Passage

Nam June Paik erected a triumphal-arch-like structure made of towering piles of old wooden TV cabinets of various sizes from the early days of television and an unadorned metal construction connecting the two towers. It is crowned by eight old, round picture tubes, which have been converted into light sources by being fitted with light bulbs and arranged in a circle around a monitor in the metal construction. The monitor, like the other screens that replace the old television sets in the cabinets, shows two different video sequences created using a synthesizer. The insides of the open cabinet doors and the cabinets themselves are painted with symbols from various cultures and epochs, such as prehistoric rock paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Chinese and Korean characters.
The use of a narrative-representational structure like that of a gate is typical of Paik's work. In 1966, he combined several televisions into a sculpture in the shape of a cross for the first time for his work “TV Cross”. In the mid-eighties, he brought the ever-expanding “Family of Robot” into being. This consists of television sets that are joined together to form anthropomorphic figures. In the context of this robot family, in addition to the two works “Connection” and “Monument” from 1986, which also reproduce architectural forms, “Passage” also belongs . While it is obvious to identify the former as places where this robot family comes together, “Passage” could be understood as a bridge between cultures, thus pointing to the possible function of television in bringing different cultures closer together. Detached from their architectural context, the opened television cabinets resemble sacred places: in Christian cultures they are reminiscent of tabernacles, in Eastern ones of Japanese Shinto shrines. The direct analogy of “Passage” with monuments such as triumphal arches is opposed by its relatively modest size.
By using the ancient television cabinets created for private households to construct a public-character architecture, Paik confronts private and public space with each other. The monitors do not show any world events, however, but rather the synthetic, non-narrative video sequences with an abstract character that Paik had already developed in the 1960s and that look like dancing patterns. The characters on the opened wings of the TV cabinets appear just as enigmatic as these patterns. Here, writing and image equally lose their communicative character in the sense of the usual, narrative transmission of messages. Paik does not only express his mistrust of spoken or written language, which he perceives as inferior to the image, including the electronic image. By directly confronting not only the different languages with each other, but also the characters with the video images, he also recalls the Rosetta Stone. This could be an indication that the media should not be weighed against each other, because they can complement each other. The re-equipping of the gutted wooden television sets with synthetic video images, which awakens the old cases to a new artificial life, makes them appear doubly antiquated, but in juxtaposition with the old characters, it becomes clear how young the medium of television is. The kaleidoscopic and playful colorfulness of the video images, which create a meaningless and purposeless illusory world, relativizes the significance of electronic media and hints at criticism of their unreflected use 4. The title “Passage” indicates that the initial phase of the television and video age has been left behind, while the synthetic video sequences, as the most recent element, suggest as yet unimagined artistic possibilities that should be pursued.
Source: Cat. »Kunst der Gegenwart«, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 1997, p. 202, translated from the German