Lancing lasers

Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum.

Since his explosion into the anarchic avant-garde of the Fluxus movement in Germany and New York during the early 1960s, no enfant has been more inventively terrible than the Korean master of electronic and performance art, Naim June Paik (born in 1932). Even his severe stroke in 1996 has not diminished his creative energies and desire to push new media to their technological limits. For his current show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (until 26 April), he has activated the dynamically challenging space of Frank Lloyd Wright's helical gallery with spectacular laser installations, alongside his more familiar compositions of multiple television monitors.

Strongly associated with the leading musical experimentalists of the late 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, Paik became centrally involved in a series of iconoclastic performances that assaulted audiences' comfortable expectations about music, art, dance and theatre. Pianos and violins were shockingly smashed as spectators winced. In 1971 the cellist Charlotte Moorman performed provocatively topless, apart from Paik's brassiere of two small TV screens. It was in the more technological dimensions embodied in the bra that Paik's future was to lie.

By 1963 Paik had already decided to dedicate his prodigious talents to “the spartan life of physics and electronics”. The cathode-ray tube, which was becoming unthinkingly naturalized in popular culture, was chosen as his primary medium. By turns he subverted the TV set, satirizing its dehumanizing technology, and exulted in its potential as the true medium for the late-twentieth-century creator. Why, he asked, should the artist not be able to “shape the TV screen canvas, as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colourfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Jackson Pollock, as lyrically as Jasper Johns”.

Detail of Three Elements by Naim June Paik with Norman Ballard — lasers, mirrored chambers, prisms, motors and smoke. Credit: DAVID HEALD/GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

In collaboration with the Japanese electronics pioneer Shuya Abe, he developed increasingly sophisticated versions of the ‘Paik Abe video synthesizer’, which allowed video images to be manipulated, formed into collages and simultaneously displayed on multiple monitors, or composed symphonically into restless kaleidoscopes of electronic imagery, both abstract and figurative. Alongside such images transmitted through TV sets, he also worked directly on the cathode-ray tube itself, using magnets to contort the configurations of rays on the screens into strange geometries, akin to the wave motions of an oscilloscope.

The laser-works that he has recently undertaken in collaboration with Norman Ballard, most notably the triptych of the Three Elements — in the form of a triangle, circle and square — are a natural continuation of such compositions as his Magnet TV of 1965. Within the shallow, mirrored cabinets of Three Elements, triangular and square prisms rotating in different phases stab thin laser beams into an ether of pale vapour. Penetrating tracers of arrowed light criss-cross the elemental figures. Scintillating points oscillate along defined tracks at the edges of each shape and at the intersections of the dancing beams. The razor-sharp geometries, refracted through the prisms and reflected off the containing mirrors at ever-changing angles in endless variations, are etched across an apparently unconfined space, as a result of internal reflections off the two-way (50%) mirror at the front of each cabinet.

In the modernist museum to cap all modernist museums, the basic geometries pay open homage to the canonical simplicities of minimalist abstraction, not least Josef Albers's series on “Homage to the Square” (see Nature 390, 451; 1997). But, as might be expected of an artist of such global experience and concerns, the resonances are much more extensive than an incestuous reference to earlier art. As alert to Platonic idealism as is Zen Buddhist meditation to eternal simplicities, Paik uses a technology perfected by late-twentieth-century physics to transform ancient archetypes into a vision of mathematical energies transmitted across infinite space. It is a vision worthy of our entry into the new millennium.