Mediating States of Media: Nam June Paik's Art of (Im)Mediation__NJP Reader 6__2016 (original) (raw)

2016, NJP Reader

Originally presented at the International symposium, "Gift of Nam June Paik -Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces" on September 9, 2016, Korea (https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/59754/international-symposium-gift-of-nam-june-paik-8-reanimating-njp-nam-june-paik-s-interfaces/), the following paper is my foray into Nam June Paik's rich oeuvre whose implications in the age of 'post-medium (or post-media) condition' are becoming increasingly acute. It is being heavily revised and expanded for a journal article. -------- Widely hailed as the so-called “father of video art,” Nam June Paik lives on. What begs the question, however, is the sheer diversity of his entire oeuvre beyond video. On top of his famous video works, Paik’s artworks encompass music, performance, painting, sculpture, cinema, TV, laser, and digital- let alone everything that wanders between or (re)mixes them. Is this simply a tell-tale sign which proves Paik as one of those avant-garde artists- who poked their noses into virtually everything? Is this not the proof of his (and their) reign whose time has now clearly passed? Sidestepping such an idée fixe, this paper seeks to offer a different reading. For, despite the frenzy born of his dizzying changes of media, Paik’s works seem to betray a striking degree of consistency (if not stability)- in terms of what I call “states of media” wherein mediation soon gives way to the sense of immediacy or “immediation.” Put differently, his artworks mark and embody varying degrees or states of media as what not simply mediates but fundamentally transmutates humans and nonhuman entities. I will show how these states are coextensive with Paik’s persistent, if at times contradictory exploration of Time, particularly in terms of its irreversibility, aka ‘entropy.’ In so doing, I will try to revise the well-worn myth of Paik’s (putatively naïve) humanism or anthropocentrism- in favor of what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno call ‘Natural History (Naturgeschichte)’ in which Machine and Human age alike. This will help us to demonstrate how Paik’s oeuvre remain more relevant and perhaps contemporary than ever.