Pressing “rewind” and “forward” to negotiate a transcultural position

Abstract

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.