SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM.

SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, recent YORK

To for what cause many of us is it given to attend the birth of a medium and to witness its institutionalization as--what else?--an "art form"? In the early '60 anyone who held in his or her hands a brown flexible, two-inch-wide piece of videotape forward which information was electronically codfished had to have a intellect of the miraculous. Play it back: There was the moving image ball a moment before--flat, factual, fibrillating, lightstruck. according to the late '60s, the portapak camera had levy the means of production (then a vaguely Marxist phase) in the hands of media artists working across the broad band from the documentary to the experimental. "Public Access" was not to such a degree much a slogan as the war scream of a marginal (and at the time despised) community insisting onward being seen and heard. From its incubation in the counterculture video had a radical, idealistic program. The universal enemy? The thee network monoliths, which had stolen the public airways, limited access, and betrayed the public (all true)

When the documentary wing, John Reilly and Rudy Stearn's Global Village (found in 1969) for example, declared the world its expose and Nam June Paik (in 1965) pronounced that the video camera would replace the paintbrush--that it was in fact the paintbrush of the future--many art-world fauna dismissed them as intoxicated utopians. For video art, which was considered marginal, a short life was predicted--a little like that of rap, which was also suppos to be short unless instead became nasty, brutish, and lengthy The truth of these pioneers has now marched on--although painting, the Lazarus medium, will survive an atomic holocaust. The electronic medium, neutral as water, became, like chisel and installation, a noun: Video. throughout thirty years, it has opened its phases as if scheduled from Wolfflin.

Video's spunky progression is unthinkable without its principally durable pioneer, Nam June Paik, whose global migrations from Korea and Europe to the continent of John Gage have an almost religious inevitability. Thirty-five years ago, you could behold him at the Galeria Bonino in Manhattan translating the sedate electron of a broadcast sitcom into swerving linear conundrum by the agency of manipulating a magnet on top of a TV locate Above the magnet was the irresistible Paik smile, which still have the appearances to hover over all his work (he gracefully bears the capacity of being universally liked). beneath the clean museum and gallery agriculture of Pop and Minimal, the inspired and somewhat scruffy pan-cultural world of Fluxus was bubbling away, and where Fluxus was, there was Paik, with programs and performances--musical, verbal, pantomimic--a charming futurist with an watch for memorable events (Charlotte Moorman performing in succession Paik's electronic cello; Moorman wearing his state-of-the-art TV bra, a rod away from the article Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell's cantilevered assets). All was driven according to an extravagant Whitmania: Gulp down the world, reshuffle it electronically, and disgorge it in a pride of monitors. Since of recent origin art ideas usually arrive accompanied at heavy breathing, it was miraculous that Paik's program was without exception performed with a transport so rare as to be almost a strange medium in itself.

near of Paik's early work, which showed the TV locate no mercy, displayed an epigrammatic wit. He designed a chair with a TV seat (TV Chair, 1968) that conjugates verbally (ass-seat, ass-set, ass-sit). He replaced the cathode tube with an void fishbowl, then a solitary lighted candle. In a gesturing that became famous, a sculptur Buddha contemplates his image forward the screen in real time. Another signature act (reversing the aquarium spectacle in Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai) state TV sets behind aquariums in which the peregrinations of miniature fish inscribed the activity upon the screen. Fish float nevertheless Paik's oeuvre (an image of his lack of gravitas?) and preface various disguises one of which shows, in a brilliant conceit, Merce Cunningham dancing (floating?) with his computerized reverberate And since Paik's genius is additive, this unit is replicated around the Guggenheim's ramp in a bracelet of monitors: redundancy as pleasurable excess

John Hanhardt's dazzling installation is, with Bill Judson's "American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove" at the Carnegie in 1988 video's summa of display. Jacob's Ladder 2000 a zigzag of laser light, shivers notwithstanding that a six-story waterfall (call John Portman); giant double-faced veils mount the outside of the ramps, furiously synthesizing scattershot satisfaction in which culture heroes (Allen Ginsberg, Merce again) make soundles cameo appearances. From the top ramp, Wright's spinning well has proffered some unforgettable floorworks, such as Carl Andre's installation in 1970--and does in such a manner again. One hundred face-up monitors huddl randomly in succession the floor overflow with images returning your gaze. The eventuate is breathtaking spectacle--and fun.

Paik's genial futurism always amounted to public relations for the coming media immersion, which is now everyone's chance His amiable polemics were and are disarming. His optimism is a version of innocence, his certainty maybe that of a sophisticated primitive, exceedingly different from the testing propositions of as it was artists as Dan Graham and the early Peter Campus, who fix uponed process and found it darker. Hanhardt's catalogue, which makes a case for an intellectual underpinning for Paik's work, is an indispensable document. It includes a history of experimental film, obscur until lately by video's ubiquity. Experimental filmmakers greatly resented video. (When Stan Brakhage finally capitulated by the agency of making his first video, a concussion wave went our through the film community.) Experimental film was and is frequently backbreaking work. Video was too easy; further in time it got long harder--and more expensive, though the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing Howard Fine, generously relieved the fiscal distress.