백남준의 선(禪)적 시간

Abstract

The textualization process of Nam June Paik started with his fateful meeting with John Cage during the Holiday Courses for New Music held in Darmstadt, Germany, from September 2 through 13 in 1958. The encounter transformed Paik from a student of electronic music to a performance artist, and marked the beginning of his artistic career. Existing texts on him have naturally focused on the period after his meeting with Cage, but with this essay, it is attempted to turn the attention cautiously to the time before Paik met him. Paik's migration from Korea to Hong Kong, back to Korea, then Japan, Germany, and New York, and transformation from the son of a pro-Japanese bourgeois imperialist to a Marxist, a researcher on Schonberg, an anarchist performer, and finally the first video artist in New York, form a part in the history of Korean diaspora in the post-colonial era. When he gave up aesthetics, Schonberg, and Marx, what was left to him was anarchism. And he realized the lesson of his traumatic "refuge train-experience" by way of John Cage. But his understanding of "Zen" is very different from Cage. Nam June Paik sought exists where art and telecommunication meet. His language was made of extraordinary questions and outrageous answers. That is, his words went over the boundary of ordinary language communication. Communication that he wanted was something that transcends the limited medium of language. He pursued communication which is like a sort of telepathy. It is not the communication of explaining and understanding, but a transcendental one. Therefore, his video images float as ‘signifier without signified,’and glitters only at the present. Reality is transformed into image, and articulation of time is metamorphosed into a series of continuous present. His obsession with simultaneous art shows using communication satellites seems to have come from his fascination with the non-visibility, physical lightness and synchronism of the electronic medium.