Nam June Paik: Rear Window Offers a Posthumous Glimpse into the Mind of a Master

Photo credit: Graham Holoch

Micki Meng’s gallery viewing encourages viewers to look above, behind, and below Nam June Paik’s allegorical work.

text by Maisie McDermid

Friends Indeed, a storefront gallery between San Francisco's Chinatown and Financial District, is housing a Nam June Paik dollhouse. Tangled cords drape from the house's backside, with ten miniature, '90s TV sets placed into its windows. The pixelated footage loops four scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, teasing visitors into thinking they're glimpsing into private moments inside the plaster-painted dollhouse. 

The sculpture, like the film, is about a stranger peering into private spaces, says curator John Morace. "It becomes a kind of hall of mirrors." 

Paik, widely known as the founder of video art, grew up in Seoul, Korea. From a young age, he studied piano and composition, later moving to Japan where he studied aesthetics at the University of Tokyo with a focus on composer Arnold Schoenberg. After further music history studies at Munich University and a brief return to Tokyo – where he bought his first Sony Portapak and joined the avant-garde art movement, Fluxus – Paik emigrated to the United States where he lived in New York City and eventually died in Miami, Florida in 2006. Although most of his art manifests in digital formats – video sculptures, performances, installations, and television productions – his paintings and drawings also reveal his interests in how humans connect.

Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) is one among three other Paik pieces – Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry), Untitled (Toy Robots), and Untitled (Allen Ginsberg) – being showcased at Friends Indeed. Visitors walk through the space opening closet doors and peeking behind black curtains at either one of Paik’s detailed paintings or a laser-generated, neon photograph. The works vary in their approaches to perception and play. All – including the six others available for viewing upon request – are on consignment from the owners and available for sale to other collectors or institutions.

In its voyeuristic slant, Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) combines questions both Hitchcock and Paik ask of viewers who stare into the “windows” of either a screen or a house. "Rear Window itself is a very interesting film because it is about viewing and viewership – who's viewing whom, and under what circumstances. This is one of the themes that Paik has always worked with – how we communicate and how information is passed between people," said Morace. 

Photo Credit: Graham Holoch

Between Alan Ginsberg's vibrating, laser-generated photograph and the toy robots splattered onto a doodled canvas, Paik made art silly, professionally. He celebrated tasteful fun. 

"What a subtle little thing for him to show us," Morace said, reacting to some inch-sized black brushstrokes at the bottom of Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry). "You know, he's communicating in his Fluxus way by mixing media that was around him. Paint, jewelry, life, and art are all together in this one tiny piece. Look at those little black birds on the bottom, they are a motif he's used in many works – like flying TVs – and it links beautifully to his entire body of work." 

In other public displays of Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse), curators have concealed the many wires, dials, and plugs spilling from the house. "It's like an octopus of cables with all sorts of different colors and widths, and you're like, oh my god," Morace joked. Paik envisioned the lives of his sculptures beyond their years. "He had this theory that if the technology improved, and his piece was going to be up again, you could move the technology forward. So if it went from cathode ray tubes to LCD screens, you could update it as long as it didn't affect the work's physical manifestation." But Morace and co-curator Mickie Meng, unlike other curators who may have likened the “guts” to a distraction, believe the “guts” are the piece’s purpose. Viewers, therefore, peek into the principal theme of peeking. 

The combination of both video and traditional fine art in Nam June Paik: Rear Window’s collection is what makes the showing of these four works – which have never been displayed together – particularly interesting. Not all of Paik's work buzzes, flashes, and sparks. Some of his most sincere art exists on paper. After suffering from a stroke in 1996, he spent much of his remaining decade in a wheelchair. 

"His dealer at the time, Holly Solomon, visited him in the hospital and brought him paper, crayons, and these oil stick colors to give him something to amuse himself. She was doing it to say, ‘Hey, you are still you, and you can go on,’" said Morace. His drawings draw-up dimensions through his use of layering and pressure shading techniques. Untitled (a small painting with film strip jewelry) features a bedazzled film strip with empty photo slots. Paik used the spaces to fill in his own storyboard: a blank face in one, a smiling face in two, a mysterious face in three, and two faces in the fourth above the word "kiss." Even on canvas, Paik could tell a moving story.

"I hope the work nudges people to think about art in a broader way than is typical of many people today when they're really focused on painting. I encourage people to say, 'Wow, I can get some pleasure, enjoyment, and some satisfaction from seeing this video, these sculptural objects, and these weird hybrid paintings with toys stuck on them,’" said Morace.

Nam June Paik: Rear Window will be on display at Friends Indeed from March 13, 2025 to May 02, 2025.

Support Structures @ Gathering Explores the 'Fixed Instability' of the Human Condition

Support Structures is a group show bringing together artists exploring the ‘fixed instability’ of the human condition. The exhibition provides a meditative space centering the notions of care and fragility as a collective responsibility. This mode of relationality evades linearity of time, avoids contractual relationships and instead embraces reciprocity and responsiveness by assembling works which elicit an affectual response. As opposed to adapting a representational approach, the exhibition stems from the experience of relatives and loved ones, the support networks.

Works by Alina Szapocznikow and Louise Bourgeois focus on the moment of intuitive, reconstructive shift towards the interest in frailty, both in terms of the choice of materials and the visual language. For Szapocznikow and Hesse in particular, cancer diagnosis has profoundly shaped their artistic efforts, leaving their legacies inherently bound to the ineffable physical and psychological experience. The precision of Maren Karlson’s paintings abstracts the mechanical nature of organisms, suggestive of ribcages, spines or car engines. The approach of quietly marrying the technological and organic are expanded by other artists included in the exhibition, such as Geumhyung Jeong, whose video reclaims a subtle but transformative dance of a complex mechanism.

Support Structures is on view starting Thursday 22 June 6-8 PM - 29 July at Gathering, 5 Warwick Street, London

Art Meets Rock

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RICHARD KERN, Nirvana, Courtney Love
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left: WILLIAM ENGLISH, Vivienne Westwood in Sex, 1975, courtesy of Maggs Brothers, London right: URS LÜTHI, Un'isola dell'aria, 1975, particolare, 28 fotografie, cm60x50 cad, Collezione Fabio e Virginia Gori
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IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD, A Rock'N'Roll Suicide, 1998, Live performance, Photo: David Cowlard courtesy Kate MacGarry, London

Museo Pecci di Prato in Florence, Italy presents an exhibition entiled LIVE! Art Meets Rock. The exhibition, curated by Luca Beatrice and Marco Bazzini, adopts a suggestive perspective to show how the history of contemporary art and of rock music have followed parallel paths to contribute to the construction of the cultural universe of the last forty years. Music and the visual arts have crossed and overlapped, over time, engendering a unified and consistent landscape; what draws them together is the performative dimension, articulated according to the specific occasion within an exhibition or a concert. LIVE!offers a parallel and original reading of historic events by exhibiting paintings, sculptures, installations, video clips, artworks, LPs, graphic works, photographs, magazines and films. Artists include Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, William English, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle and more. The exhibition will be accompanied by Live!, a book published by Rizzoli with contributions by Luca Beatrice and Marco Bazzini. LIVE! Art Meets Rock view at the Museo Pecci di Prato until September 16.  

FLUXUS and the Essential Questions of Life

Ben Vautier, Let's Fuck

It could be said that John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "bed-in" for peace movement was the ultimate expression of Fluxus performance art. Yoko One is of course one of the most famous of the Fluxus artists.  John Lennon actually met Yoko at a Fluxus performance and fell in love that very night. The Fluxists are sort of like modern Dadaists.  Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, a major traveling exhibition based on the Hood Museum of Art’s George Maciunas Memorial Collection of Fluxus art, is "designed for visitors to experience the radical and influential cultural development that was Fluxus, and maybe learn something about themselves along the way." Fluxus was an international network of artists, composers, and designers that emerged as an art (or ―anti-art‖) phenomenon in the early 1960s and was noted for blurring the boundaries between art and life. The Hood’s exhibition runs from April 16 through August 7, 2011.  www.hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu