have you ever seen nam june paik’s video arbor here in philadelphia?
have you ever seen it working?
have you ever even seen a picture of it working?
do you know who nam june paik is?
whether you know it or not, you are likely familiar with his influence on visuals relating to video. stacks of old-school TVs, robots with cathode ray screen “faces”, things that seem ubiquitous and modern-yet-period — look at paik’s work, and you will see. and, while al gore is credited with coining the phrase “information superhighway”, what are the chances he’d walked by paik’s electronic superhighway, installed at the smithsonian american art museum, before he “thought of it”? (paik had coined the term in 1974; we have a lovely “bill clinton stole my idea” pin from an exhibition called nam june paik in the nineties, but we didn’t see the exhibition — i got the pin on ebay.)
and we have a piece of paik’s work here in philly, and it’s not in a museum. video arbor was dedicated in 1990, and paik had even then expressed concern about exposing the video components to the elements. this indeed has been a problem. that, and disinterest. or poor archiving of video source material on the part of paik himself and his foundation. depends on who you talk to, and maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, but i think out of those three possibilities it’s pretty easy to pinpoint which of them can, and should, change for the better.
shortly after visiting the arbor in 2006 — the year paik died, as the first time i ever heard of him was in reading his obituary — i began knitting an homage to what i thought the piece would look like if it was operational. the “screens” all came together easily and quickly (maybe because they were exactly what was missing from the actual piece in real life)… but, like real wisteria, the knitted wisteria in my piece has been slow to grow. in fact, the piece has become “that pillow” in claudia’s room for some years. which is not to say i won’t finish it.
in 2010, i was inspired to see if i could get the actual video arbor running (not by any clever means, but by sticking my beak in and continuing to follow up on every brush-off bit of info i was fed). art critic and creative connector, the wonderful roberta fallon, suggested i contact the philadelphia redevelopment authority. the RDA were very responsive and prompt in sharing my concern, and they communicated directly with the property management company that runs the condos where the arbor lives. they say the screens are turned on every evening, but that’s not what we see. so, this story is not over, but hear a little about it from the residents of one franklin town (and from me!) in this fascinating piece about philadelphia’s orphaned public art, by peter crimmins.
as dave kim says, “nam june paik 4 lyfe”.
