36 Maciunas, George, 44, 69, 91, 186n68, 188n9 Mac Low, Jackson, 189n25 magistracy, 141 Magnet TV (Paik, 1963), 57, 81–82, 82, 85, 92 Malevich, Kazimir, 72, 73, 190n37 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 55, 191n14 Man Ray, 73 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 106–7, 111, 198n63 materiality: ephemerality and, 70; process of transformation and, 7; temporal materiality of artworks, 8, 163–64 materialization, 29, 30, 51, 57, 95; concept and, 54; expanding archival body and, 150; instructions and, 32, 162; recurring, 41; rematerialization, 111, 129, 146, 168 McLuhan, Marshall, 116, 117, 200n27, 201n52 media art, 5, 6, 31, 39 medium: aging and decay of, 73, 131; change of, 162; cinematic/filmic, 67, 71, 73, 78, 110, 113, 114, 193n42; as end in itself, 51; of language, 31; medium specificity, 92, 94, 110, 187n72; message of, 73, 200n27; obsolete, 116, 168; original, 77; pastness of, 115, 116, 199n21;

premedium, 116; remediation and, 116, 201n49; singular, 9, 48; as technological ruin, 122; television (TV), 80, 81, 89, 200n35; temporality of, 118; traditional, 121; of video, 46, 117, 118, 119 memory, 9, 10, 32, 131, 154; conservation narrative and, 153; cultural, 142; embodied, 149; paradox of, 103; reinstallation practices and, 148; technological, 26; virtual sphere of archive and, 150 mentors, 6, 37, 149, 179n26 mereological theory, 137 metadata, 9 migration (emulation, upgrading), 6, 8, 71, 92; conservation and, 120; of data to new formats, 87; of hardware and data, 162; instrumentation, 49; of playback technology, 128 minimal art, 10 Moholy-Nagy, László, 31, 72–73 moment, 25, 58, 111, 129; of artwork’s conception, 100; “authentic moment,” 98; autographic, 8, 52–53, 139; captive moment, 8, 107–108; cone of memory and, 103; duration (durée) and, 104, 112; film (cinema) and, 111, 114, 116; fractured moments of time, 106; historical, 5, 69, 97–98, 110; of intervention, 108; linear succession of moments, 101, 102; “locking a work” and, 96; methodological, 10, 105, 110; preservation of, 74; of spectatorship, 70; time as progress and, 99 monuments, 10, 173n16 Moon Is the Oldest TV (Paik, 1965), 30, 32, 80–81, 86, 97; archival judgment and, 156; recorded on videotape, 200n34; temporal structure of film and, 117; upgraded display of, 87 Moore, Peter, 63, 69; Paik in photograph with Magnet TV, 82, 82; silhouette of Paik in photograph of Zen for Film, 72, 190n31 Moorman, Charlotte, 36, 182n17 Morris, William, 9 Morrison, Bill, 114 motion, instance and, 105–108 multimedia artworks, 4, 5, 49, 61, 142, 204n84; archival judgment and, 154; autographic marking of, 52; Bergson’s analysis of time

and, 101, 105, 109; changeability of, 76, 77, 90, 99, 133, 157, 169; creative conservation and, 158, 160; delegated labor and, 35; documentation of, 32; existence as concepts, 15; identity of, 10, 146, 164; microarchives and, 145; reversibility and, 98; temporality of, 8; virtual (nonphysical) archive and, 148 multimedia installations, 5, 7, 8, 58, 99; as artworks actively responding to time, 9; autographic moment and, 53; changeability and, 76–77, 139; conservation narrative and, 152; conservation of, 96; continuum and, 48–49; defined, 10; dual and temporal nature of, 49; duality of, 48, 49, 95; Eco’s Open Work and, 54–58; outdoor, 123; as polychronic entities, 125; rematerialization of, 129; time and, 93 Multi-Mediale 2 Karlsruhe festival (1991), 19, 95, 174n12 Mulvey, Laura, 113 Muñoz Viñas, Salvador, 10, 172n11, 173n16; on “authentic condition” of artwork, 105; on creativity in conservation, 159, 210n21; on restoration, 96, 195n9 musealization, 22–23, 143, 162 Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago), 38 Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] (New York), 88, 143, 161, 162 Museum Ostwall (Dortmund, Germany), 74 museums: documentary dimension of museum archive, 142–43; museum time, 130–31; posthumous reinstallations of Paik’s works in, 40; site specificity and, 86; static material objects in, 5; tacit knowledge of specialists in, 151; Western museological culture, 92. See also conservators; curators music, 24, 42–44, 85; “action music,” 43; as allographic works, 50; authenticity in musical performance, 7; electronic music, 6; historical instrumentation in performance, 77; “noise” and, 43; physical music, 45; silence and, 72; as temporal art form, 61; time and, 109; two-stage process of creation, 47, 50; uniqueness and, 46; Werktreue (fidelity to the musical work), 49. See also new music

INDEX

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2 41

Muybridge, Eadweard, 106, 107, 111 Mystic Writing Pad, metaphor of, 150 Nam June Paik Art Center (Yongin, South Korea), 28–29, 32, 74, 92, 94, 147; archives of, 143; Erik Andersch Collection, 188n10 Nam June Paik: Video Artist, Performance Artist, Composer and Visionary (Tate Liverpool, 2010–11), 65, 66, 67 Nam June Paik: Werke aus der Sammlung des ZKM [Nam June Paik: Artworks from the ZKM Collection] (exhibition, 2008–2009), 20 narrative, 9, 69, 132; cinematic, 70, 73, 110; conservation narrative, 9, 132–33; rejection of, 114; Ricoeur’s narrative theory, 9, 132; visual, 82 nature, 18, 24, 26, 76 Nauman, Bruce, 67, 88 Network of Stoppages (Duchamp, 1914), 125, 126–27, 127, 128, 162 Neuburger, Susanne, 32 New Cinema Festival (New York, 1965), 69 Newman, Barnett, 191n7 new music, 8, 42 New Vision (Moholy-Nagy, 1928), 72–73 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 142, 159, 206n11 Noël de Tilly, Ariane, 32, 178n18 “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (Sarris), 36 “Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad, A” (Freud), 150 nothingness and emptiness, 43, 64, 71, 72, 73 Now Jump festival (2008), 28 Nyman, Michael, 178n15 object, 8, 184n37; Abschattungen (shadows) of, 55; changeable, 5; conservation objects, 5, 10–11; duality with performance, 49; ethnographic, 98; evolving attitudes toward, 9; fragmentation of identity of, 102; identity of, 137–38, 139; “museum object,” 11; performative objects, 46, 85; static material object, 4, 5; from static object to dynamic process, 191n14; temporality of, 202n53; time and, 70, 110, 125–28, 126, 127

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INDEX

obsolescence, 5, 6, 76; changeability and, 77; of media, 25; museum time and, 131; technology deprived of original function by, 122 Ono, Yoko, 31 ontologies, 8, 137, 204n83 Ontology (Bazin), 113 opacity, 114, 115 Open Work [Opera Aperta] (Eco, 1962), 54–58, 185n58, 186n62 Opera Sextronique (Paik and Moorman, 1967), 36 Oriental Paintings (Paik, date unknown), 27, 176n34, 176n39 original condition, 98, 99, 100 Originale (Stockhausen), 44 originality, 47, 95 Osborne, Peter, 31 Ostrow, Saul, 31 Paik, Nam June: on abstract time, 109; assistants and fabricators, 18, 30, 33, 36, 95; Bensberg-Refrath (Cologne) secret studio of, 44, 78; Cage’s influence on, 42–44, 70–71, 182n4, 187n71; collaborators of, 33, 35–36, 37–39, 95, 179n27; conceptual art and, 31, 32, 177n2; death of, 35, 40, 172n7; estate of, 40, 68; Fluxus and, 32, 54; as forerunner in use of new media, 171n4; intentions of, 51; letters of authenticity, 34; on longevity of his work, 169; move to Germany (1957), 43; as musician and composer, 42–44; performing arts and, 36, 42; on progress of technology, 123; reluctance to create scores/instructions, 32, 178n15; on time-structure of video, 18; universal questions pursued by, 5–7; video installation compared to opera, 42; workshop of, 171n1 Paik, Nam June, works of: Allan ‘n’ Allen’s Complaint (with Godfrey, 1982), 36; Brandenburger Tor (1992), 33, 33; Buddha (1989), 90; Bye Bye Kipling (1986), 171n4, 180n47; Candle TV (1975), 173n2; Danger Music for Dick Higgins, 178n17; Earth (1990), 173n2; Eine Kerze/One Candle (1989), 173n2; Electronic Moon No. 2

(1966–72), 117; Electronic Superhighway (1974), 171n4; “Electronic Video Recorder” (manifesto, 1965), 119; Family of Robots (with Solway, 1986), 38; Global Groove (with Godfrey, 1973), 23, 24, 36, 171n4, 175n24, 176n39; Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), 171n4, 180n47, 181n1; Hommage aan Stanley Brown (1984), 161; Hommage à John Cage (1959), 43; K456 robot (with Abe, 1964), 38, 180n44; Kuba TV (1963), 57; Magnet TV (1963), 57, 81–82, 82, 85, 92; Moon Is the Oldest TV (1965), 30, 32, 80–81, 117, 200n34; Opera Sextronique (with Moorman, 1967), 36; Oriental Paintings (date unknown), 27, 176n34, 176n39; Participation TV (1963), 57; Passage (1986), 18, 173n2, 174n15; Piano Piece (1993), 161; Planets series (1980s–90s), 18; Project ‘74, 88; Real Fish/Live Fish (1982), 176n35; Record Schaschlik (1963), 92; Rembrandt Automatic [Rembrandt TV] (1963), 45, 78, 122, 124, 182n12; Schallplatten-Schaschlik (1963), 57; Something Pacific (1986), 90, 118, 123–24, 132, 138; Symphony for 20 Rooms (1961), 32, 45, 56–57; 32 Cars for the 20th Century (with Patsfall, 1997), 180n42; TV Bed (1972), 180n46; TV Bra (with Moorman, 1969), 36; TV Buddha (1974), 27, 30, 32, 54, 90; TV Cello (with Moorman, 1971), 36, 160; TV Clock (1963–89), 30, 32, 54–55, 89–90, 89, 182n14; TV Cross (1966), 180n46; TV Fish (1975), 27, 30, 32, 54, 176n35; TV Rodin (1976–78), 90; Untitled (Piano) (1993), 210n29; Untitled (Piano) (Paik, 1993), 88, 161, 162; Video Commune (1970), 120; Video Fish (1975), 176n35, 176n37; Video Piano (1999), 161, 162; Wrap around the World (1988), 180n47. See also Arche Noah; Canopus; Random Access; TV Garden; Zen for Film; Zen for TV Paik hinter Pflanzen mit TVs [Paik behind the plants and TVs] (photograph, undated), 25 paintings, 37, 50, 74, 187n72; change in, 76; polychronicity and, 125; recontextualized, 159; repainted, 162; time as duration and, 101; time in, 121; “traditional,” 159–60, 168

Palais des Beaux-Arts (Belgium), 47 Paraphrasing Henri Bergson (Cua Lim), 59 Participation TV (Paik, 1963), 57 Passage (Paik, 1986), 18, 174n15 past, 42, 93, 198n56; autographic object and, 51; Bergsonian duration and, 104; contemporaneity of (cone visualization), 103, 103, 158; as delayed presence, 26; document of past performance, 85; documents of artwork’s past manifestations, 9, 21; “freezing” of artwork’s history, 98; mediated in the present, 58; “original” state of objects, 99; photography and, 111; “presencing” of, 158, 160; return to past original state, 29 pastness, 110, 116, 142, 143 Patsfall, Mark, 35, 37–38, 178n21, 180n42, 192n30 Pearce, Susan M., 98 performance, 5, 8, 31, 42, 43, 168, 183n22; authenticity and, 75; cinematic, 70; duality with object, 49; living critical tradition and, 56; performance art, 120, 189n16; performing arts, 85; from performing arts to performative objects, 44–46; re-performance, 94 phenomenology, 104 Philippot, Paul, 10 photograms, 111–13, 117, 190n37 photography, 10, 113, 177n2; cinema as further development of, 111; in documentation, 144–45; motion and, 105–108, 106, 107, 198n63; “pastness” in, 110; as “past of the present,” 111; polychronicity and, 125. See also chronophotography phronesis (rational consideration), 155, 164, 208n1, 208n4 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Hirst, 1991), 133 Physics (Aristotle), 61 Piano Piece (Paik, 1993), 162 Pillow, Kirk, 184n42 Planets series (Paik, 1980s–90s), 18, 173n2 plasma screens/televisions, 80, 174n8 Plato, 135, 138 playback formats, upgrading of, 87–88, 129, 161 Plessi, Fabrizio, 40 Plutarch, 137

INDEX

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2 43

poetry, 44, 121, 184n39, 189n16, 201n52 Polanyi, Michael, 150–51 polychronies, 125, 127, 128, 129 postmodernity, 159 presentation, 5, 30, 42 preservation, 9, 21, 165; decision what to preserve, 73–74; material preservation as illusion, 168; time as duration and, 103. See also conservation processes, 5, 8, 29, 74 Project ‘74 (Paik), 88 projectors/projection, 63, 68, 69, 70, 78; cinematic time and, 110, 111–12; digital, 91–92; digital and analogue, 78; DVD, 67; illustion of motion and, 111–12; sculptural and auditory relevance of, 115; sound experience of, 67; upgrading of playback equipment, 88. See also film (cinema) props, 38, 51, 85, 183n23. See also leftovers; relics protention, 104–105, 127, 128, 163. See also retention proto–new media, 6, 171n4 Proust, Marcel, 143 Prune Flat (Whiteman, 1965), 190n31 Rancière, Jacques, 188n14 Random Access (Paik, 1963), 45, 57, 81, 83–84, 83; displayed in archival form, 160; information retrieval and, 84–85; museum-bound versus interactive versions of, 92; reconstruction by Saueracker, 85–86 Rauschenberg, Robert, 72, 73, 74, 114, 199n16 readymades, 35, 205n10 Real Fish/Live Fish (Paik, 1982), 176n35 reason, practical and theoretical, 155 Reck, Hans Ulrich, 41, 203n73 Record Schaschlik (Paik, 1963), 83–85, 84, 92 Redin, Johan, 130, 131 registration record, 8 relics, 8, 51, 85, 131, 161. See also leftovers; props Rembrandt Automatic [Rembrandt TV] (Paik, 1963), 45, 78, 122, 124 remediation, 29, 88, 116, 200n24, 200n27, 201n49 Remediation (Bolter and Grusin), 116, 200n27 Renaissance, 198n56, 198n65 repetition, 46, 70, 183n29, 188n15. See also iterations

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replaceability, 53, 139, 161 repository, 36, 145, 207n17; archive in relation to, 10, 141, 144, 154, 160; of fixed material objects, 5; implicit knowledge and, 148 representation, 159, 188–89n15, 207n16; of duration, 113; naturalization of technology and, 25; of time, 111, 128 repurposing, 116 restoration, 3, 93, 96, 172n10, 195n9; historical and aesthetic dimensions of, 10; “purpose of restoration,” 97; Romantic critique of, 158; Viollet-le-Duc and, 99, 196n28. See also conservation retention, 104, 127, 128, 163. See also protention reversibility, 8, 93, 98, 99, 169, 196n23 Rhine Avant-garde, 44 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 132 Riegl, Alois, 9–10, 158 robots, 37, 38, 179n36 Rodin, Auguste, 88, 90, 123 Romanticism, 9, 49, 173n16; appreciation of age and decay, 158; “original” state of objects and, 132 Roth, Dieter, 115, 130, 203n73 ruins, 122–25, 202nn56–57, 203n62; “ruin in reverse,” 122; technological, 9, 122, 124–25 Ruskin, John, 9, 99, 158 Russolo, Luigi, 43 Saaze, Vivian van, 100 Sachs, Lynne, 119 Sang Su Ahn, 28 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 34, 54, 192n30 Sarris, Andrew, 36 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55, 186n59 Saueracker, Jochen, 18, 19, 20, 27; autographic works and, 50; collaboration with Paik, 35; “exhibition objects” re-created by, 57; reconstruction of Random Access, 85–86 Schallplatten-Schaschlik (Paik, 1963), 57 Schildt, Göran, 124, 203n62 Schmitz, Günther, 36 Schoenberg, Arnold, 42–43 Scholte, Tatja, 163, 208n37 science, 97, 100, 102, 173n16 scores, 4, 9, 33, 41, 51; authenticity and, 7, 49; changeability and, 34, 95; duality of multimedia installations and, 48; implied,

30; improvisation and, 54; materialization of concepts and, 31, 57; musical, 44, 45, 52, 56; Paik’s reluctance to create, 32, 178n15; as proposals, 43; silent, 71; uniqueness and, 47; variability and’, 77; in Western classical music, 47 sculpture, 32, 70, 173n13, 184n37; air sculpture, 72; change in, 76; classical, 97; polychrome, 162; polychronicity and, 125; restored, 159; time as duration and, 101; time in, 121; “traditional,” 159–60, 168 “second nature,” 25, 175n30 Sehgal, Tino, 211n37 sequentiality, 98 set design, 173n13 Shanken, Edward, 177n8 Shinto shrine, periodic reconstruction of, 138–39 signifier and signified, 138, 140 silence, 23, 43, 72, 73, 289n26 Silence (Cage, 1973), 72 Silverman Fluxus Collection, at MoMA, 33, 67, 68, 80, 185n48, 188n7 site-specificity, 19, 50, 86, 163 Smithson, Robert, 122, 202n55 Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art exhibition (New York, 1970), 31 Solway, Carl, 33, 34, 87, 171n1; collaboration with Paik, 35; Paik’s factory and, 39; robot series and, 38 Something Pacific (Paik, 1986), 90, 118, 123–24, 132, 138 sophia (theoretical wisdom), 155 space, 10, 39, 41, 91 space, gallery/exhibition, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26, 29; enclosed, 86; iterations of artworks and, 47, 48, 77; limitations of, 45; loft space, 69 space, time and, 7, 70; Bergsonian duration and, 101–102; measurability and, 100; site specificity and, 50 spectatorship, 64, 70, 115 Speer, Albert, 202nn56–57 Spieker, Sven, 152 Spoerri, Daniel, 40 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), 32, 90, 143, 156, 161, 169 Steuer, Richard, 188n14

Stiegler, Bernard, 132, 204n83 Stigter, Sanneke, 162 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 6, 23, 43, 56; Klavierstück XI, 54; Originale, 44; Paik’s performances with, 45 storage, 39, 44, 93, 144; Arche Noah and, 18, 19–21, 23, 129, 145; Canopus and, 3; Zen for Film and, 68 Stránský, Zbynek, 22 Stringari, Carol, 97 Suderburg, Erika, 173n13 Sun in Your Head (Vostell, 1963), 200n29 survival, 23, 91, 104 Suzuki, Daisetsu Taitaro, 71, 189n22 Symphony for 20 Rooms (Paik, 1961), 32, 45, 56–57 System Esthetics (Burnham, 1968), 177n8 tape recorders, 83 Taruskin, Richard, 7, 49, 75, 168, 184n35, 210n32 Tate Liverpool, 27, 65, 66, 139, 176n43 Taylor, Diana, 149, 207n30 technē (skill), 155, 156 technicians, 28, 74, 146, 164; archival judgment and, 154, 155; artist’s instructions and, 151; atomized knowledge of, 152; identity of artworks and, 56. See also collaboration/ collaborators; fabrication/fabricators technology, 17, 19; graveyard of, 123, 124, 138, 202n58; humanization of, 83; installation art and, 10; naturalization of, 25; obsolescence of, 5, 76, 116, 124; paradox of technological ruins, 122–25; symbiosis with nature, 24, 26; technology-based art/ media, 18, 85, 93, 173n2; temporal turn in art and, 109–10; time and, 101, 204n83 Teitlebaum, Richard, 161 television (TV), 19, 23, 45; digital, 80; Participation TV, 82–83; sequential access dictated by, 85; temporality of, 8; time and, 116–20. See also CRT (cathode-ray-tube) monitors Television Piece (Brecht, 1959), 201n39 temporality, 41, 61, 93, 107; of artworks, 8; of narrative, 70; polychronic, 125, 127; technology-based media and, 116; temporal artworks, 120–22; temporal materiality, 8, 163–64. See also time

INDEX

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2 45

theatrical staging, 43 Theory of Restoration (Brandi), 172n10 Theory of Ruin Value (Speer), 202n57 Theseus, myth of, 137–38, 205n2 Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 (MoMA exhibition, 2011–12), 188n9 Thinker (Rodin), 88, 90, 123 Third Mind, The (Guggenheim exhibition, 2009), 65, 66, 187n2 32 Cars for the 20th Century (Paik and Patsfall, 1997), 180n42 Three Standard Stoppages (Duchamp, 1913), 125, 126, 127, 203n66 time, 7, 9, 74, 124–28; architecture and, 99; being and, 131; cinematic, 70, 110–15; in conservation, 93–96; duration and, 8; inner and outer, 128–30, 132, 133, 203n71; linear understanding of, 100, 141; “measurable,” 100–101, 196n37, 197n38; media time, 110; museum time, 130–31; organic time and media time, 24; persistence of identity through, 9, 138–39; phenomenological time, 132; as progress, 99; technological time, 132; technology’s incompatibility with, 122; time-based media, 10, 18, 48, 50, 172n11; understanding of, 61; uniqueness and, 46; viewer’s perception of, 123, 204n84; visualization of, 46. See also duration (durée), Bergsonian theory of; space, time and; temporality Tinguely, Jean, 31, 72 trace, 37, 63, 127, 160, 165; of autographic moment, 53; conservation narrative and, 153; of damage, 2; on film leader, 67; of history, 158, 162; material, 145, 146, 167; of memory, 150; of process, 71; of projector on celluloid, 74, 113; random, 73; “signature” as trace of artist, 4; temporal translation and, 120; of time and decay, 114, 122 traditional conservation, 9, 10–11, 122; authentic condition, 97; boundaries with new conservation, 96; changeability and, 162; “classical” conservation contrasted with, 172n11; contemporary conservation contrasted with, 10. See also conservation translation, 32, 54, 116, 201nn48–49; clocks as “translation machines,” 102; temporal, 80, 118, 119, 120

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transparency, 114–15, 130; transparent film stock, 64; in Zen for Film, 69, 72, 73, 113, 114 Tree Movie (Mac Low, 1961), 189n25 Truffaut, François, 36 Truman, Blair, 35 Tudor, David, 189n26 TV Bed (Paik, 1972), 180n46 TV Bra (Paik and Moorman, 1969), 36 TV Buddha (Paik, 1974), 27, 30, 32, 54, 128; archival judgment and, 156; other Paik works in relation to, 90 TV Cello (Paik and Moorman), 36, 160 TV Clock (Paik, 1963–89), 30, 32, 86, 97, 128; archival dating of, 182n14; archival judgment and, 156; degree of change in, 91; instructions for preparation of, 34, 34, 54–55; reshaped and refined concept of, 89–90, 89 TV Cross (Paik, 1966), 180n46 TV Fish (Paik, 1975), 27, 30, 32, 54, 176n35 TV Garden (Paik, 1974), 7, 20, 23–29, 174n16, 175n28, 182n14; Arche Noah as successor to, 23; archival judgment and, 156; archival research on, 146, 207n20; changeability of, 48, 76; collaboration in, 35; degree of change in, 91; in Guggenheim Museum, 41, 47, 50, 86, 94; improvisation and, 54, 56; inner time of, 129; as instruction-based work, 133; iterations of, 29, 47–48, 77; at K21 Ständehaus (Düsseldorf ), 50, 139–40; “Letter of Authenticity” for, 31–32; paradox related to identity and, 139–40; as performance, 49; plant ensembles in, 24–25, 25, 28–29, 35, 47–48, 76, 175n18; quasi-conceptual character of, 30–31; relation to other Paik works, 88–89; spatial circumstances and, 86; Tate Liverpool installation, 27–28, 28, 139–40, 176n43; TV Sea or Garden as alternate titles, 23, 24, 35, 91, 97, 128, 175n24. See also Global Groove TV Rodin (Paik, 1976–78), 90 Uecker, Günther, 200n35 uniqueness, 46–48, 111 Untitled (Piano) (Paik, 1993), 88, 161, 162, 210n29. See also Piano Piece; Video Piano Ursprung, Philip, 40

“Valéry Proust Museum” (Adorno), 143, 206n14 variability, 77, 85, 91, 190n1 Variable Media Network (VMN), 77, 176n34 variation, 48, 55, 129, 193n38 Vasari, Giorgio, 9, 172n8 Venice Biennale, 81, 86 video, 25, 38, 67, 87; digitization of, 129; in New York studios, 40; Portapak (video camera), 119, 201n40; processing of time and, 110; temporality of, 8; time-structure of, 18, 116–20; video collage, 125; video sculpture, 38, 173n13; video synthesizer, 36, 119–20 “Video, Flows and Real Time” (Lazzarato), 117 Video Commune (Paik, 1970), 120 Video Fish (Paik, 1975), 176n35, 176n37 Video Piano (Paik, 1999), 161, 162 Vimeo, 74 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 9, 99, 159, 196n28 Virilio, Paul, 117 virtuality/virtual sphere, 10, 64; reinstallation practices and, 148–49; virtual (nonphysical) archive, 148–52, 163, 165, 207n30; virtualization, 104; from virtual to actual, 156–58 vitality, of works, 22, 186n58 Vitiello, Stephen, 27, 30, 35, 54, 56, 176n35 voices, on soundtrack, 24 Vostell, Wolf, 31, 200n29, 200n35 Voyage on the North Sea (Broodthaers, 1974), 199n23 Voyager space probes, 130 Wall Drawing No. 728 (LeWitt, 1993), 32 Wall Drawings (LeWitt, 1967–2007), 31, 32, 35 Warhol, Andy, 39–40, 67, 180n50, 200n38 Watari, Etsuko, 149 Watari, Shikusho, 149 Watts, Alan, 199n19 web-based art, 168 Webern, Anton, 43 Wegner, Thomas, 18, 174n10 Weibel, Peter, 18, 167–68 Weisses Haus (Hamburg), 18, 40, 95, 100, 156, 174nn7–8 Wesselmann, Tom, 200n35 Wharton, Glenn, 210n30 White, David, 74

Whiteman, Robert, 190n31 White on White (Malevich, 1918), 72–73, 190n37 White Paintings (Rauschenberg, 1951), 72, 73, 74, 190n29, 190n39 “White Walls” (Fiske), 183n29 White Walls (Goldsworthy, 2007), 77 Whitney Museum of American Art, 26, 82 Wilde, Edy de, 169 Wilhelm, Jean Pierre, 44 Winkel, Camiel van, 31 Wirkung (effect of action), 41, 51, 139, 156 WNET New York Public Media, TV Lab of, 175n24 World Over, The (City Gallery exhibition, 1996), 176n34 Worlds of Nam June Paik, The (Guggenheim Museum exhibition, 2000), 27 Wrap around the World (Paik, 1988), 180n47 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 47 Wuppertal exhibition (1963). See Exposition of Music—Electronic Television Yalkut, Jud, 112, 115, 117 Yamamoto, Keigo, 28 Young, LaMonte, 44, 52 Youngblood, Gene, 179n27 Young Man and Girl in Spring (Duchamp, 1911), 126, 128 YouTube, 74 Zen Buddhism, 43, 70–71, 78, 189n22; enlightenment and, 80; painting and calligraphy informed by, 79; Zen gardens, 173n13 Zen for Film (Paik, 1962–64), 8, 74–75, 187n1, 188n8, 190n31; at Bild für Bild (Museum Ostwall), 65, 65, 67; changeability of, 76; cinematic time and, 110, 112–15; conceptual change in, 81; decay of, 67, 187n5; degree of change in, 91; digital projection in, 91–92; early “condition” of, 97; as event, object, and process, 69–73; film leader from, 64, 67–75, 91, 94, 112, 128; first public screening, 188n12; Fluxkit editions, 68, 69, 77, 91, 188n9; Fluxus and, 65, 71; as instruction-based work, 133; preservation of, 73–74; projectors used in, 115–16; at Tate Liverpool, 65, 66; at Third Mind show

INDEX

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2 47

Zen for Film (continued) (Guggenheim Museum), 65, 66; three impressions of, 63–65; upgraded display of, 87 Zen for Film—Fluxfilm No. 1 (Maciunas), 69 Zen for Head (Paik, 1962), 52, 53, 185n49 Zen for TV (Paik, 1963), 32, 33, 45, 79, 120; artist’s signature on, 185n48; death of the image and, 191n8; effect of change on concept of artwork in, 78–81; lost and reconstructed, 191n5; other Paik

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works in relation to, 89–90; television time and, 118 Zielinski, Siegfried, 119 Zip Paintings (Newman), 191n7 ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 1, 2, 19, 20, 51, 168, 171n1; conservation department, 19–21, 144: storage facility, 20, 21; upgraded display of works in, 88 Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders (Zielinski), 119