Erosion of medium purification by time-based media in the 1970s

Erosion of medium purification by time-based media in the 1970s

Video artist Nam June Paik and computer artist Lillian Schwartz were pioneers of their artistic fields. Even though both artists worked within their medium, their work with time-based media in the 1970s combined aspects from other media and therefore undermine the ideologies of medium purification promoted by Clement Greenberg.
This essay will look at the Video art works TV Buddha 'figure 1' TV Garden 'figure 2' TV Cello 'figure 3' by Nam June Paik and computer art works PIXILLATION 'figure 4', UFOs 'figure 5' and ALAE 'figure 6' by Lillian Schwartz. And discuss how the artists integrated real-time generation, illusions of three-dimensions and sculptural elements, philosophical and scientific exploration , and combined moving images, both figurative and abstract, with music and at times with spoken or written words.


For Greenberg modernism was to be the formal focus of a medium, self-reflexive, on its own specificity and it was modernisms task to purify media of all that was non specific to the medium.
Greenberg set out a series of parameters for the visual arts. Artists should refrain from the use of words to prevent perversion of the medium. The implementation of the illusion of three-dimension in two dimensional media of should be removed as pursuing the illusion conflicts with the sculptural medium. In regards to music Greenberg considered it the art of pure form and immediate sensation, and as a result its susceptibility to tainting by other media is lessened. And Literature which focuses on subject matter, is therefore dichotomous to music.¹


Time-based media therefore is antithetical when placed within the frame of Greenberg's view of medium purification. Time-based media combines aspects from other media which are not native to their medium. In the case of Paik, the integration of real-time camera feeds and sculptural elements whereas for Schwartz the illusions of three-dimensions in the two-dimensional image which therefore erodes the ideologies of medium purification. Paik's initial explorations into video art were heavily influenced by association with Fluxus art and studies in the late 1950s in music and philosophy. This influence led to his combination of elements from performance and theater, painting, sculpture, dance and music.² In his video installation TV Buddha (1974) Paik combined elements from sculpture and video. The work is perhaps one of Paik's most identifiable as it employs an iconographically identified object, a statue of Buddha who, through a closed circuit TV, is viewing a real time image of itself. This use of camera, real time circuit loop and iconographic imagery blurs the object to subject distinction.³ In another seminal video installation which combined sculpture and video by Paik, TV Garden demonstrated a new aesthetic discourse and capacity for technological composition by combining a vast number of tropical plans with thirty television sets of various sizes. The site-specific installation created a new visual experience, a liminal space between the natural and scientific, setting a new standard for immersive video. Paik's also merged real time video and sculptural elements in his work TV Cello but additionally integrated music and performance in his collaboration with classical cellist Charolette Moorman. TV Cello was constructed from three television sets which had been removed from their casing and installed into plexiglass boxes to show their inner workings. A cello bridge and tailpiece were adorned with strings to form a cello-like instrument which Moorman stated was the first real innovation in cello design since the 1600s.⁴
For Lillian Schwartz, her practice developed through her innovations with the computer as an art medium and digital film manipulation at Bell Labs, when the systems were linear in time and space. Each of her computer art works PIXILLATION, UFOs and ALAE are hybrids of medium employing the use of computational image generation, hand colored animation, film and music. Programs had yet to be developed to provide a malleable palette and the ability to control moving pixels so Schwartz intermixed hand colored animation with computer-generated black and white texture. To permit the eye to see a deeper saturation of color arrangement she developed an editing technique to match the colors between the two media. What makes these works unique is the illusion of three-dimensions which arise from the interplay of texture and saturated colors when viewed through CromaDepth 3D glasses. Essentially this technique works by sorting the three-dimensional position of colors according to their position in the rainbow, for example bringing red to the foreground. These techniques were applied to PIXILLATION (1970) which is a four minute computer art work and UFOs(1971), a three minute computer artwork . Another unique aspect of this technique is that while the works give the illusion of three-dimensions while wearing ChromaDeph glasses, the works are compositionally coherent when viewed without them.⁵


It is important to note that this scientific exploration within Schwartz's practice is dichotomous to the self-reflexive nature of medium purification. Paik's practice was also non self-reflexive in that his works often delved into philosophical and spiritual dialogue. The scientific exploration into the boundaries of technology by Bell Laboratories in the 1970's was influenced by popular news and culture of the times. For Schwartz her investigations into the science of vision were prompted by her contraction of chorioretinitis, which manifested in inflammation and scar tissue of the right retina. Causing permanent visual distortion and loss of depth perception, a devastating ailment for a visual artist but one that had a profound effect.⁶ While the exploration in PIXILLATION primarily focused on chroma depth her exploration in UFOs expanded into a film breakthrough that developed an individualised viewing experience. Schwartz reshot film using an optical bench through a series of specialised filters to exponentially intensify color saturation, which was inter-edited with black frames. The stimulation of the rods and cones in the human eye disrupt the brains alpha rhythms a process called stroboscopy, thus when combined with the ChromaDepth glasses, created a unique viewing experience.
While Paik also explored the boundaries of technology, in his case the television and portable camera, he pioneered its transformation into a post-modern art form due to his understanding of technologies meaning and social presence in the 1970s. He believed that it was short sighted to view television as the equivalent of a radio with pictures or as a commodity for entertainment.

television represented a new communications technology of enormous potential and signaled the beginning of a post-industrial age where manufacturing, the organization of society, and the making of art would be transformed.⁷

Composer John Cage suggested to Paik to integrate religion, which was influenced by his oriental heritage, into his practice. Later Paik proposed that technology had the potential to explore elements to visualise spiritualization. This exploration is evident in TV Buddha, the buddha, in a meditation mundra, is denied its transcendence from its own physicality as it sits contemplating its own projected image in the closed-loop circuit. The buddha, grounded by the surface of reality and time, caught in its own reflection becomes the exemplification of ceaseless meditation on thought and non-through. The inward looking contemplative state of Buddhism is transformed by Paik in TV Buddha, to outward looking state and through the use of technological multiplication the buddha has been prepared for mass media consumption and secularization.⁸


Finally it is important to note that while time-based media used by Paik and Schwartz in the 1970s relied on using technology as a visual and audio medium, combining elements from other media further eroded the ideologies of medium purification. Aspects such as the combination of moving images, both abstract and figurative, with music and at times with words, spoken or written. Sound for Paik was integrated into his works in varying ways. In the video installation TV Garden the thirty televisions are all playing Global Groove, the 1973 collaboration with John J Godfrey. Global Groove contains a mix of music and spoken word, still and animated images both figurative and abstracted from performers from around the world. Where as in TV Cello the often distorted images of cellist Charollette Moorman and other cellists were visible on the screens when Moorman moved the bow or plucked on the strings and a ominous electronically distorted sound was produced and amplified.⁹
For Lillian Schwartz her works relied heavily on music, figurative and abstracted images to enhance her practice. And due to the limitations of the technology available, she integrated traditional materials such as silkscreen, cell animation and film into her early works.¹⁰ PIXILLATION ,one of Schwartz's earliest works at Bell Laboratories, is an intense assault on the senses with soft blossoming forms that transform into labyrinth patternations of flickering hard-edged abstraction, while swirls of blood drop shaped forms phase in and out of existence. During the course of the work the effects escalate in a crescendo. To achieve this effect Schwartz combined hand colored animation with black and white computer generated textures. The optical experience is accompanied by a auditory score produced by composer Gershon Kingsley, in which each visual queue is punctuated by Moog-synthesized industrial sounds.¹¹ As technology improved so did the reduction in editing time and the complexity of elemental shapes. UFOs was created using 35mm black and white microfilm reshot through colored filters onto 16mm film, the video effects were programed on a computer and visual resembled an early Richter animation.¹² While at no point the forms seen in UFOs are in the same frame together the illusion of three planet like rotating spheres is produced and in the background abstracted computer generated landscapes flash in rapid succession. The electronic music for UFOs was produced on a Moog-synthesizer by composer Emmanuel Ghent. Drawing on inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge, ALAE depicts digitally broken down, optically scanned images of sea birds in flight. They are accompanied by geometric overlays, which when viewed with ChromaDepth glasses create the illusion of depth. The animation is glitched, transformed chromatically and geometrically phasing between figurative and abstraction. The electronic audio track produced by composer F.Richard Moore is hauntingly unsettling, intensifying the viewing experience.


Even though Nam June Paik and Lillian Schwartz were pioneers of and worked within their medium, their work with time-based media in the 1970s combined aspects from other media. In the case of Nam June Paik as the pioneer of video art he integrated video, real-time camera feeds, sculptural elements, music, spoken word and live performance into his works TV Buddha, TV Garden and TV Cello. Whereas for Lillian Schwartz who pioneered computer art , her computer art works PIXILLATION, UFOs and ALAE are hybrids of medium employing the use of computational image generation, hand colored animation, film and music. The scientific exploration into chroma depth which produced the illusions of three-dimensions in the two-dimensional image and the unique viewing experience through Stroboscopy within Schwartz's practice is dichotomous to the self-reflexive nature of medium purification. Additionally Paik's interests within his video works were non self-reflexive as they often delved into philosophical and spiritual dialogues. In conclusion, time-based media for Paik and Schwartz therefore erodes the ideologies of medium purification when placed within the frame promoted by Clement Greenberg.

1. Ernst van Alphen, "On the Possibility and Impossibility of Modernist Cinema: Peter Forgács Own Death" Filozofski vestnik 35, no.2 (2014): 255–269, ttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/279044989_On_the_Possibility_and_Impossibility_of_Modernist_Cinema_Peter_Forgacs_Own_Death.

2. Bruce C. Jones "Projects: Nam June Paik", MoMA, No. 3 (Summer, 1977), p. 6 Published by: The Museum of Modern Art http://www.jstor.org/stable/4380700 Accessed: 05-06-2018

3 Faye Ran, A History Of Installation And The Development Of New Art Forms; Technology And The Hermeneutics Of Time And Space In Modern And Postmodern Art From Cubism To Installation (Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2009), 189, ProQuest Ebrary.

4 Elizabeth Bacharach, "Charlotte Moorman: Shattering Barriers Between Art And Technology," Medill Reports Chicago, February 24, 2016, http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/charlotte-moorman-shattering-barriers-between-art-and-technology/.

5. Maureen Nappi, "Lillian F. Schwartz redux: In Movement, Color and 3D Chromostereoscopy." Leonardo 48, no. 1 (2015): 55-59, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566119.

6. Lillian Schwartz, "Oral History Of Lillian Schwartz" Interview by Christopher Garcia, Computer History, Computer History Museum, 2013.
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/06/102746737-05-01-acc.pdf.

7. Robin Oppenheimer, "Video Installation: Characteristics of an Expanding Medium." Afterimage, (March-April 2007): 14+, http://link.galegroup.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/apps/doc/A161758501/EAIM?u=griffith&sid=EAIM&xid=d33b00db.

8. Bert Winther-Tamaki, "The Oriental Guru in the Modern Artist: Asian Spiritual and Performative Aspects of Postwar American Art" Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking: Conflicting Visions  of “Asia” under the Colonial Empires 38, (2011):321-336. https://doi/10.15055/00002439.

9. "Arirang Special(Ep.312) Nam June Paik's Art and Revolution 1 _ Full Episode" Youtube video, 48.10, posted by "ARIRANG TV", January 22, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0E2v_rbY7s&index=113&list=WL&t=0s.

10. Sue Gollifer, "ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art: Lillian Schwartz." Leonardo 48, no. 4 (2015): 324-325, https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01083.

11. Claire Voon, "Paying Tribute to Lillian Schwartz, a Computer Art Pioneer", Hyperallergic, last modified October 19, 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/329466/paying-tribute-lillian-schwartz-computer-art-pioneer/.

12. Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg, Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite (Peachpit Press 2008), 307.