We Talked Nam June Paik, Internet Freedom, and 80s New York with Paul Garrin

Joseph Beuys + Nam June Paik, Tokyo 1984 © Paul Garrin

Black-and-white film photographs of demolished buildings, street fights, dance parties and New York artists, alongside early video collage works, line the walls of famed Lower East Side art scene bar, Max Fish. Serving as a time warp back to the days of the 80s Village art scene, New York video artist and media activist Paul Garrin's exhibition Buy Art, Save the Internet straddles a strange intersection between video art, photography, and the future of the internet.

Last Sunday, Garrin showed 74 unseen photographs featuring the likes of Josef Beuys, Lefferts Brown, and Nico, as well as two video projects, in an ode to a near 20-year-long collaboration with "father of video art" Nam June Paik.

A Cooper Union graduate and active member of the Village scene since the 1970s, Garrin photographed everyday life in downtown New York. Shot using a Nikon FTB, his forgotten archive of photographs catalogue discos, parties and, effectively, the birth of the contemporary New York art scene.

Alongside his photos, Garrin also previews two video installations from a series he's currently working on for the 10th anniversary of Paik’s death. These pieces use assembled digital photo frames to play looped videos of past presidents and colorful digital drawings.

Aside from being an artist, Garrin is also an early internet pioneer who started a domain service called NAME.SPACE in 1996 and trademarked 500+ Top Level Domains, including .sex, .nyc, .cool, .art, and many others. The show itself is designed to assist in fundraising for his anti-trust and trademark lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

At the opening of Buy Art, Save the Internet, The Creators Project had the opportunity to ask Garrin a couple questions about his work, his relationship with Nam June Paik, and the motivations behind the show:

The Creators Project: What is the timeline for all these photographs?

Paul Garrin: One series is from 1982, that documents a robotic performance piece and sculpture that Nam June made in the 1960s. At the time, it was on loan from a German collector to the Whitney Museum as a part of the Nam June Paik solo show. There were arrangements for CBS to film the show, but Nam June thought that would be boring, so instead, he proposed to have the robot cross Madison Avenue and get hit by a car, to create the first robot-car accident. These photographs are from the rehearsal of this performance when we took the robot out on the street the day before the TV crew came.

Many of these other photos are taken in 1980 during my photography class at Cooper. All my friends were musicians, so I would just hang out with my friends, go to clubs and take pictures.

Is there a story behind the Nam June Paik and Josef Beuys photograph?

That photograph was shot just before a performance with Nam June Paik and Josef Beuys in 1984 at the Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo. I was there to supervise Nam June’s retrospective that had traveled to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. Josef Beuys had been invited to do a performance. This shot was from backstage when they were discussing what the performance was, because they hadn’t determined it ahead of time, they just set an alarm clock for one hour.

How did you meet and start working with Nam June Paik?

I met him in 1981. At the time I was doing a work-study internship at Anthology Film Archives where I do the set up for the screenings and worked under the curator Bob Harris.

One day, after a screening I was sitting with Bob in his office and he was filling out my time sheet, and this small Asian man walks in very casually with his sweater tied around his stomach and said, “Mr. Harris, how are you?” and Bob said, “Nam, I want to introduce you to our new intern on work-study from Cooper Union.” Nam replied, “Oh, you go to Cooper Union? George Maciunas went to Cooper Union and he’s a genius, so you must be a genius. Bob, how can I hire him?”

So the next thing I knew, Nam filled out the [work-study] forms and told me to come to his loft on 110 Mercer Street. My first day on the job was in March 1981, the day Ronald Reagan got shot.

Could you tell me a little bit about the video work you have up?

This is a series of limited edition digital works in anticipation of the ten year anniversary of Nam June Paik, which will be January 29th, 2016. I’m doing a series of tributes to Nam June celebrating the collaborations we did between 1983 and 1996.

This work with the four screens is called, Morphing Presidents, showing the changing faces of the “television presidents.” The piece begins with Harry Truman, he was the first president to be on TV, and goes through Bill Clinton, who was president at the time. The portraits are from the official presidential library portraits and were then treated and mapped out used a morphing software on a very slow computer in 1994. It probably took half a day to do each sequence and about a week to do the whole thing. Once those were recorded, that was then taken to Post Perfect, a high-tech post production facility, where all those affects were then added to the morph. This piece appears in two of Nam June Paik’s works, the most prominent being Electronic Super Highway, which is a gigantic neon map of the United States, this one was for Washington DC. All the video in that work I created, the whole piece took about 8 months.

The second work is a nine screen piece. This piece has an interesting history because Nam June had a stroke around Easter time in 1996. After he came out of the hospital, which was a week before his birthday, I took him to the Post Perfect studio as a early birthday present as well as a kind of therapy. Before Photoshop, there was something called Paintbox, where you could freehand draw on a video frame. I connected the live feed to a tape and rolled tape as he did his drawing and calligraphy. The intention was to take the still frame and create a print edition, that actually never happened. This piece has been sitting in my archive all these years unlabeled and I just discovered it again. His drawings creates part of the work, then the other part was a video I shot of him at his loft on 110 Mercer Street where he was playing the piano with his head. This was one of his performances, where he wraps a keyboard scarf around his head and plays the piano.

Could you explain how this show is related to the NAME.SPACE v ICANN Top Level Domain lawsuit and what it means about the future of the internet for the average internet user?

In short, I sum it up by the title of the show, Buy Art, Save the Internet. I started a crowd fund for the lawsuit against the Internet Corporations of Assigned Names and Numbers. It’s hard to ask people for money when they don’t directly feel the benefit or they might never tangibly benefit, so I realized some people would rather buy something. I have this really incredible archive and I’ve never shown my photography work.

What’s at stake here is whether or not citizens or entrepreneurs can build, own and operate a network infrastructure that can be included into the greater internet. When people talk about Net Neutrality, they talk about whether their Netflixes will be slow or not—thats on a consumer level. We’re looking at this from a producer level, a community empowerment level. If you are part of a network and being unfairly excluded because other companies want more control, that’s wrong and breaks the principle of the internet which is about opportunity, new ideas and a global concept. NAME.SPACE did innovation 18 years ago, and that innovation was stifled because of monopolies and power were in control. This isn’t about if your Netflix plays fast enough, it’s about whether these big companies who control the internet, are the only ones who can create infrastructure, and who can shut down and censor the internet.

The question is whether or not citizens have the right to self determination, so this lawsuit is about free speech, equal access, equal opportunity and not having a monopoly control the internet.

Buy Art, Save the Internet is on display at Max Fish through the end of the month.

Related:

Nam June Paik Was The De Facto Father of Video Art

Remember Nam June Paik, The "Father Of Video Art," At New Exhibition

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