[백남준] 2006년 사망, 뉴욕타임스(2월4일) 애도 부고기사

시게코 여사는 백남준 사후 그에 대한 글에서 2006년 그가 사망하자 <뉴욕 타임스>는 그를 '성공한 반란자'로 말로 애도했다며 이렇게 소개하고 있다. 아래 글은 Robert Smith가 쓴 뉴욕 타임스 기고문 Tuming Television Inside Out and Art Upside Down Feb 4, 2006 https://www.nytimes.com/…/turning-television-inside-out-and…

Turning Television Inside Out, and Art Upside Down

<2006년 백남준 사망 때 뉴욕타임스 애도 기사 성공한 반란자> Turning Television Inside Out, and Art Upside Down -By Roberta Smith Feb. 4, 2006

Lots of artists spend their youth finding new ways to flout established aesthetic protocols, but few maintain the renegade status fruitfully into old age. That was the achievement of Nam June Paik, widely considered the inventor of video art, who died Sunday at 73. Mr. Paik was forever young in the best sense of the phrase, although his perennial joviality, which sometimes bordered on clownishness, could disguise the extent of his achievement.

His artistic longevity may partly stem from his having had really two careers. First was his sojourn in the vicinity of avant-garde music and Fluxus, the neo-Dada, anti-art movement. What followed was a more sustained exploration of the uncharted frontier of television and its rambunctious offspring, video. His career is a study in how radical artists can function at the center of society, and change it.

Mr. Paik spent the late 1950's and early 60's on the fringe, first in Cologne, Germany, then in New York. There he barreled through a period of rebellious, largely ephemeral experimentation, wielding a volatile hybrid of music, performance and art that could shock an audience into silence. And this was an audience that often included such seasoned avant-gardists as the composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and the artists Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth, some of whom collaborated with him.

A Paik event might have involved some reasonably normal piano-playing, a dip (fully clothed) into a bathtub full of water, and screaming or the shedding of crocodile tears followed by head-banging on the keyboard. (After he moved to New York, these performances often involved his stalwart collaborator the cellist Charlotte Moorman, sometimes stripped to the waist.) Mr. Stockhausen once likened Mr. Paik's energetic, unpredictable performance style to the speed of lightning. Cage wrote that Paik's "work, conversation, performance and daily doings never cease to by turn amaze, delight, shock and even terrify me."

During the early 60's, Mr. Paik started searching for a visual equivalent of his first passion, electronic music, and was soon altering the circuitry of used television sets, driving their images to abstraction. He had stumbled into a medium waiting to be invented, and realized that television technology promised a good measure of the spontaneity, ephemerality and spectacle implicit in his stage events. Above all, the electronic moving image gave him a semblance of the perpetual motion intrinsic to his performances, and yet could be transmitted worldwide.

Mr. Paik was a visionary. In 1965 he became possibly the first artist to buy a video camcorder; that day, he videotaped Pope Paul VI's visit to New York and showed the results that evening at the Café au Go Go. Within a few years, dozens of artists were roaming the world or just fooling around in their studios with video cameras -- Bruce Nauman, Lynda Benglis, William Wegman and Joan Jonas among them.

In 1969, after a year's residence at WGBH in Boston, working with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, Mr. Paik constructed the first video synthesizer ever used on broadcast television. Known as the Paik-Abe video synthesizer, it was essentially an image processor, ancestor of the elaborate computerized control panels found in every television studio. It enabled Mr. Paik to combine and distort images from different sources, interject splashes of bright color and create the manic, crazy-quilt editing, often accompanied by manipulated music, that became something of a signature.

Using television monitors ablaze with images, Mr. Paik built archways, towers, spirals and shimmering ponds, like the one that dominated his 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. He would eventually work with global broadcast systems, lasers and, of course, computerized digitalization. But he will probably be best remembered for the flood of dazzlingly scrambled moving images that he unleashed on the world -- in effect, as he said, turning the medium inside out.

Mr. Paik never forgot his early Fluxus years. For one thing, many of the videotapes he recycled through his work recorded his fellow travelers in performance -- among them, Cage, Beuys, Moorman and Merce Cunningham. But television enabled him to disseminate the antic, egalitarian principles of Fluxus to a broad audience in what was quickly becoming a universal language.

Mr. Paik understood the challenge of the new age he helped usher in. He maintained that the central objective in combining art and technology was "not how to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium." For him, humanization involved a giddy, celebratory joyfulness. His aim, he once said, was a "TV version of Vivaldi."

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<2006년 백남준 사망 때 뉴욕타임스 추모 기사(II) 1월 31일 '문화의 장벽을 깩 비디오아트의 창시자'> Nam June Paik, 73, Dies; Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers By Roberta Smith Jan. 31, 2006 / For him, humanization involved a giddy, celebratory joyfulness. His aim, he once said, was a "TV version of Vivaldi."

Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer, performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art, died Sunday at his winter home in Miami Beach. He was 73 and also lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Paik suffered a stroke in 1996 and had been in declining health for some time, said his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, who manages his uncle's studio in New York.

Mr. Paik's career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of expression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited.

At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term "electronic superhighway" in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive. In recent years, Mr. Paik's enormous American flags, made from dozens of sleek monitors whose synchronized patterns mixed everything from pinups to apple pie at high, almost subliminal velocity, could be found in museums and corporate lobbies.

Mr. Paik was affiliated in the 1960's with the anti-art movement Fluxus, and also deserves to be seen as an aesthetic innovator on a par with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. Yet in many ways he was simply the most Pop of the Pop artists. His work borrowed directly from the culture at large, reworked its most pervasive medium and gave back something that was both familiar and otherworldly.

He was a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity. A lifelong Buddhist, Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelming: a writer once compared his New York studio to a television repair shop three months behind schedule.

Mr. Paik is survived by his wife, the video artist Shigeko Kubota.

Mr. Paik got to television by way of avant-garde music. He was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, into a wealthy manufacturing family. Growing up, he studied classical piano and musical composition and was drawn to 20th-century music; he once said it took him three years to find an Arnold Schoenberg record in Korea. In 1949, with the Korean War threatening, the family fled to Hong Kong, and then settled in Tokyo. Mr. Paik attended the University of Tokyo, earning a degree in aesthetics and the history of music in 1956 with a thesis on Schoenberg's work.

He then studied music at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Freiburg and threw himself into the avant-garde music scene swirling around Cologne. He also met John Cage, whose emphasis on chance and randomness dovetailed with Mr. Paik's sensibility.

Over the next few years, Mr. Paik arrived at an early version of performance art, combining cryptic musical elements -- usually spliced audiotapes of music, screams, radio news and sound effects -- with startling events. In an unusually Oedipal act during a 1960 performance in Cologne, Mr. Paik jumped from the stage and cut off Cage's necktie, an event that prompted George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, to invite Mr. Paik to join the movement. At the 1962 Fluxus International Festival for Very New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr. Paik performed "Zen for Head," which involved dipping his head, hair and hands in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and dragging them over a scroll-like sheet of paper to create a dark, jagged streak.

In 1963, seeking a visual equivalent for electronic music and inspired by Cage's performances on prepared pianos, Mr. Paik bought 13 used television sets in Cologne and reworked them until their screens jumped with strong optical patterns. In 1963, he exhibited the first art known to involve television sets at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.

In 1965 he made his New York debut at the New School for Social Research: Charlotte Moorman, a cellist who became his longtime collaborator, played his "Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only," performing bared to the waist. A similar work performed in 1967 at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in Manhattan resulted in the brief arrest of Ms. Moorman and Mr. Paik. Mr. Paik retaliated with his iconic "TV Bra for Living Sculpture," two tiny television screens that covered Ms. Moorman's breasts.

Mr. Paik bought one of the first portable video cameras on the market, in 1965, and the same year he exhibited the first installation involving a video recorder, at the Galeria Bonino in New York. Although he continued to perform, his interests shifted increasingly to the sculptural, technological and environmental possibilities of video.

In 1969, Mr. Paik started showing pieces using multiple monitors. He created bulky wood robotlike figures using old monitors and retrofitted consoles, and constructed archways, spirals and towers, including one 60-feet tall that used 1,003 monitors. By the 1980's he was working with lasers, mixing colors and forms in space, without the silvery cathode-ray screen.

For his 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Mr. Paik arranged monitors faceup on the rotunda's floor, creating a pondlike effect of light and images. Overhead, one of the artist's most opulent laser pieces cascaded from the dome in lightninglike zigzags an apt metaphor for a career that never stopped surging forward.

Correction: February 1, 2006, Wednesday An obituary yesterday about Nam June Paik, widely considered the inventor of video art, omitted a survivor. He is his brother, Ken Paik, of Kamakura, Japan.