After its inaugural festival, NOW JUMP, the Nam June Paik Art Center presents its first group show, The First Stop on the Super Highway. Curated by Tobias Berger, the art center's chief curator since August 2008, this international group exhibition adopts Nam June Paik's original idea of an 'Electronic Super Highway' to convey both the axis linking different spaces and times and the exciting journey ahead for the Nam June Paik Art Center.  The catalogue gives a list of works and artists, in Korean with a brief English translation. 

The First Stop on the Super Highway takes as its departure point Paik's strategy to always work on the limits - from the very slow to the very fast / either extremely subdued and meditative or incredibly loud, flashy and exaggerated.

'Actually why New York made me maximal I don't know I was more minimal in Germany – maybe because I am more or less anti-anti...' - Nam June Paik on Edited for Television, Channel WNET/Thirteen in New York, 1975

From the sixties, the art world has noticeably played with these extremes: paintings and installations got very big; other works got reduced to the max. At times, extremely big installations were used to display extreme reductions. Size and sound became key issues and as they became accentuated, the way they were articulated also became more specific.

For The First Stop on the Super Highway, various attempts to represent and experiment with the idea of minimal and maximum in contemporary art are explored. Different concepts of 'size' as they emerge in Paik's work, from his earliest video piece - Button Happening or his event scores to his more recent full-on video installations or paintings - are interrogated as this exhibition confronts works that operate within the same context but use entirely different modes to negotiate them.

Dennis Oppenheim's Safety Cones will mark the approach to the art center's entrance. These supersized traffic safety cones produce a dramatic first impression characteristic of the artist's ability to transform the landscape by merely magnifying the size of an everyday object.

Recurring symbols in this exhibition are the line and the point - Stop and Go. Contrasting concepts of line and movement are featured in works like La Monte Young's influential 1962 event score Draw a straight line and follow it, Santiago Sierra's 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people, or Taro Shinoda's God Hand, a huge apparatus that produces a single red line. By cutting out all the black lines separating the frames in a 35mm film and then editing them into a new film, Pak Sheung Chuen makes visible the gaps existent in the flow of a film. While Lawrence Weiner makes his point with Gloss lacquer paint sprayed for two minutes at 40 lb pressure directly upon the floor, Abramovic/Ulay drive for hours in a circle and Robert Breer uses both spray paint lines and dots in his early experimental films. In addition, George Brecht always starts his Event scores with a black circle. Acceleration and human scale are again revisited, along with the Olympic ideal of "Higher, Faster, Stronger" through Nam June Paik's video Lake Placid and the Xijing Men's 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Stop and Go.


Nam June Paik Art Center

Alternative title

수퍼 하이웨이 첫 휴게소

Access level

Onsite

Location code
EX.KOR.FSS
Language

English, 

Korean

Publication/Creation date

2009

No of pages

24

ISBN / ISSN

Nil

No of copies

1

Content type

catalogue

The First Stop on the Super Highway
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The First Stop on the Super Highway