Smithsonian American Art Museum
Eighth and F Streets NW
Free; 202-633-1000; americanart.si.edu
Name: John G. Hanhardt
Occupation: Consulting Senior Curator for Film and Media Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Residence: New York City
The Work: “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii,” by Nam June Paik, 1995. 49-channel closed circuit video installation, neon, steel and electronic components.
What I Want to Tell You About This Piece: Nam June Paik has been called the father of video art. He was the first artist to understand the full breadth of what the electronic moving image could be. He wanted it to be an artist’s medium. He really re-made the idea of the television set as an art object. He gave us a new way, through that instrument, to see the world around us.
Nam June was an artist who wanted to give viewers a sense of where they are and how they could see things differently through the artist’s eye. So here we are, standing in front of this fantastic map of the United States made of video images and neon, seeing places that we know in different ways, or places we think we know. It incorporates excerpts from movies that convey a sense of place: “The Wizard of Oz” for Kansas, for example, but also from television, and from Nam June’s own recorded images gathered from around the country.
The power of television is to transmit information, but the power of the artist is always to transform it. To give us a personal view. To shape a medium, and a material, into a new form of sculpture.
That’s essentially what “Electronic Superhighway” is: A sculptural tableau that covers this enormous surface with hundreds of monitors, conveying a new sense of ourselves, and of the United States. It’s an expression of Nam June’s love for the U.S. — he was born in Korea, and moved here in the early 1960s.
What Nam June, and what artists working in video bring, is movement. They’re bringing a temporality, a changing image. In his hands, it becomes a dynamic way to articulate all of the variety of the United States through the stories we tell and the way we represent ourselves in media and film.
