Lake Placid' 80 is a metonymy for the Winter Olympic Games, created by Nam June Paik, when commissioned by the National Fine Arts Committee for the 13^th Games, in Lake Placid, in 1980. Sound and image unite sport and the festivities. Both the subject and the medium are endowed with the international dimension of the context, and Nam June Paik only goes beyond this with music, which he sees as a non-verbal communication between audiences of different ages cultures and countries.

Various sequences cut from one to the next: rock dancers, a descent followed by a ski-jump, a skater, aerial acrobatics, a game of ice hockey, etc. The editing brings the shots and sequences into harmony with rock rhythms. This is conveyed, right at the start of the tape, by the image of the dancers' feet, which indicate that movement is determined by music. The beginning and end of a sequence or a sporting event (a down-hill ski race, a skater's twirl), the moment when one sequence cuts another, or the screen splits diagonally, or when two movements are superimposed (two moments in an ice-hockey match), and the rhythm of colour changes; all of these correspond to the rhythm and syncopation of the rock sound-track (Devil With a Blue Dress On by Mitch Ryder and the group Detroit Wheel's Devil, taken from Global Groove).

In the middle of the tape, the image makes the transition from full screen to a moving, rectangular in-set, on a black background. The dancer in this small space is doubled by a digital, wire figure, which dances in parallel outside the rectangle. The tape ends with a calm sequence, with Allen Ginsberg playing meditative music, and the symbolic rings of the Olympic Games dancing on screen in the manner of closing credits.

The artist has re-used extracts from, or even the whole of Lake Placid' 80 in his other works. The most notable are Tricolor Video (1982, an installation of 384 monitors imitating the French flag) and Video Laser Environnement (1981, a rectangular arrangement of 36 monitors, combined with an H. Baumann laser projection on the side walls).

Rhythm is a central element in Nam June Paik's work. This is so in the sort of flow denoting the spirit of an era in Global Groove, or in the contrast in movement between Merce Cunningham's video dance and the Korean artist's rapid, rhythmical sequence editing in Merce By Merce By Paik, or again in his monumental architecture built of TV sets. It represents a division of time and the duration in which a subject is continuously available on screen. It is this same rapidity that disconcerts the spectator, creating an obstacle to be overcome before entering the works of the master of video and television programming.

Thérèse Beyler