Korea was an appendage of the Japanese empire when Nam June Paik was born in 1932. The dissolution of the empire after World War II brought the Cold War rather than freedom to the Korean peninsula. At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1949, Paik and his prominent Seoul family fled to Hong Kong and then moved on to Japan. He settled in at Tokyo University to earn a degree in liberal arts with an emphasis on music. Arnold Schoenberg was the subject of his graduation thesis. The next station on Paik's nomadic journey was the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt Germany. Here he ran into John Cage. The avant-garde composer was notorious for treating all manner of noise as music. His compositions are built up out of ambient sounds, crashes, clangs and silence – conceivably, high frequency hums that only dogs can hear. These anarchic ideas took root in the art cabal Fluxus founded by George Maciunas et al. Paik joined these agitators in Cologne, the base for their assault on the established art scene. He organized concert-like events that included a getting-ready prelude to the performance. The extensive build up served as an introduction to Paik's minimalist pieces that typically concluded in one mesmerizing note played on a piano, Paik's favored instrument. Out of the Fluxus ferment of manifestos, events and general contrariness came the earliest video pieces ever… depending on the definition of video. The maybe first video piece was a candle set in a primitive TV cabinet shown in 1963 at the “Exposition of Music and Electronic Television” in Wuppertal. Presumably Paik put a candle in the place of the tube because he considered the flame more engaging than commercial television fare. Or the first video might have been an interactive work exhibited at another show in Wuppertal. Building on the previous theme, Paik furnished viewers with magnets and encouraged them to make their own TV show. The magnets they slid along the sides of the TV console interfered with the electronic innards of the picture tube. The distorted images on the TV were taken as a spoof of Abstract Expressionism, a recently landed American import to Europe. Several themes of Paik's overall work were evident in these warming-up efforts. The pieces are sculptural and interactive, but mostly they show that Paik was attuned to the economics of recycling. His primary palette is junked stuff hacked together. A work commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1982, Tricolor Video, is a massive installation of 384 discarded monitors. Paik dates from an era when the grandiose schemes of artists were realized for pennies. Paik came to the US in 1964 for a short stay. He joined in Charlotte Moorman's Avant- Garde Festival, an annual event that featured the Fluxus tribe of artists. The goings-on were set in out-of-the-way places like a storage area for railway cars. Every year the venue was changed to stay one step ahead of the cops. Good fortune smiled on Paik in New York. One of the first Japanese portable video cameras to get overseas to the United States fell into his hands, and the city has been his home ever since. Toting around his Sony “Portapak,” Paik documented time and place like visual artists had never been able to do. The signature image-blitz style of his videos took form on crowded city streets. He videoed the Pope passing in car caravan, the New York mayor at a press conference (taped off a TV set), and an occasional oddity like a pet lobster on a golden leash paraded by a proud owner (maybe to the dinner table.) The stream of images from Paik's video sculpture Arc Double Face is uncharacteristically modest. A few dozen monitors piled up in an arch play clips of the spectacle around the Champs-Élysées. The piece is Paik's homage to the Arc de Triomphe. It is a rather diminutive tribute compared to The More the Better (1993), a tower of one thousand and three monitors that Paik erected to commemorate Korean independence. But really, victorious armies marching through an imposing arch and down a grand avenue are passé. Technology has rendered massed armies obsolete. The Kremlin no longer puts on a May Day display of men and missiles in Red Square. Only the out-of-touch dictatorships of Iran and North Korea stick to the pomp and pageantry of marching soldiers. The Arc de Triomphe set on the Champs-Élysées has weathered the vicissitudes of history remarkably well. The monument to victory makes an impressive backdrop to the elegant shops, languorous cafes and hordes of tourists thronging the elegant environs. The videos on the monitors of Arc Double Face convey the sophistication of this corner of Paris. The piece celebrates the enduring glory of France's triumphs. On the other hand…

Barbara London