The Multifaceted Presence of Zen in the Early Work of Nam June Paik As a young artist aligned with the Fluxus group the late 1950s and 1960s, the Korean-born artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) began working in Germany and America at a time of remarkable growth in Western artists’ interest in the spirituality, philosophy, and aesthetics of Zen Buddhism. Although he himself had no spiritual allegiance to Buddhism, Paik often invoked Zen both in name and concept within his early artistic practice. This paper tries to unpack the manner in which the artist engaged with Zen while occupying a unique subject position in the interstices between his cultural heritage and immediate cultural context, and retains a narrow focus on two specific ‘Zen works’—Zen for Head, and Zen for TV—because of their remarkable visual, theoretical, and intermedial similarities. By focusing on the thematic continuities among these works, one can assess how Zen was congenial to and manifest within Paik’s technologically-inflected thinking, and in turn how Paik strategically deployed certain Zen principles to enrich the underlying conceptual framework of his art. An initial survey of the strains of Buddhist thought prevalent throughout and incorporated by artists in the Fluxus milieu contextualize Paik’s activities within a specific cultural environment and sphere of influence. A subsequent assessment of primary sources provides insight into his theoretical interests, creative musings, socially-minded thinking, and artistic convictions—although his oblique style of discourse often leaves much unsaid. Although he often wrote about and discussed Zen in interviews, Paik never articulated an explicit stance towards it; when directly questioned, he typically provided answers shrouded by ironic humor or histrionic denials of any spiritual allegiance. Such ambivalence, coming directly from the artist himself, complicates interpretations of his ‘Zen works,’ but readings of Paik’s first person texts are nevertheless essential to the project of unpacking his relationship to and deployment of Zen. Finally, building on this theoretical groundwork, this paper explores the aesthetic, intermedial, and theoretical continuities between Zen for Head and Zen for TV within the broader thematic framework of Paik’s engagement of Zen. Central to the proliferation of Zen within neo-avant-garde circles was the experimental composer John Cage. An avid student of East Asian philosophy, Cage incorporated many Zen teachings as central, guiding principles in his work. In turn, he was primarily influenced by the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist master Daisetsu Taitaro Suzuki, whose lectures he attended at Columbia University from 1949 to 1951. David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (New York: Wiley, 1998), 96. Suzuki presented Zen as a nature-centric, rather than anthropocentric, practice defined precisely by its lack of definability: emphasizing Zen’s ephemerality, he believed that “even the slightest attempt to catch a glimpse of it causes it to disappear.” Hanna B. Hölling, Revisions–Zen for Film (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015), 43, fn 5. This idea that rational systems of thought (like language) cannot be used to describe a higher state of consciousness is reiterated in Zen’s central pedagogical tool, the koan, which is used to demonstrate the the insufficiency of logical, dualistic reasoning. The classic example of the koan asks: “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”, the ‘correct’ response to which is the student’s proffering of one hand to the master while saying nothing. The student moves beyond dualistic thinking to present “the sound itself as such,” rather than trying to describe sound as the product of clapping. Doris, 101. The resolution is thus reached only when the student has achieved the very state of consciousness that the koan has awakened. Ibid., 100-101. Within this framework, nature serves as a paradigm for human behavior. As Suzuki writes, “we accept nature’s ‘irrationality’ or its ‘musts’ deliberately, quietly, and wholeheartedly. … It is an active acceptance, a personal willingness, with no thought of resistance.” Ibid., 93. For Suzuki, an active participation in the “irrational” processes of nature functions similarly to the koan, opening the mind and facilitating a direct relationship with reality. In an essay from 1982, Cage recalls a lesson from one of Suzuki’s Columbia lectures that echoes this notion of participatory acceptance: “the ego has the capacity through its likes and dislikes to cut itself off from its experience…Or, instead of cutting itself off from it, the ego has the capacity to flow with its experience, and that, Suzuki said, is what Zen wants.” John Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, ed. Thomas Kellein et al. (New York: H. N. Abrahms, 1993), 22. His interpretation of Suzuki’s teachings emphasizes the dissolution between the self and the natural world achieved through an ego-release in order to flow with life’s experience. David T. Doris has suggested that Zen’s goal of eradicating subject and object positions can be likened to the conceptual framework underlying the activities of Fluxus: “both Fluxus and Zen investigate the nebulous realm between conceptual categories: between subject and object, between vision and hearing, between high and low.” Doris, 94. More a loosely organized group of nominally like-minded individuals than members of a cohesive, ideologically driven movement, most Fluxus artists nevertheless were unified in their desire to push the boundaries of established cultural practice and eradicate the heretofore rigid distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘life’. Central to this Fluxus ethos was this concept of “intermedia,” first articulated by Dick Higgins in 1965 to describe the work of artists operating in the margins between traditional mediums and disciplines in contrast to the all-encompassing notion of multimedia. The conceptual interstices of Zen might thus be compared to Fluxus artists and artworks that occupied the liminal space between media. Key to accessing this “nebulous realm” of Zen is the act of meditation. Meditation itself places paradoxical demands on the Zen practitioner: only through considerable mental exertion can one learn to evacuate the very mind that is at work. It thus requires immense discipline, dedication, and mental labor, which is seemingly belied by its emphasis on extreme physical inactivity—one could even describe it as a total abandonment of the corporeal—emblemized by the iconic, cross-legged pose of “zazen.” Cage recalls the profound effect Suzuki’s teachings had on his approach to composition, leading him to “go out rather than in, to use chance operations as a discipline in my music, a discipline equal I trusted to sitting crosslegged…that my writing of music would be as a result not self-expression but self-alteration.” Cage, 22. Here, he makes an notable comparison between Zen meditation and the composition of music: chance operations and their aleatory results are a literal manifestation of Suzuki’s charge to “flow with” experience. In forgoing authorial control in exchange for heightened attention to the natural world and its sensory stimuli, employing chance operations in music provided Cage with the same kind of mental clarity as meditation. The result is a paradigmatic shift away from self-expression and towards self-alteration. Rather than create phenomena, Cage attempted to compose ways to present it; he sought to evacuate the subjective in order to maximize the listener’s potential alteration of the self via an enhanced attention to and perception of the multiplicities of experience. A radical repositioning of the authorial position, truly there could be no greater challenge to the zeitgeist of the high modernist avant-garde. Although Paik had been exposed to different strains of Buddhism while living in Korea and Japan, it was his initial interactions with Cage that elicited his interest in Zen. Hölling, 33. He had left Japan with the specific intention to expand his study of Western thought, but in a profoundly ironic turn, it was in Germany and through an American that he reconnected with aspects of his cultural heritage. David Ross, “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, eds. Thomas Kellein and Toni Stooss (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 59-60. He was initially dubious about the prospect of an American composing music based on his Western interpretation of Eastern principles, but, as Paik recalled in a 1975 interview, he was quickly seduced by Cage’s work: “I went to see the music with a very cynical mind to see what Americans will do with Oriental heritage. In the middle of the concert, slowly, slowly, I got turned on. By the end of the concert I was a completely different man.” Nam June Paik, Calvin Tompkins, Russell Conners, “Edited for Television,” WNET/Thirteen, 1975, UbuWeb, November 30, 2016, http://www.ubu.com/film/paik_edited.html. Paik’s initial cynicism likely stemmed from his awareness of Western artists’ tendency to Orientalize and fetishize reductive interpretations of Eastern cultures throughout history. However, Cage clearly reoriented Paik’s thinking by demonstrating how aspects of “Oriental heritage” like Zen could, when interpreted through a Western mindset, produce radical innovations in art and, more broadly, how cultural exchange could emotionally and intellectually connect people of disparate backgrounds. Despite the profound influence of Cage’s Zen, Paik never fully ascribe to Buddhism in the same way as his teacher. His ethnic and cultural background inherently inflected his attitude towards and engagement of Zen, creating an undeniable tension between his diasporic, Korean identity and Western artists’ enthusiasm for and experimentation with Eastern ideologies like Zen. Self-aware of this tension, Paik was wary of the potential for his own relationship to Zen to stereotype him and his work. In an article for the June 1964 edition of the Fluxus newspaper cc fiVe ThReE, Paik reflected on such potential stereotypes, writing, “now let me talk about Zen, although I avoid it usually, not to become the salesman of ‘OUR’ culture like Daisetsu Suzuki.” Nam June Paik, Videa’n’Videology, ed. Judson Rosebush (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974). The latent aggressiveness and guardedness of tone here suggests that the young Paik may have often been labeled; implicit in the uppercase OUR is a commentary on the Western perception of East Asia as a homogenous bloc. One could posit that he sought to demarcate his engagement with Buddhism from his cultural heritage: the former was not simply a result of the latter but rather an intellectual and artistic choice. In contrast to many of the artists who engaged with Zen apolitically, Paik spoke out about the dangerous ease with which it could be misused. Commenting on Suzuki’s embrace of “nature’s irrationalities” and the principle of acceptance, Paik writes that “the relative IS the absolute,” meaning that The NOW is utopia, what it may be. The NOW in 10 minutes is also utopia, what it may be. The NOW in 20 hours is also utopia, what it may be. The NOW in 30 months is also utopia, what it may be. The NOW in 40 million years is also utopia, what it may be. As a result, Zen requires that “we should learn how to be satisfied with 75%, how to be satisfied with 50%...how to be satisfied with -1000%.” Paik, Videa’n’Videology. If the relative is indeed the absolute, there can exist no qualitative distinctions between the lives of individuals across each and every moment in time. Subjective experiences are thus irrelevant in the grand scheme of nature’s timeless existence, and as a result, one must learn to be satisfied with one’s lot in life. While the strictly philosophical interpretations of this teaching might have appealed to neo-avant-garde strategies of negation, Paik reminds readers that it is this principle of Zen that “is responsible of Asian poverty.” Here, he alludes to the exploitation of Zen by the shogunate in fourteenth century feudal Japan: under directive of the military governors who subsidized the monasteries throughout the provinces, Buddhist monks (highly respected by the populace as educated, spiritual leaders) were able to quell popular unrest by disseminating Zen principles of acceptance, teaching people to be satisfied with even the most crippling economic poverty. Doris, 127. Paik suggests that such adulteration of spiritual principles by institutions of power occurs in modern Asian societies as well. In a 1991 interview, Paik ascribes the stagnant social conditions of modern Asia to the fact that “China and Asians, who live the Confucian edict of complete obedience to one’s elders, have little space for individual freedom.” Ross, 58. The systematic limitation of individual freedoms, Paik argues, is veiled by a discourse on the preservation of and respect for tradition. Latent in Paik’s commentary is the suggestion that Zen constitutes one such seemingly innocuous tradition used to mask the fatalism inherent to this vertical social structure. Although he is at times quite critical of Asian society and its ideological undertones, Paik remains relatively equivocal in his attitudes towards Zen. Yet perhaps this equivocation is in fact a true representation of his feelings. In a 1992 interview, Paik declared, “I am an artist…because I am a friend of John Cage, people tend to see me as a Zen monk. …I am not a follower of Zen but I react to Zen in the same way as I react to Johann Sebastian Bach.” Quoted in Hölling, 33. Here, Paik’s likening of Zen to Bach suggests his respect for and appreciation of their aesthetic features and formal principles. Yet, as cornerstones of their respective cultural traditions, both potentially act as barriers to radical progress and innovation; the Bach connoisseur would likely oppose Paik’s efforts to liberate music through sex. Paik appreciated Zen and Bach as autonomous entities, but as he implies in his invective against Asian poverty, there is no art outside of power. Having outlined the theoretical framework encompassing the dynamics between conceptual principles of Zen and Paik’s aesthetic inclination towards but wariness of its sociopolitical deployment, one can analyze Zen for Head and Zen for TV—respectively and as a thematic group—through a Zen-specific lens. Performed at the 1962 First Fluxus Festival of New Music in Wiesbaden, Zen for Head was Paik’s enactment of La Monte Young’s 1960 Composition #10 (for Bob Morris). The work consists of the directive to “draw a straight line and follow it.” Paik dipped his head and necktie into a bowl of ink mixed with tomato juice and ‘drew’ a line by dragging himself down the length of a thirteen-foot roll of paper. Doris, 121. The formal resonance between Paik’s line and Zen calligraphy notwithstanding, Paik’s literal actualization of Zen’s emphasis on the mind—using his head as a brush—could be interpreted as a mischievous jab at the Westerners’ enthusiasm for but lack of knowledge about Zen and its more complex concepts. Constituted by both the performance and the physical trace it produces and thus occupies the intermedial realm between event and object, ephemera and materiality. Both the material and performative elements of Zen for Head can be interpreted as actualizations of Zen. The crudely drawn line here evokes Zen calligraphy (zenga), which features rapid, expressive brushstrokes that indicate the use of instinct, rather than training or premeditation, to paint. Hölling, 35. Zenga could be interpreted as a painterly representation of Suzuki’s belief in letting the ego flow with experience, visually manifesting as the flowing brushstroke. The physicality of Paik’s bodily performance also imbues the work with a somatic violence—accentuated by the blood-red of the tomato juice mixed with the ink—that recalls the incorporation of violence in certain Zen pedagogy. The ninth century Zen master Lin-chi developed a mode of Zen that foregrounded the immediate attainment of enlightenment (satori), which could be facilitated through acts of shock or violence. Watson, Burton, transl The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 97. by slapping or striking a student with a stick, the master might trigger his instantaneous realization of satori. In a 1963 text, artist Earle Brown characterized Paik in such terms, describing him as “a kind of Oriental Kammerkrieg” who, as a teacher, used direct action—“ Paik doesn’t tell somebody, he up and does it”—to demonstrate rather than instruct. Earle Brown quoted in Munroe, 7. Through his somatic generation of the line and invocation of Zen’s violence, Paik also imbues Zen for Head with a tacit rejoinder to Abstract Expressionism’s theosophical conception of the authorial gesture as a means of accessing the sublime. Abstract Expressionism locates the sublime potential of the work of art in the indexical trace of the artist’s hand—for example, the skeins of paint in Jackson Pollock’s monumental canvases. Paik’s violent evacuation of the hand in the production of the line creates a corporeal trace—one that could have been made by any body—that actualizes the dissolution between subject and object, and with it, the notion of mastery itself. Doris, 121. Furthermore, this subversion of high modernism’s occupation with the auteur is already implicit in the ontological structure of the event score, wherein the artist, La Monte Young, simply creates a model for the work of art that depends on an enactor, Nam June Paik, for its completion. Event scores generated by artists like Young and George Brecht constitute a paradigmatic shift away from Cage’s compositional strategy of creating interactions between a multiplicity of sources. Instead, they devised monostructural presentations that emphasize the multisensory experience that exists within singular phenomena. Doris, 97. Paik continued to focus on many of the theoretical considerations that had emerged from his initial integration of Zen principles when experimenting in the medium of analogue video, producing intermedial and conceptual continuity between Zen for Head and Zen for TV. Paik first exhibited Zen for TV at the Exposition of Music, Electronic Television held in 1963 at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. For the “electronic television” component of the exhibition, Paik individually manipulated the internal circuitry of thirteen different television sets, producing unique variations in the electron video-horizontal-vertical units of each. Even though Paik had mastered basic electronic device signal manipulation while at the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, he continued read electronics magazines, examined television circuit diagrams, and studied principles of electronic science like Werner Heisenberg’s unified theory of elementary particles in order to enhance his capacity as artist-manipulator. Paik, Videa’n’Videology. Of these works, the television that would become Zen for TV was damaged in transport, its signal reduced to a single horizontal line across the center of the screen. Paik was delighted by the effects of this accidental event, and placed the work on its side to display its linear sign in a vertical format. Here, an unexpected chance operation served as the formative ‘event’ in the creation of the work of art. Paik would later comment that Zen for TV was the best work in the exhibition, underscoring his believe in the generative potential of variable or indeterminate action. Edited for Video As a result, the intermediality of Zen for TV is, like Zen for Head, constituted by the dialectic between object and event. There exists, however, an essential ontological difference between these works: while the performative event of the former depends on the production of a single material object, the material structure of the latter is predicated on both the original alterations caused by the accidental event and the constant electron scanning of the cathode ray tube. Composed of a perpetual stream of signals, video is a primarily time-based medium; every passing moment in effect constitutes an event in the life of analogue video. In light of the fragility of the line’s material structure, one could also posit that each passing moment possess the potential for the video’s death. The static, graphic image of Zen for TV belies the constant flurry of electromagnetic processes occurring within the television’s internal circuits. Here, one might liken this visualized, conceptual operation at work in Zen for TV to a specific tendency in Bill Viola’s work of the late 1970s; as Ina Blom describes it, “video had become like a motionless body with thought rushing right under the surface.” Ina Blom, The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016), 117. The work is thus comprised of two contradictory temporal measures: the complete suspension of televisual movement and the constant activity of the electronic system. Conceptually apprehending the coexistence of these seemingly irreconcilable temporalities could be likened to solving a koan; one must move beyond the dualistic notion of “moving/ not moving” to perceive the invisible, material structure of video as such. This non-dualistic mode of comprehension is further enriched by the introduction of a third, relative temporal measure: that of the individual viewing subject. Drawing on James H. Austin’s work on the neurological processes of meditation, Blom locates similarities between the neurological effects of meditation and the experience of video duration in their potential to alter the subjective measure of one’s individuated, internal “clock”. Literal and figurative meditational absorption in Zen for TV and its complex, temporal multiplicity thus has the potential to produce a profound psychophysiological effect on the body and mind. Ibid., 118-119. Paik’s experimentation with the creative potential of analogue video was arguably subject to greater indeterminacy due to the fragile nature of the medium’s electronic structure. Christine Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944-1966,” October 125 (Summer, 2008): 47. Such indeterminacy was, in the spirit of Cage, a means through which to diminish subject expression in the work of art. Paik identified aspects of indeterminism in media theorist Marshall MacLuhan notion of “cool media with low definition,” and in cyberneticist Norbert Weiner’s discussion of entropy as the natural force towards disorder, which shaped his own strategic deployment of chance operations. Paik, Videa’n’Videology. As such, the indeterminately produced line of Zen for TV, like the deskilled mark in Zen for Head, could also be interpreted as a challenge of the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. In the late 1940s, the New York School artist Barnett Newman began painting what he termed “zip paintings”: large-scale, monochromatic canvases whose expanses of rich, saturated color are bifurcated by thin, vertical “zip lines.” In comparison, the graphic mark in Zen for TV appears cold, stagnant, and untouched by the artist’s hand. These “zips” possess a potential kineticism produced by the dynamic verticality of line, which in turn resonates with our own verticality as bipedal creatures. Yet one could argue that in video, Paik’s authorial position manifests in concept rather than form. David Ross contends that the artist’s manipulation of electronic circuitry constitutes “an intellectual violence generated by the insertion and assertion that the hand had a role in technology,” that the hand could transform a medium that had “nothing to do with touch.” Ross, 58. Here, Paik is able to insert the somatic into what might seem like the most non-corporeal of materials, ostensibly reimagining the kinetic Zen violence of Zen for Head as the constant movement of electron signals . When viewed through the lens of cybernetics, Zen for TV blurs the boundary between technology and nature even further: if the communication and automatic control systems of both animals and machines are indeed organized in remarkably similar ways, then Paik’s analogue video works represent intellectualized, electronic renderings of nature. Katherine N. Hayless, “Cybernetics,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 146. Another of Paik’s Zen-themed video works, TV Buddha (1974), provides additional insight into deployment of Zen in the context of video. The work consists of a bronze Buddha positioned in front of a television, behind which a video camera films the motionless statue, its video streaming directly into the television to create a closed-circuit video feedback loop. Paik initially intended to simply pose the Buddha in front of a television (without the camera) to comment on the exponentially growing TV culture of the 1970s. Freed of all external impressions, the Buddha works towards ego-suppression through the principle of self-confrontation by gazing at his own direct (rather than mirrored) electronic visage in concentrated, motionless meditation. Decker, 38. In contrast to Lin-Chi’s use of shock and violence to gain immediate access to enlightenment, TV Buddha—contained as he is within the closed feedback loop—can take all of eternity to slowly work towards enlightenment. At times, Paik paired the work with his TV Rodin (1976-78), which operates on the same closed feedback mechanism. The camera, however, is placed not directly behind the television but besides it. As a result, the statue contemplates not his direct image but an oblique view of his upper body and face. As a pair, these works comment upon disparate cultural modes of self-reflection and how they might manifest in the technological age. More broadly, they can be understood as visual manifestations of Paik’s own meditation on models of selfhood and the non-communicative potential of video technology. In contemplating the similarities between Zen and Fluxus, Doris contends that their most important commonality is “an insistent attitude of questioning: a revelation of the codes by which we come to frame the world, by which we come to receive the world as given and immutable.” This is perhaps the most productive framework through which to think about Paik and Zen. As a postcolonial subject occupying the liminal space between systems, he possessed a remarkable sensitivity towards and prescience about the increasingly networked connectivity of a society in the fin de siècle of globalization. As a result, he was able to strategically combine the aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical aspects of Zen within his technologically-minded practice as a means of questioning entrenched social codes and cultural traditions of both hemispheres. Works Cited: Blom, Ina. The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology. New York: Sternberg Press, 2016 Cage, John. “On the Work of Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, edited by Thomas Kellein and Toni Stooss, 21-23. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. Decker, Edith. “Hardware.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, edited by Thomas Kellein and Toni Stooss, 67-71. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. Doris, David T. “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus.” In The Fluxus Reader, edited by Ken Friedman, 91-135. New York: Wiley, 1998. Hayless, N. Katherine. “Cybernetics.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 245-256. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Hölling, Hanna B. Revisions–Zen for Film. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015. Mehring, Christine. “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944-1966.” October 125 (Summer, 2008): 29-64. Munroe, Alexandra. “Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Cage Zen, Beat Zen, and Zen.” In The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, edited by Vivien Green. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009. Paik, Nam June, Calvin Tompkins, Russell Conners. “Edited for Television.” WNET/Thirteen, 1975. UbuWeb, November 30th, 2016. http://www.ubu.com/film/paik_edited.html. Paik, Nam June. Videa’n’Videology, edited by Judson Rosebush. Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974. Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, edited by Thomas Kellein and Toni Stooss, 57-63. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. Watson, Burton, transl. The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Francesca Bolfo 1