http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=IOW9S5z26ac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2xU4Arb8FI
I have to say I actually enjoyed reading Chapter 6 from the Multimedia textbook because it brought out some interesting points regarding modern art's pros and cons within its politics and aesthetics. As seen in his “Cybernated Art” and “Art Satellite” essays, the Korean-American video-artist, Nam June Paik was a great figure who contributed to the 20th century Avant-Garde Art movement. Unlike other musicians who created completely new compositions or imitated past classic composers like Mozart and Beethoven for mass audiences, Paik was one who did otherwise. To him, art is made up of “not new things but the new relationships between things already existing” (Jordon, Packer 41). In other words, modern art like cybernated art should utilize and re-transform art of the past to better suit the ideologies of modern society. As seen in the first video where Paik is being interviewed, there are quick snippets of his work where an American cellist and a Korean drummer are traditionally playing their instruments in spaces where sounds and images are contorted. Instead of playing their instruments in live performance at a concert, these musicians are videotaped and edited with colorful montages and special effects. A viewer then becomes interactive and not so much absorbed within the art, for he or she is left confused by the illogical assembly of images and is forced to question its overall meaning. And the information-overload provided to viewers by these outlandish images and sounds can illustrate modern society’s high consumerism in a technological age preceding computers and internet. Cybernated art thus becomes an art that juxtaposes and modernizes different aesthetics that already exist in television, music, and fine art to produce new meanings on reality.
And Paik’s fusion of different mediums that went beyond popular art forms can be a metaphor of him fusing different cultures together to defy social norms. This is clearly seen in the second video where the American female cellist, Charlotte Moorman is interviewed for her involvement in Paik’s Opera Sexotronique performance which was widely controversial politically and socially in the late 1960s due to involving public nudity. Here, she describes how this and other performances involving her being nude while playing the cello was not problematic in Asia, Europe and South America until it was featured in New York. She justifies her act of nudity as being artistic not criminal, for she compares her performance to that of topless African dancers who were previously able to perform on the exact same stage months ago. But regardless, Paik and Moorman’s performance was cut short and they were arrested for breaking the obscenity law. This incident eventually went to court and because Moorman's nudity was intentionally used as an instrument along with her cello for intellectual/aesthetic purposes, the American justice system to this day rules nudity in art to be unconstitutional if it is unintentional and fortuitous. But as Moorman points out, this ruling enabled porn shops to distribute degrading, nude images for the sake of what they call profitable ‘art’. So what is art? And to what degree can nudity in modern art be distinguished from nudity in pornography? This overall event reflects the problematic nature of the obscenity law and the U.S. government’s unclear definition of what is obscene art. Thus, in its effort to defy social norms like public nudity and consumerism, cybernated art within the Avant-Garde Art Movement can be viewed as problematic and not so much embraced by all viewers. While being a constant, unfiltered flow of information for anyone to access and witness, cybernated art can innately be perceived by most viewers as being too bizarre and offensive like that of pornography (which goes against its overall purpose and meaning). Thus, while having its pros, this unpopular art can also have its cons.
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