Nam June Paik, Tate Modern

Attending Nam June Paik’s exhibition amid the digital revolution is both inappropriate and necessary. His works came from the 1960’s 70’s and 80’s when the power of mainstream media was just taking hold, and household technology was starting to invade everyday life. Paik predicts a future of technological connections and possibilities and isn’t far off the mark. Seeing this commentary on early technology and its power from the position of the digitally swamped present day can make it hard to see how ground-breaking it was for people at the time. Paik, however, wasn’t looking at technology and the mass media with a negative eye, he was excited about the possibilities of a globally connected world and plays with the new generation of gadgets that have come his way. It is in this way that viewing his work now is important, we see a hopeful vision of a technology-filled future and how things could have been.

The exhibition also details Paik’s work with the Fluxus movement, which is interesting in the context of Paik’s Korean upbringing and extensive time working in Japan. Fluxus was mainly white European artists who had started to embrace ideas of Eastern Philosophy and spirituality and so seeing an artist who was raised in the East join them in their experiments gave Fluxus some credit. This element of spirituality in Paik’s work is what personally interested me the most. The idea of marrying technology and spirituality in artwork is a fairly new one and something I researched in preparation for my dissertation.

Jungu Yoon wrote a book called Spirituality in Contemporary Art, the Idea of the Numinous, in which he explored ways that artists of the Post-Modern era could make artwork that dealt with spiritual subject matter in a contemporary manner. Yoon references Paik’s work several times in the book as he was a good example of the point Yoon was making that technology, although seen as quite anti-spiritual in some ways, can actually be utilised in creating the feeling of the numinous in audiences, and that in this way a new way to approach spirituality could be formed in contemporary art. Yoon writes about how German theologist Rudolf Otto’s definition of the numinous had many similarities to lots of traditional Eastern ideas of spirituality, including exploring empty space, silence, light and the subject of time. Temporality is a subject explored in relation to spirituality and in the context of fine art extensively. Yoon used the example of Paik’s TV Buddha, 1974, Good morning, Mr Orwell, 1984 and other pieces to show Paik’s experimentation with using technology to warp and edit time and reality.

After reading about Paik’s work and its relation to spirituality I was keen to see it in person and so this exhibition couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Pieces like TV Garden, 1974–77, are pretty, calming and have an optimistic view of the position technology would take in the future and the join of spirituality and technology are shown in a charming and simplistic manner in pieces like Zen for Film, 1964.