Recalling Artwork as a Whole

​An Essay on Nam June Paik's TV Bra for Living Sculpture in the exhibition "A Feast of Astonishment: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s" (Sep 8 - Dec 10, 2016) at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU 
Link>> 
https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/exhibition/a-feast-of-astonishments-charlotte-moorman-and-the-avant-garde-1960s-1980s/

​Nam June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969
Video tubes, televisions, rheostat, foot switches, plexiglass boxes, vinyl straps, cables, copper wire, Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991, Grey Art Gallery, New York, Photo: Eana Kim​​

​   On the top of a white square box are two of the smallest TV screens one might have ever seen. They appear to be relics with obsolete cathode ray tubes that project fuzzy videos. The work intrigues audiences with its disoriented identity, making them wonder why those three-inch miniature monitors are attached to a set of vinyl straps. The title, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, informs us that the work is a metaphor for a woman’s bra, and the performer playing the cello in the video is the living sculpture. The work was created in 1969 by a Korean-American artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006), the founder of video art who performed often with his collaborator Charlotte Moorman. The neighboring photos and artworks show that the TV Bra is the costume for the Living sculpture Moorman playing the cello. Thus, the display of TV Bra itself as a small part of the whole performance art lacks the original context. From the understanding that an artwork becomes greater when it is integrated within itself and the integrated whole is even greater than sum of its parts, it is important to appreciate the work of art as the whole, which points to the meaning and work of performance in this case. In order to understand the integrated whole and its being greater from the artwork itself, this paper will look into the artwork, TV Bra for Living Sculpture. In the following it will examine its physical/formal elements and analyze the internal/external relationship and tensions and conflicts around them. It will finally show how the greater meaning of the artwork across time and is revealed and constructed.

Nam June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969
Video tubes, televisions, rheostat, foot switches, plexiglass boxes, vinyl straps, cables, copper wire, Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991, Grey Art Gallery, New York, Photo: Eana Kim

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​Why ‘TV’ Bra?
 
   TV as a medium and object itself has been the center in Nam June Paik’s artwork for over 40 years. TV was a canvas, music score, sculpture, and performance for him. He experimented media with various kinds of video, satellite, broadcast, robot, and laser and developed them into tactual and multisensory ways of communication. His pursuit of crossing various genres of media reflects the Neo-Dada movement of avant-garde group Fluxus in the 60s and 70s. He participated in the movement where the goal was to ease the boundary between art and life, which was influenced by the composer John Cage (1912-1992) and the artist Marcel Duchamp (1987-1968).
   Paik’s artwork mirrored the idea that “the medium is the message”, the one that the media critic Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) articulated in the book Understanding Media in 1964. McLuhan and Paik argued that a medium itself should be the focus of study as it affected the society not only by its contents, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. Their perspectives have changed the traditional view that considered media as no more than a conveyer of the message.  More importantly, their positive view on the media opposed to the prevalent concerns at the time.  Science and technology were often negatively described in dystopian science-fictions such as George Orwell (1903-1950)’s 1984 in 1949 where the developed technology was conceived of as a tool for endless censorship and surveillance. Many critics also warned of the media-dominated and information-saturated world in the coming future. For example, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) pointed out that our reality was being replaced by massive “simulacrums”, and Guy Debord (1931-1994) was anxious of a life being artificial, alienating and inauthentic by media. While they recognized the fact that people have developed much numbness by the dominance of technological media, McLuhan and Paik insisted that media had suggested a new opportunity of communication. Nam June Paik pushed further this idea in his art and has sought “humanized technology”, which reflected an utopian ideal of Zen Buddhism where innate qualities of nature and technology believed to be real and distinctive would eventually diminish.

TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1995
Photo: Peter Moore ©Nam June Paik, Source ©Sharon Tetly

​   ​Paik first focuses on the form of his artwork in pursuit of humanizing technology.  The performance TV Bra for Living Sculpture leads us to experience optical illusion or metaphysical insight with its dynamic images. We encounter the moment when the shape of cello coincides with Moorman’s body, the moment that body becomes music and music becomes body. We are even able to see the screens of the TV Bra as a visualized music. However, if the artwork was not a performance, the same cognitive process would not have triggered well due to several noticeable visual conflicts. The conflict (or difference) between the shape of TV sets and that of Moorman’s breast is so intense that it is hardly to notice that the straight-square shape of TV sets and the electrical images on their screens contrast with flesh of human body. Our perception instinctively divides between organic and non-organic, human and machinery, nature and technology. Paik prompted the performance to overcome the visual clash in static status, forcing the performance as an even more radical way.
   Interestingly enough, the video of the TV Bra at the performance was not in the prerecorded tape as today, but it was a real-time system, showing either actual TV program being broadcasted at that moment or through a closed-circuit image captured by Paik as he walked among the audience with a video camera. (“Putting the audience’s faces on my brassiere,” was Moorman’s description of this method). While she played her cello, Moorman raised her foot on the pedals so that she could manipulate the video on the screen, and the sound of cello could influence the video with the magnets taped on her. Considering both of artist and audience as agencies for the creation of the art, this generative system reflected Paik’s pursuit of open and participatory communication through the artwork. He noted that one-way projection of TV at the time was a dictatorial, and so he pursued interactive and democratic communication by breaking and altering the original system of the TV. But the video of the TV Bra is replaced by a different video today, admitting the non-presence of the performance. The video artwork titled, Video footage for TV Cello, is what Paik created to show within the bra when the Walker Art Center purchased this work, which is compiled of Moorman performing various pieces, such as Paik’s TV Bed and Human Cello. It was Paik’s thought of new life of his artwork by giving new video for the TV Bra.

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Charlotte Moorman performs TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1976
Performance at Art Gallery of New South Wales, 5th Kaldor Public Art Project, Sydney, Australia
Photo: Kerry Dundas, © Art Gallery of New South Wales

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​​Why TV ‘Bra’?
 
   TV is a mass media that is designed to ‘being watched’ by the large public. When Paik conceived TV as a bra, he must have meant to draw all the attentions to Moorman’s breast, and succeeded it by putting these ‘meant to be seen’ images on a very sexual part of the female body. The hyper-electronic beams of the screen strongly stimulated our eyes to focus on the bra more than any other parts. Considering that a bra is an attire that only women wear, the TV bra immediately caused feminist narratives and controversies. The bra itself recollected the symbolic action of burning bra of feminist activists in 1970s.  However, it also seemed to serve for some anti-feminist narratives mainly because it was made by a male artist. Moorman was viewed as Paik’s muse, his sidekick, and his raw material with a two-dimensional character. Her body was considered as a sexual and passive object only playing for men’s pleasure, which was actually employed and fetishized by many male artists. Defining her as a woman willingly and blindly following Paik’s instructions, many feminists condemned her for being a girlish and docile stereotypical woman.
However, it is important to know the meaning and position of Charlotte Moorman herself in Paik’s work. Moorman acted against the anti-feminist perspective, not being mere sexual object but being the subject of the art who played, composed, and performed the art. Her attitude and her practice in the performance show her fearless, experimental, avant-garde willingness of art.  While TV Bra and Living Sculpture started from Paik’s idea, she was the one who completed and expanded the art. We can also see that how integral, inspirational collaborator Moorman was for Paik from the relationship between the two. Paik did not stipulate that Moorman should be naked or to wear the bra, but she understood the art and actively appropriated it in her own way. The term Living Sculpture that Paik titled implies that Moorman is a living, active, and creative art. Just after her being arrested for the notoriety “Topless Cellist” at the premiere of Opera Sextronique (1967), and released, Paik created the TV Bra for Moorman. It turned out that the artwork was purposefully aimed to rename her and restage the avant-garde art. As the current exhibition of Charlotte Moorman stated that Moorman was a “avant-gardist”, she was the artist who dared to break the classical and traditional conventions of the world.

TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1975.
Cello, 2 television sets, microphone, amplifiers, deflection coils, "fussbedienungsgerate," cables. Dimensions variable. Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnof, PAIKN1734.01. Image courtesy of Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin.

Why for ‘Living Sculpture’?
 
   In the initial state of the artwork, Moorman was the only human element in the dark exhibition space filled with dim, kaleidoscopic beams of TV sets. The dynamic agency generating the performance began to dramatically change the aura of the space in the Living Sculpture. The sculpture was not the female body often idealized and fetishized in traditional image, but was a living sculpture which created and bridged between human and technology, and among all the elements including spectator. It was not a traditional static sculpture on the pedestal, but was a bodily dynamic, variable, interactive, and generative sculpture, which simultaneously created multi-dimensional images and multi-sensory effects/phenomenon.
   The dynamics of the TV Bra for ‘Living Sculpture’ transcends time and space. Following the trace of the original whole in the exhibition, the audience may be confused by the lapse between the time of repetitive video playing on screen and the time of the audiences themselves. They face two different times that are simultaneous but divided, and ontologically different. Watching the one flowing in a linear way and the other in the non-linear, they feel it is so much like the paradox of our life, cyclical and undetermined at the same time.  
   It embodies paradoxical coexistence of both ephemerality and continuity, and absence and ubiquity. The Living Sculpture only exists when it performs. On the other hand, the TV Bra itself exists in the exhibition as an evocation of the Living Sculpture, that is, a relic   embracing the history of its life. The ephemeral performance becomes eternal when it is reserved in our memory through the artwork TV Bra and various documentations in the exhibition including, photographs and videos of the Living Sculpture. In addition, the possibility of being performed at any time and any place reminds us that it is repeatable and ubiquitous. The performance in fact has staged several times in different places after its debut in May 1969 at the opening of TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. It can be furthered by contemporary artists who either commemorate or emulate the artwork.
 
   Now, the integrated whole TV Bra for Living Sculpture is living in a different time and space under a different look. The numerous images and the dynamics of the artwork have left countless messages behind. Starting from the understanding that every narratives root in the basic forms of the artwork, a formal analysis is the first and foremost step that this paper carried out. It is important to recognize the potentials of visual and various cognitive components of the artwork, since all the elements have their own possible messages and it reveals itself greater as it becomes an integrated whole. Subsequently, the paper looked into the social history of work to find out its expanded narratives in relations to their surroundings. It is critical to understand the relatedness between an artwork and its environment. Its approach to the relatedness is open, not determined or fixed, to exploring and interpreting, depending on what and how much knowledge of history that we have. The paper lastly explored beyond the deposition of the artwork to see the experiences of audiences across time and space. It is an artistic experience through a specific form of art such as the video art in the paper. And it relies on a subjective experience that can be appropriated differently by people and by time. This paper now opens new possibilities of narratives and discoveries yet uncovered of artwork TV Bra for Living Sculpture.



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