Watching “Global Groove,” Nam June Paik’s 29-minute psychedelic video he created in 1973, it’s hard to fathom what a revolution it triggered.
In it, he predicted that there would come a time when "you will be able to switch to any channel in the world" and the pleasures and consequences it could have.
The famous video art work goes on view Friday, Nov. 7 at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk. The museum will also exhibit two Paik works from the permanent collection, “Hamlet Robot” and “Dogmatic,” both dated 1996.
Paik (1932 - 2006) was the first artist to toy with television, starting in Germany, where he staged his first exhibition with TVs in 1963. His art appeared playful, as did Paik himself. But he was serious about his underlying message.
“Television is a dictatorial medium,” he said. “I think talking back is what democracy means.”
For him, talking back translated into seizing control of a television and altering it himself.
Paik grew up in Japanese-occupied Seoul, Korea; his family fled in 1950 to escape the Korean War. He was a pianist and eventually moved to Germany to continue his music studies. There, he watched leaders on television and saw how TV could be used to control people.
Paik began modifying television sets and staging eccentric events.
In 1964, he moved to New York and continued to build a body of work. He became well-known for his performances in the downtown avant-garde art scene, especially with cellist Charlotte Moorman.
Starting in the mid-1960s, he received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. Funds gave him studio time to experiment at public broadcasting stations, including WNET-TV, which aired in the New York City region.
While experimenting at a TV station, he saw the need for equipment he could use on his own, so he co-created a video synthesizer. With it, “you can play the television yourself, like a piano,” the artist said in a video clip in the 2023 documentary, “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV,” which aired on WHRO in March 2023.
He made “Global Groove” while at WNET, using his synthesizer to combine and alter video images collected from various sources. A year after it aired in January 1974, Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker magazine wrote a profile on Paik that began with a roster of impacts stemming from his TV art.
By May 1975, an entire world of video art had sprung up. More than a dozen New York art galleries sold video art, he wrote. One gallerist closed his doors to start a new kind of business, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), which managed work by 38 video artists. EAI still exists and loaned “Global Groove” to the Chrysler for this show.
Chelsea Pierce, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Chrysler, organized the show. She sees Paik as a predictor of electronic media changes on the horizon.
“When you think, in the early ‘70s, so much of television was monopolized by national broadcast networks,” she said. “He really foresaw that one day we would surpass that and have access to all of these streams from around the world.”
“Global Groove” offers a gleeful glimpse of our channel-changing future. Viewers get pulled in by an entertaining mix of footage, opening with a man and woman dancing to the pop hit “Devil With the Blue Dress On.” Images morph and multiply. Short clips provide a disparate blend — the poet Allen Ginsberg chanting, a traditional Korean woman dancing, Moorman on a talk show discussing Paik’s “TV Cello,” which the artist fitted with a stack of TVs.
“Global Groove” will be shown nonstop in a small gallery called The Box. The video will measure about 5 1/2 feet high by 7 feet wide as projected on the wall — a tad bigger than seen on viewers’ boxy TVs in 1973.
“Dogmatic” will stand guard by the video in The Box. The piece is shaped like a pup with TVs for a torso and head.
The curator sees meaning in the title.
“It takes dogma, a set of beliefs, and merges it with matic,” which she said refers to the U-matic video cassette that, starting in the early 1970s, gave consumers user-friendly magnetic tape wound in a plastic video cassette.
With that product, “it’s a new paradigm,” Pierce said. “It’s video as the new dogma coming out of film.”
Anyone could use it. That’s what Paik believed in: video as a unifying force that could bring the world’s people together. As predicted in “Global Groove.”
“Nam June Paik: Electronic Television” will be on view Nov. 7 through April 26. Admission is free. Visit chrysler.org for more information.