Paik Nam June: Rethinking his cultural terrorism

By Kate Lim

Paik Nam June (1932-2006), the father of video art, owns a nickname by which the global art-associated society fondly remembers him: “Asian cultural terrorist.” He was introduced to the international community of artists with this epithet which reflects not only his persona but also his artistic achievements. He was liked and lauded for his audacious, funny, derisive actions that were transmitted in an enigmatic concoction in his performances, sculptures and video installations.

Paik earned this moniker mainly through a series of his rampant performances in the earlier phase of his career. In Zen for Head (1962), Paik dipped his head into a bucket of ink and painted a line down on a sheet of cheap craft paper that was laid on the floor. In One for Violin Solo (1962), he raised a violin very slowly in a concentrated manner which took about 5 minutes and then smashed it. In Hommage à John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano (1959), he ran like a madman, sawed through piano strings with a kitchen knife, and then overturned the whole thing. Paik also took a bath in an old tin bathtub, fully dressed, scooped up the dirty water in his dirty shoe and gargled this filthy water, then spat it out at a Stockhausen performance. He “terrorized” the invited audience, thrashing about with his weapon of unexpected shocking actions.

The edge of his weapon was the avant-garde mentality, a crucial Western artistic tradition. Its defining feature is to subvert the conventional thoughts of art in pursuit of new, ground-breaking forms and content. The actions of avant-garde artists and the questions posed by them are meant to rattle society and draw the immediate and intensive attention of the community. They are artistically legitimate outlaws within the Western tradition, assuming the social role of an artist-cum-activist to cut through the apathy and ignorance of audiences and at the same time force them to confront the discomforting areas of human reality.

Paik’s appellation, therefore, signified his artistic lineage and gave him the authority of being acknowledged as the Asian artist who made this spectacular leap into the Western avant-garde camp. Paik’s conversion was real. The majority of art commentators think of these characteristics embodied in Paik’s praxis as a singular aspect of the Western avant-garde that is commonly embraced by avant-garde artists.

Paik himself contributed to this homogenous understanding of the Western avant-garde by heavily criticizing what the Asian society traditionally stood for. He said: “As an Asian, I give credit to Western civilization, which has the dialectic power to regenerate itself constantly, whereas Asia’s history is yoked with stagnation.” He openly expressed his aversion to his own cultural heritage: “The Chinese gave us many of our most important nouns: property, Tao, benevolence, duty, and others. They gave us 50,000 nouns, […] but these did not contain one noun meaning ‘freedom.’ They gave us the concepts of greed and arbitrariness, but not the concepts of freedom and liberty.” Paik seemed to revel in the destruction and repudiation of even his heritage. In many ways, he sounded like a more orthodox avant-garde artist than any other artist of the West.

Ironically, it was John Cage (1912-1992), an influential avant-garde composer who is most closely associated with Paik in the public’s eyes. Cage’s judgment of Paik’s cultural terrorism was near criticizing. In Paik’s outrageous gig Etude for Pianoforte, he cut Cage’s tie and washed Cage’s hair with shampoo. Recalling the performance, Cage remarked: “When at the end he left the room through the packed audience, everybody, all of us, sat paralyzed with fear, utterly silent. We were stunned. […] I was determined to think twice before attending another performance by Nam June Paik.” Then Cage went on to elucidate the difference ― which he called “separation” between himself and Paik ― by referencing Indian aesthetic tradition that he studied. Etude for Pianoforte focused on fear, anger and disgust, far from tranquility, toward which Cage believed a work of art should conduce. Cage held the faith that “writing of music would be not self-expression but self-alteration.” To Cage, Paik’s cultural terrorism implied not a genuine source for mind-altering experience but a banal debunkery taking delight in being a hero for messing up the given order and value.

In Korea, the tie-cutting performance has been constantly cited as Paik’s mockery of permissive bourgeois self-complacence and interpreted as representing the uniquely outstanding vanguard artist’s attributes. What is more, the performance was only taken as a token of an intimate spiritual kinship between Paik and Cage. This interpretation loops from the misperception of avant-garde’s uniformity to the failure to recognize the difference in artistic values sought by the two artists. It is a result brought by a lack of intellectual scrutiny. Understanding Paik Nam June should move from simply praising him as one of the few great international Korean artists on a simplistic and habitual ground, to a more sophisticated narrative of art and culture.

Kate Lim is director of Art Platform Asia, an independent curator and art writer.