Becoming-Robot With Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik: Robot (1990) 

Mixed metal with lightbulb 

55 x 12 cm

 shaperomodern.com 

 

I. 

 

Last week, as mentioned in a recent post [1], I paid a visit to the Shapero Gallery on Bond Street, in London's Mayfair, to see the Modern Muse exhibition, featuring works by various twentieth and twenty-first century artists. 

 

Prints by all the usual suspects were included - Picasso, Warhol, Hockney, and (groan) Banksy - but there were also works by artists with whom I'm rather less familiar, such as Nam June Paik, whose lightbulb-headed robot giving a friendly wave hello made me smile at least. 

 

For whilst traditionally a muse is conceived as an inspirational female figure, either mortal or divine, that seems a bit narrow and I think and we should open up the concept to include animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, including machines.

 

After all, we're not ancient Greeks. And surely, like Paik, we can all find inspiration even in a rusty robot assembled from wires and scrap metal. In other words, an automaton might serve as a muse just as easily as Venus rising from the waves - especially if, like Paik, you believe technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.  

 

 

II. 

 

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a South Korean artist who is often considered to be the founder of video art. He is also the man who coined the phrase electronic superhighway and foresaw several of the technological innovations (in communications and social media) that would shape the digital age.

 

Originally a classically trained musician, he was pals with John Cage (whom he met whilst studying in West Germany) and became part of the the international avant-garde network of artists and composers known as Fluxus. 

 

Paik moved to NYC in 1964 and it was there he began to experiment with a variety of media, incorporating TVs and video tape recorders into his work. 

 

His infaturation with (often radio-controlled) robots also began around this time, though it wasn't until 1988 that he unveiled the mighty Metrobot [2], followed in 1993 by a number of robot sculptures for the Venice Biennale [3] that emphasised how East and West were now connected via technology.  

 

And then, in 2014-15 a (posthumous) solo exhibition entited Becoming Robot was held in New York at the Asia Society Museum, exploring Paik's understanding of the relationship between technology and society and, more specifically, how technology will impact art, culture, and the human body in the future [4].

 

 

III. 

 

D. H. Lawrence would hate, loathe, and despise Paik's work. 

 

For Lawrence, the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are" [5]. 

 

Thus, as a reader of Lawrence, I also have reservations when Paik talks about the inadequacy of skin and the need to encase the body in technology so as to better interface with reality. 

 

Interestingly, however, he qualifies his transhumanism by conceding that even the most advanced cyborg requires a strong human element in order to guarantee modesty and safeguard natural life. 

 

And what is modern man's most human aspect - lacking as he does a soul - other than his skin? 

 

What's more, far from being inadequate, the skin has never been so vital and so present within critical and cultural theory as today:

 

"The skin asserts itself  in the erotics of texture, tissue and tegument played out through the work of Roland Barthes; in the concern of Emmanuel Levinas with the exposed skin of the face, as the sign of essential ethical nudity before the other [...] the extraordinary elaborations of the play of bodily surfaces, volumes and membranes in Derrida's concepts of double invagination [...] the concept of the fold in the rethinking of subjective and philosophical depth in the work of Gilles Deleuze; the fascination with the intrigues of the surface in the work of Baudrillard; and the abiding presence of skin in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, from the arresting evocation of the opened out skin of the planar body at the beginning of his Libidinal Economy through to the Levinsian emphasis on the annunciatory powers of skin at moments through The Inhuman. Most strikingly of all [...] there has been the prominence of the skin in the meditations on place, shape and the 'mixed body' of Michel Serres. Across all this work, as ubiquitously in modern experience, the skin insists." [6]   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See 'You Don't Have to Be Yayoi Kusama to Make Pumpkin Art' (25 November 2024): click here. 

 

[2] Metrobot is an electronic public art sculpture designed by Nam June Paik. At the time of its unveiling in 1988, it was his first outdoor sculpture and his largest. Since 2014, it has stood in front of the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. 

      The gold-painted aluminum sculpture is 27 feet in height and resembles a box-shaped humanoid robot. It's cartoon-style facial expression (and large red heart) are made from neon tubing behind clear plastic covers. On it's outstretched  left arm is an LED informing the viewer of such things as the time and temperature. On Metrobot's stomach is another display feature, showing full-colour videos. And, finally, a payphone is built into its left leg.

 

[3] La Biennale di Venezia is an international cultural exhibition first organised in 1895 and hosted annually in Venice, Italy, by the Biennale Foundation. It includes events featuring contemporary art, dance, architecture, cinema, and theatre (often in relation to political and social issues). 

 

[4] An eight minute video of the exhibition made by Heinrich Schmidt for Vernissage TV can be found on YouTube: those who are interested are invited to click here.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161.

 

[6] Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 9-10. 

      Readers who are interested in the subject of the skin might like to see the post entitled 'Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre' (7 August 2018): click here.  

Gallows Corner (Reflections on Capital Punishment and Lessons in Paganism)

I.

Living as I do just north of the notorious road junction known as Gallows Corner - a large roundabout with five exits, a flyover, a nearby retail park, and an above average number of collisions -  mean my thoughts often turn to the subject of capital punishment; particularly in the wake of some ghastly local crime, such as the murder of Jodie Chesney ... 

I'm not suggesting that they should demolish the drive-thru KFC and re-erect the gallows as a place of public execution, but it has to be asked what should be done with violent felons who have placed themselves outside of the law and society and what role cruelty, punishment and death (as a form of truth) should play within the socio-legal space.


II.

Historically, as Foucault notes, public executions were always about more than justice; they were a theatrical display of force within a system founded upon a notion of sovereignty. But we, of course, no longer live in such a world; as citizens and as subjects, we are are constituted by a very different regime of power - one that has given itself the task (and the right) to administer life, rather than take it.

Such a regime - let's call it liberal humanism - prides itself on its ability to sustain and coordinate life within a system of law and order: "For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction." It's because this is the case - because having to execute a prisoner is an embarrassing sign of failure - that most Western democracies have abolished capital punishment (and why those states that still carry out executions do so behind closed doors as a joyless, bureacratic procedure witnessed only by officials and a few selected individuals). 

It's not that they - we - have become more humanitarian or more squeamish; death isn't carefully evaded or hidden away within our culture due to a heightened moral sense or some peculiar form of modern anxiety, but due to the fact that death is that which frustrates (bio-)power's desire to micro-manage every aspect of an individual's life. 

III.

Again, I'm not saying that we should attempt to turn the clock back and resurrect violent spectacles or what Nietzsche would term festivals of cruelty, though one suspects that here in Essex - home of the witch trials - there would be an enthusiastic audience for such.

I'm just reminding readers that, as Foucault suggests, public executions were once an occasion also for the exercise of popular power; a chance for citizens to directly vent their anger and make their views known; to not only rejoice in the execution of a criminal, but to mock those who act with pretensions of higher (universal) authority.   

Perhaps there is still something important to learn from Lyotard's lessons in paganism after all ...


IV.

By the term paganism Lyotard refers to a style of thinking which affirms the idea of incommensurable differences founded upon an ontology of singular events. For Lyotard, all things - including crimes - should be considered on their own terms, without attempting to arrive at a universal law of judgement that can make sense of (or do justice to) each and every unique happening.       

In other words, paganism is a kind of godless politics; one that abandons One Truth and One Law in favour of a multiplicity of specific judgements that have no pre-existing (ideal) criteria to refer back to. This would, arguably, allow us to develop a kind of post-Nietzschean legal sytem wherein judgement becomes an expression of an active and affirmative will to power.   

I have to admit that I find it difficult to see how this plurality of judgements would work in practice, but that might simply be because I lack the constitutive imagination to do so (a Kantian notion that Lyotard also invokes in his work on paganism).

See:

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998); see Part Five: 'Right of Death and Power Over Life'.

Jean-François Lyotard, 'Lessons in Paganism', The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Blackwell, 1998). 

Reflections on The Strange Death of Europe: A Book For Thinking, Nothing Else

Bloomsbury (2017)

Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe, addresses very contemporary concerns to do with immigration, identity and Islam. But it's in some ways a rather old-fashioned read, as one might expect from a neoconservative who continues a long (peculiarly German) tradition of cultural pessimism - Oswald Spengler anyone? 

Far from being an incendiary text full of urgency and the visionary promise of a future beyond the ruins, it's a nostalgic, somewhat lugubrious work oscillating between world-weariness on the one hand and a sense of loss on the other; less angry call to arms, more solemn eulogy. But perhaps that's its strength and what distinguishes Murray's work from that of far-right nationalists; he's not demanding that Europe awake! but suggesting that Europeans take time to quietly reflect and, in so doing, rediscover not just old forms, but find new feelings.

Never going so far as to renounce entirely the need for action, Murray nevertheless understands the importance of engaging in what Nietzsche terms invisible activities and which Heidegger relates to a notion of transcendence (the human capacity to reshape and revalue the world via an essential form of contemplation).

In other words, The Strange Death of Europe is a book for thinking, nothing else.

Thus, whilst Murray discusses in detail the large-scale events unfolding all around us and clearly indicates the problems these events bring in their wake, he wisely refrains from offering any final solutions. Critics who pour scorn on the book for failing to provide such answers have missed the point.

Similarly, when they laugh at Murray's suggestion that the fate of Europe might depend on our attitude towards church buildings, they fail to grasp what he means is that our singularity as Europeans is made manifest in our art and architecture. And, of course, in our literature; one of the nicely surprising sections of Murray's book is his discussion of the novelist Michel Houellebecq.    

Having said this, there are aspects of Murray's book that disappoint. For example, whilst I broadly accept his political analysis of postmodern Europe, I don't find what Lyotard termed incredulity toward metanarratives paralysing in the way Murray suggests. Nor do I feel ravaged by decades of deconstruction and desperate to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Although an atheist, one gets the impression that Murray is moving towards the Heideggerean conclusion that, ultimately, only a god can save us. But if only he stopped thinking nihilism in such dramatic nineteenth-century terms and playing the crypto-theologian, Murray might recognise that our loss of faith and inability to act with absolute certainty paradoxically signifies our spiritual superiority to all fanatics and fundamentalists who daren't ever doubt or deviate from scripture.

For me, it's infinitely preferable to live in a secular society that delights in shallowness and gay insincerity, than in a theocratic society plumbing the depths of religious stupidity. In order to counter Islamism, we need to become more ironic and irreverent, not less. And a little bit more Greek; superficial out of profundity.