Nam June Paik
A Painting Which Exists 2x1 Seconds In a Hour
1965
- Artist / Artist group
- Nam June Paik
- Title
- A Painting Which Exists 2x1 Seconds In a Hour
- Year
- 1965
- Category
- Sculpture
- Format
- Wall Piece
- Material / Technique
- Plastic sleeve of a Sony open reel video tape, paper labels, inscribed.
- Dimensions / Duration
- 19 x 20,5 x 2,5 cm
- Collection
- Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation
- Description
- »A painting which exists only 2x1 seconds in a hour«wrote composer and artist Nam June Paik on the sleeve of a Sony open-reel videotape. The remark most likely alludes to the functioning of the video image: it is composed of two interlaced fields, built line by line on the screen, each lasting only a fraction of a second. This work exemplifies a typical feature of Paik’s practice: his habit of inscribing technical objects with spontaneous, often humorous, multilingual, and aphoristic comments. The inscribed sleeve also points to a key moment in the history of media art. On October 4, 1965, Paik used a portable Sony camera to record the visit of Pope Paul VI in New York and presented the footage the very same evening at the Café Au Go Go. The tape itself has not survived, but it is regarded as the first artistic use of video. The sleeve that once contained it—or that Paik declared to have contained it—remains the symbolic trace of this birth of video art. On the flyer for the presentation, Paik programmatically announced the medium’s future: “As collage technic replaced oil-paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvass.” [1] [1] Nam June Paik, “Electronic Video Recorder (Flyer, Café Au Go Go, 1965),” in: John G. Hanhardt, Gregory Zinman, and Edith Decker-Phillips, »We Are in Open Circuits. Writings by Nam June Paik«, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019.
Author
Margit
Rosen