JOHN HANHARDT: I want to now introduce Stephen Vitiello. It’s been my privilege to know Stephen for many years as a composer and as someone who played an important role working with Nam June to restore key video and audio pieces for Nam June’s exhibition, “The Worlds of Nam June Paik,” at the Guggenheim Museum. Stephen’s sensitivity to and knowledge of the avant-gardes in audio art and performance have informed an art practice that is uniquely his own, and sophisticated in its treatment of the audio environment. His work has been represented in many exhibitions here and abroad, including the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and at the Cartier Foundation, and many, many others. And, now, I know this, because whenever I want to contact Stephen, he’s either about to leave, or is just returning from a project, concert, and so forth—he’s very busy. And so we’re delighted to have him here. He’s also curated projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s on the faculty of a wonderfully-named department, the Kinetic Imaging Department, at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I’d just like to remind you, we’ll be also hearing from Stephen this evening, when he performs with Ryuichi Sakamoto in the concert at 7pm. So, without further ado, Stephen Vitiello. Stephen.
STEPHEN VITIELLO: Okay, but I’ve got to switch computers and do some stuff.
JH: Hope it works.
SV: I hope it works. And if it doesn’t, it’s Nam June’s ghost kind of leading us.
JH: Exactly.
SV: I don’t know if John realizes this. He mentions that I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he’s—I never imagined teaching in my life, and I was working at Electronic Arts Intermix for twelve years, and one day John said, “We have to have lunch,” and I said “okay,” and he sat me down and he said, “It’s time for you to get a teaching job, either at Bart or CalArts,” and I went, “What?” and—oh we lost my—well now she’s stretched—anyway, but he sent me down a path that kind of saved my life in some ways.
Okay. I have a script. You can see the little thing here that says “script.” But I’m really bad at reading scripts, and as Edith Decker was so beautifully reading so clearly, I kept thinking, “Maybe I can go up and ask her to read my script.” But I’m not going to do that. Instead, what I’m going to do is kind of improvise and talk and do my best to, hopefully, tell you things, and then if you feel cheated, I’ll send you a PDF of what I might have said.
So, what I’m primarily focusing on is Nam June’s music, which, my feeling has always been that it’s always kind of conceived—it’s always thought of as a footnote, that there’s the history, which is, he originally studied music, he came to Germany, he met John Cage, everything changed, and for a short period of time, he made these tape pieces, and then he sort of used that knowledge to go onto video. Video is the thing that we know best, and it’s what we’ve seen most, it’s what we hear about. And perhaps it is his great contribution to twentieth-century art and twenty-first-century art, but there’s this part of me that’s always felt maybe it’s because I come from a musical background, but that the music sort of gets shortchanged. And as I thought about it and for the last month I’ve been going back and reading all the catalogues I have and watching documentaries and watching interviews and going through my own notes, and things that he hand wrote and I used to take home and transcribe. I also realized, and I’m kind of jumping ahead if you’re reading my script that you’re not reading yet, that he also did a lot, as did Cage, to sort of underplay the value of his music.
Another important point was that the tapes that were played, and the action music pieces that Ms. Decker talked about from 1959 through ‘61, ‘62 were played reel-to-reel tapes, often from multiple tape recorders, as these actions were happening on stage. If you research Paik’s music, primarily what happens, at least pre-Charlotte Moorman, where the works were either filmed or video-taped, is you’re getting oral histories. Michael Nyman wrote this wonderful chapter in the Whitney 1982 catalogue, and it’s probably the best chapter that I know of, at least in English, I know, I’ve heard that there’s things being written in German and elsewhere, but of anything ever written on Paik’s music, the Michael Nyman chapter is the best thing that I know of. But I’m ninety-eight percent sure that he wrote that all based on oral histories that he actually hadn’t heard the tapes, and there’s—alright, here’s my one moment of reading. Michael Nyman starts the essay by saying Paik was a composer-performer before he became a video artist, and though he has not produced many exclusively musical works in recent years, he remains a composer, even while he is a video artist. And he goes on to define the three kind of periods of composition, one being from about 1947 to ‘57, when Paik was composing what maybe he thought was kind of straight, serious, serial and non-serial compositions using Korean folk music mixed with influences from Schoenberg and other composers. And then the tape pieces that he made in Germany while he was also studying musique concrète, and I think musique concrète is something that doesn’t get referenced often enough.
You know, we always go to Paik, to Cage, sorry, and, in 1958, Paik wrote a newspaper report on visiting Pierre Schaeffer’s studio and the state of musique concrète, and as far as I know it’s only been in Korean, and I had a Korean-American graduate student named Byungwan Ha help me translate it in the last couple weeks, and I’m still trying to get through it, but I think that there’s a lot to be said about the influence of musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer and the abstraction in the way that musique concrète sort of worked with manipulation in a way that was different than Cage.
And the more, you know, just in preparing for this talk, I feel like there’s, I’ve known Nam June’s work for a long time, but then there’s been these moments of revelation. And I knew the tapes really well from working at Electronic Arts Intermix, and then, when I met Judd and saw the films from the ‘60s, I went, “Holy cow,” and they just sort of floored me in a whole new way, and then, eventually, when I heard the music, it did the same thing, but even more than all of that has been reading his writings in the last few weeks, re-reading Paik’s writings, and I think that’s where I finally understood his genius. Knowing him, he was brilliant, and he was wonderfully confusing. His work changed so many things, but there’s something in the language and the writings that really has just been renewing my great, great, great admiration for Paik.
So, I, with my various years of working with Nam June, I was never part of the studio, I would just get assignments, and it started with music. I was working at Electronic Arts Intermix, and Nam June used to come in and, you know, often once a week, and he’d shuffle in and he’d say something to me like [muffled sounds] and I’d go “What?”, “[muffled sounds]”, and he wouldn’t understand me, and he’d shake his head and he’d walk away, shuffle away. And then, I think it was 1991, he came into EAI one day and there was a video playing on the monitor by Peter Callas, who’s an Australian animator and visual artist, and he said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Oh, it’s a piece by Peter Callas from Australia, and that’s my music,” and he said, “Ah, very good! We go to Blimpie’s?” And suddenly I could understand him, it was like the filter had gone and I didn’t know what to do, but I waved at everybody else and I ran after him and crossed Broadway and went to Blimpie’s. And he said, “Okay Mr. Vitiello, you call Mr. Bad Brain, and we make concert with Mr. Boyce.” And I stared, he had, like, egg on his chin, and I didn’t know what to do because I knew Mr. Boyce was dead and I had no idea who Mr. Bad Brain was. And we talked and I waited and I thought, and I came to realize, a, that he wanted to project video tape of his performance with Joseph Boyce from Japan in the ‘80s, which, amazingly, I just found out, Ryuichi Sakamoto was at the concert, and then he wanted to invite the Bad Brains to perform with him. The Bad Brains, if you don’t know them, are one of the great early hardcore bands. They came from Washington, DC, were all African American, incredibly trained, which is unusual for punk rock, being African American being unusual for punk rock at the time. How Nam June knew of them in that moment seems so unbelievably exciting to me, but that was the moment where the filter went away, was music.
And because of that, I always wondered, well, what about those early music concerts from the late ‘50s and ‘60s? Because then I started to read and “Whatever happened to them,” and he’d say, “Oh, it’s too boring, it’s Fluxus music, nobody wants to hear that,” and I was like “I do! And I know other people,” and he’s like “No, no, no, no,” and he’d say the tapes were lost. And I’d seen this picture, this is also from the Whitney catalogue, and always wondered what happened to those. And, you know, again, he would tell me they’re gone. I had a concert in Cologne, I asked around, it was sponsored by W.D.R., I asked could they help and they said no, and as far as I knew the tapes had been destroyed or hidden or lost or eaten. This was just a quote I pulled out, which was that Stockhausen and Ligeti had suggested that these performances be filmed. And as Michael Nyman also points out, that there’s some pieces that are scored, some that are scripted, but the thing that the scores and the scripts can’t put in there is the quality of Nam June himself. And even if one could get up and restage any of these pieces, there’s one or two—“One for Violin” is an exception, perhaps—but for the most part, the most important part of the experience was Paik, and the variability that he put into it, and the incredible charisma. And something John asked me to point out and sort of stress in the talk that’s really hard to point out is the kind of fear and chaos that was part of the performances, and it’s something—I’ll have one little moment of a film clip in a few moments that might help, but I think, again, you had to be there with him in the moment, and not knowing, as Cage said, at the Étude for Pianoforte concert in 1960, there was a tall window and you really didn’t know if at some point Nam June was going to run out and just jump through the window. And he would sometimes attack the audience, sometimes attack his mentors, Cage and Tudor. You just didn’t know what was going to happen.
Interestingly, or at least interesting to me, in the mid ‘90s he got a letter from Darmstadt saying that they wanted to restage one of his pieces and could he send a score, and he sort of contradicted that early statement and sent them a note saying, he always, everything I own has a different spelling of my name, which I kind of love — “Vittiello tape is like a score. Any score costs two hundred dollars. Pay him. When you get to twenty thousand, pay him three hundred,” but the point was, send him, I should send him a video tape and that was the score.
And this is, I guess all footnotes, but my favorite Nam June story of all time, and I think I told this last year at the National Gallery, was working for Nam June, you really never knew how you would be paid, but it always in some way came back, and I was at Electronic Arts Intermix one day, and Korean television showed up, and they said “Who is Mr. Vitiello?” and I said “me” and they said, “We’re so sorry, but we must give you a thousand dollars,” and I said, “Why?” and they said, “Otherwise Nam June won’t let us into his studio,” and so I said “ I’m so sorry too, thank you, because I could use a thousand dollars.” And then I called him and they went over to Mercer Street and he let them in.
But he was, I mean, the chaos that even in working for Nam June, working on projects, you really never knew what you were stepping into. You know, Stayna was asking Judd how he first met Nam June, and I think each one of us has these stories. You couldn’t approach him and say “I want to work for you or work with you,” he had to discover you. And with me, he told me one time, “Okay, you’re going to videotape a month of Fluxus performances starting tomorrow,” and I said, “I don’t have a camera, and I don’t, I’m a musician.” He said, “Oh, good luck!” But it also taught me so much about making sound to be exposed to that month of Fluxus performances. I think that was the graduate school that I didn’t go to.
Alright, so, back sort of to my script. And then, I don’t have a timer, so John will have to tell me when I’m done. Going back to those pieces “Homage to John Cage,” “Étude for Pianoforte” and “Simple,” as far as everyone knew, those tapes were lost, and again, it was about the stories. I remember reading Nam June said that he was disappointed because he would spend so much time editing, splicing these bits of audio together, and yet, all that anybody ever talked about were the actions. And he thought that the actions would be a background for the sound, but actually the way that everybody remembered it was that the sound was a background for the performances.
So, I was working for John Hanhardt leading up to the 2000 retrospective documenting videotapes in Nam June’s archive, and he rolled out one day in his wheelchair, and said, “Ah! Now you have discovered all of my audiotape masterpieces.” And if it wasn’t that box that I showed you earlier, I’m pretty sure it was, but it was exactly like that. It was spools of tape spilled out on top of each other. They would say “HJC,” “HJC or Simple,” “Étude,” literally unwound, broken splices. You really didn’t know what was there, and he said, “You can, you know, get these restored and we’ll see if they work for my Guggenheim exhibition,” and I asked, it was raining, “Could I have an umbrella,” and he said, “No. Go,” and so I went out into the street. I mean, I really had tears in my eyes, it sounds stupid, but I really did, with this treasure trove and was given the task of bringing the tapes to my friend Art Shiffrin, who does restoration of obsolete audio formats, trying to figure out tape speeds, trying to figure out, is it “Étude,” or is it “HJC,” is it “HJC” and “Simple”? And that seems, for an archivist, and I was only a fake archivist, but I was an archivist because I knew the work and the artist, but not archiving, maddening, but if you think about Nam June’s work, as it was pointed out earlier, “Global Groove” is his most famous videotape, but it’s also the element that plays inside “TV Garden.” It’s been remixed, reconceived. I mean, he, the fact that he kind of reconsidered, recycled, recontextualized was very much in keeping. So, if there’s part of “Homage to John Cage” that’s also in “Simple,” that’s not surprising to me.
Alright, let’s see, I didn’t hear sound when I clicked to this next, hopefully, I’m going to click to this next slide, and what you should hear is “Homage to John Cage,” which is also a little confusing, because it’s the audio that went onto the CD that came out on Sub Rosa Record Label after the Guggenheim show. And I think a confusion that I was never able to really work out with him, but that I think that was intentional was that, what you hear is an element of the piece, it’s not the piece itself, because in “Homage to John Cage,” he had multiple tape recorders, he was smashing a piano, he was starting and stopping tapes, but fortunately he allowed it to go out into the world as a CD.
Now I’m buzzing, but I didn’t do anything.
I think if nothing else, it gives people some sense of the sounds that he created, so let’s see what happens when I switch slides.
Okay. Alright, I’ll switch it for the moment.
Just one more, I promise, one more, personal story and then I’ll try to stick to the script, but when I hadn’t seen some of the Paik studio people, John Huffman and Ken, since, in a long time, when I spoke at the National Gallery last year. One thing I always felt really guilty about was, I felt, I sort of pushed, the only thing I felt I could ever push Nam June to do was to release that CD, and I think in the end, he was just like, okay, but at first, again, he kept saying, “It’s too boring, nobody wants to hear this.” And John Huffman told me that before Nam June passed away, he used to listen to it over, and over, and over, very loud, and shriek and laugh. That’s right, right? And it...
MAN IN AUDIENCE: Over a hundred times, sometimes he’d listen for two hours.
SV: Oh my god. It just, I can’t tell you how happy that made me feel, because I did worry. I did feel like, at that point his health was declining, and his, I mean, he was always thinking, he was always so smart, but there were just days I would go over, and I knew he was tired, and I just worried I had taken advantage of that tiredness, but I felt like those tapes should go out, and so I’m happy that they have. On that CD is a long, prepared piano piece, and I just heard from Ray Gallen, who recorded that and actually wasn’t credited but also plays on it, that there’s some more of that material from the late ‘70s, more prepared piano concerts, so I’m hoping that we’ll hear some of it soon.
Oh, wait, I cheated. Okay, sorry. So that’s, alright, just very quickly, I’m going to play you, when we did the audio transfers, Art Shiffrin would do these little intros, and just so you hear that he’s trying to make sense of what he got.
ART SHIFFRIN: VidiPax job, 1699, track four. “Simple,” S - I - M - P - L - E, also marked “Omage,” O - M - A - G - E this time, “John Cage,” 1959.
SV: Okay. You can, you should buy the CD, or you can also hear them on Ubu. There’s a lot of wonderful Paik audio on Ubu.
Again, I don’t know how I’m doing on time, so whenever John tells me to stop, I’ll stop. Am I still, what do you think?
JH: Another five minutes.
SV: Okay.
JH: Is that okay?
SV: Yeah, sure.
JH: You can go on.
SV: No, no, no, I know. That’s the problem.
This is a little bit from the film originally, Stockhausen performance that was done in 196—this film of it was when it was in 1964. It was the first time Paik and Charlotte worked together. But what I noticed, and it’s so dark, I don’t know if you’ll be able to see it. Peter Moore made the film, shot the film, and I believe Barbara Moore put it together after Peter passed away, but you’ll see Nam June performing some of “Simple,” and you’ll hear some of the audio that we’ve already heard if we’re lucky.
I don’t know if you could tell, but that’s Allen Ginsberg who drinks the water from his shoe and then they kiss on the lips. Oops.
Alright, I’ve got to wrap up quickly, but just a few more things to note. One of the things that I used to get to do when I’d visit Nam June was transcribe texts that he was writing or letters to people, and he wrote this. I don’t know that it’s ever been published, but I’ll give it to John, like a bunch of other things I’ve been collecting, but this note that he made, which was, “In 1956, I moved to Germany and met John Cage,” and I love this: “I wanted to make the most profound audiotape music. I would scream into a microphone all night until 3am, until the landlady stormed into my room and said to me, ‘Herr Paik, I must put you into the insane asylum.’ Insane or not, this frenzied ecstasy crumbled like a house of cards. I had to start this Torture again.” This kind of made me think of Nam June and John Huffman listening a hundred times, over and over and over. There was a lot where, before Nam June turned to video, he was quite boastful of his audio. I mean, he said Socrates bemoaned that before death he wished he had seen the premiere of “Young Penis Symphony.”
I’m going the wrong way.
I love this: “Fly weight composer (HIGGINS) works with seconds. Feather weight composer (WEBERN) works with minutes. Light weight composer works with ten minutes. Middle weight composer works with hours, et cetera. Heavy weight composer works with days, weeks, years, centuries.”
And, why am I buzzing? If I move here, wow, it is. It’s like the old days when you’d have to move so your TV didn’t fuzz.
But maybe I’ll end with Nam June speaking, because he speaks like no other. But the point, if I’d gotten a little more time, that I wanted to get to was that Cage was a very important reference and influence and almost mentor figure, but he was also a complicated one, and one that there’s a, I think, really important history to be written about how they were almost like silent sparring partners. Also, after the ‘82 exhibition, Cage said something about Nam June really being a visual artist, not a composer, and he said, “I think the most beautiful music that Paik ever made was for pieces like ‘Video Buddha,’ where he made no sound and the sound of the environment was the soundtrack,” and of course, that’s beautiful and poetic, but it’s so Cage-y, and Michael and Maroney wouldn’t be impressed.
Alright, so I’m going to play you about a minute and a half and then I’ll be done.
INTERVIEWER: When did you start getting interested in video as an art form?
NAM JUNE PAIK: The, actually, I was doing electronic music in the late ‘50s—
INTERVIEWER: As a composer? Or as a performer?
[Note: We apologize for the poor audio quality during this portion of the video.]
NJP: Yeah, as a composer. And then, performer. And actually, I became a performer because my [unintelligible], and then I found out [unintelligible], so I had to do something else. And I found that nobody was working still, so by default, by, how do you say in English—
INTERVIEWER: Process of elimination?
NJP: Yeah, yeah, by process of elimination. You can hopefully, when you run away, you can either run away to the back, or run away to the front. And if you run away to the back, this is more dangerous [unintelligible] from the back. So the only way to run away in crisis is to run away to the front. So, I was running away from television, no, from electronic music, because I was untalented. So, I ran away to the front [unintelligible]. So, I want to be already number one. [Unintelligible]. One place where nobody was, was the video arts. So, I’m excited to learn on that too, you know?
SV: Anyway, thanks so much.
