This Is Participation TV: Nam June Paik at WGBH, Boston

In 1968, Nam June Paik arrived at WGBH, Boston, to produce his first video for broadcast television. The artist had previously constructed participatory sculptures from modified TV sets—in which, for example, speaking into a microphone generated abstract shapes—and he quickly grasped that broadcast required new approaches. What could participation mean when audiences were anonymous and geographically dispersed? Over six years, Paik produced several extraordinary programs at WGBH that demonstrate his evolving understanding of this challenge. This paper draws on new research and unpublished archival material from the station to examine this critical transition in the artist’s development.

The paper centers on Video Commune: Beatles from Beginning to End (1970), a four-hour broadcast in which two seemingly contradictory approaches collide. In it, Paik documents studio visitors experimenting with editing tools to distort images; a narrator instructs home viewers to manipulate their sets’ color knobs to produce additional visual effects. Periodically, and with no warning, the program cuts to highly-produced Japanese pop music performances and commercials. Paik’s notes reveal that he forcefully petitioned WGBH to include this material, which he felt would activate viewers by startling them into unexpected cross-cultural encounters. The broadcast thus demonstrates Paik’s shift from seeking direct viewer participation to offering a more expansive understanding of audience engagement, one with an explicitly political bent. While illuminating an understudied work, this paper also sheds light on artists’ involvement with public television; art’s engagement with global pop culture; and shifting ideas about artistic participation in the Vietnam War era.