Semi-short Response Week 2: Nam June Paik does McLuhan, + Feuer

I want to use this post to invite you to check out “Waiting for Commercials,” a 1972 piece by video artist Nam June Paik. “Waiting” starts at about 22:45 in this “Videofilm Concert” and is kind of delightful. It also, among other things, makes interesting use of Marshall McLuhan’s televised image and voice.

The McLuhan segments are not unlike the interviewee-in-box segments of Good Morning, America (GMA) detailed in Feuer’s article, wherein we see footage of an interview subject who is visible only via the intermediary of a television monitor, located in a space (and in the case of “Waiting,” time) that is clearly distinct from that which the interviewee inhabits. But where Feuer reads these GMA segments as producing a kind of spatiotemporal confusion which may or may not be opaque to the viewer, in “Waiting,” the McLuhan-in-a-box segments are all about messing with the television monitor – in terms of its location in time and space, its screen content, and its internal technology – to produce peculiar formal effects (18). Confusion of different mediated spaces (as well as of cathode ray beams, the legibility of images and discourse, the aesthetic situation of advertisements, etc.) here becomes subject matter rather than, as it is with GMA, a smoothly integrated formal component.

A question that I’m left with about “Waiting” is: To what extent does Paik take McLuhan seriously? (And do I arrive at this question simply because I personally find it difficult to take McLuhan seriously?) From my cursory understanding of Paik, I know that he, like McLuhan, was interested in issues of points of contact between “Eastern” and “Western” societies. Paik is also associated with the phrase “electronic super highway” (more commonly rendered as “information superhighway”), which tinges of a McLuhanite enthusiasm for connecting disparate social locations via media/technology. But that “Waiting” allows us to engage with McLuhan only at a remove might point to another line of analysis…