Art in the late 20th century has been distinguished by the inclusion of video and television, new media that continue to shape artistic creation.
Hello, Masters!, the current event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, offers a retrospective of the major developments in the more than 30 years of the history of electronic moving images in art. Its weekly schedule, like that of a film festival, features the works of nine artists grouped according to six themes.
The use of video as a medium in art began in 1963 with Exposition of Music -- Electronic Television, a milestone exhibition in Wuppertal, Germany. It was the first solo exhibit for Nam June Paik, the Korean-born artist whose opus of installations, videotapes, global television productions, films, and performances reshaped our perceptions of the temporal image in contemporary art.
Studying music composition, Paik traveled to Germany in 1956 to pursue his interest in avant-garde music. Two years later, he met composer John Cage, whose ideas on composition and performance were a great influence on Paik, as were those of George Maciunas, the founder of the radical art movement Fluxus, which Paik was invited to join.
At the exhibition, Paik scattered about the room several televisions, on their sides and upside down. He placed magnets near the TV sets and rearranged the wires in them to distort their reception of broadcast transmissions. He also created interactive video works that transformed the relationship between viewers the medium.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Paik also worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other artists and working to realize the potential of the emerging medium. Along with his remarkable sequence of videotapes and projects for television, featuring collaborations with Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, David Bowie, Cage, and Merce Cunningham, he created a series of installations that fundamentally changed video and redefined artistic practice.
The Father of Video Arts, the opening part of "Hello, Masters!" presents three of Paik's most important works.
Video Synthesizer and TV Cello is one of his early experiments with television. Using video synthesizers and scan modulators -- devices Paik developed to manipulate the transistors and resistors of TV sets -- he creates abstract images of waving, swinging and changing colors. Its aim is to reduce TV sets to objects of art.
Paik's legendary installation, TV cello -- a mock cello made of three TV monitors, creates visual music also by manipulating electronic images.
The significance of Global Groove lies in its opening statement: "This is a glimpse of a new world when you will be able to switch on every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be as thick as the Manhattan telephone book." Made in 1973, it anticipates two trends for television: channel zapping and a growing space for music on TV.
Other parts of the series introduce video artists who made ingenious use of the medium in the 1970s and 1980s.
Experimental video pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka represent the development of the "Machine Vision" concept -- the use of various optical artifices and video camera movements to shoot images of space not perceived by the human eye.
Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Icelander Steina Vasulka and Czech Woody Vasulka began building complex machines in 1975 that integrate mirrors, closed-circuit control monitors, fish-eye lenses or prisms to execute panoramas and exagegrated zooms like those found in Urban Landscape.
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