Electronic Superhighway is one of the most popular and iconic works at our museum.
Nam June Paik's a really fascinating artist. One of the most important figures of the 20th century.
And in many ways, he represents looking ahead to the 21st century, both in his biography and in the
materials he uses and the themes he touches on. He was born in Korea, in Seoul, Korea in 1932,
and with his family, he moved to Hong Kong and then Japan during the Korean War. And then he
goes to study music, first in Japan, and then in Germany. He gets a name for himself, and
he builds a community that's really strongly based in New York, and so, he moves to New
York in 1964. And so his whole life experience and all of these connections and communities,
they span the globe, as does his work. He also is one of the first artists to really take technology
seriously and to start using electronics, and television sets, and video in his art.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a long relationship with Nam June Paik. In the 1990s,
we collected a piece called Technology, and we also collected one of his most important works, a
multi-screen wall piece called Megatron/Matrix.
Shortly after that, he had made Electronic Superhighway,
which is actually particularly Electronic Superhighway: U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii,
because there are other Electronic Superhighways that he made. But this one, which has the map of
the United States, he rightly thought could have a very important place at the American Art Museum.
And so, it was actually a gift by the artist to the museum. It's monumental, it's massive.
It includes 336 television sets. And when it was first installed, 50 DVD players, though we
now use media players, 3,750 feet of cable, and about 575 feet of multicolored neon tubing. So
that’s a lot going on, but what it comes together to be is just this really exuberant, brightly-lit
picture of America as seen through television. What you see on the monitors that are inside
the borders of any given state are basically what Nam June Paik associated with that state.
And remember, he's a new arrival to the United States in the 1960s. He is based in New York
for most of his life. So his associations range from really personal stories, friends he knew,
acquaintances, people he worked with to really pop culture references or very surface level,
or very kind of classic Americana ideas. So for example, in Arkansas, he spliced
together footage of his longtime friend and close collaborator, Charlotte Moorman,
with then-presidential couple Bill and Hillary Clinton. California is full of fitness classes,
ones and zeros. So you get the fitness culture of the beach California,
along with the rising computer revolution that was happening in Silicon Valley. And there were
some more classic ones like Iowa, which is where the presidential primary starts, so you have a
montage of presidential figures. And then other states he's taken whole segments of movie
musicals. So Wizard of Oz for Kansas, Meet Me in St. Louis for Missouri, and Oklahoma for Oklahoma.
And then the final twist that he does is in the state where the piece is on view,
which currently is the non-state of Washington, DC. He places a camera
that is a closed-circuit TV camera that loops back to play on a monitor there. So wherever
you are standing, you are inside the map in the proper geographic location. And this creates a
form of interactivity that can be really playful. So when you first step into the gallery space with
this work, it can be really overwhelming. All these screens, they all are moving,
they're changing, the edits are really fast. One of the analogies is that they're so fast,
like speeding along a highway. But there's also a lot happening in the
audio space so where you have the movie musicals, in particular, you might hear a bit of a show tune
come up when it gets loud. So those are background noises. And then there's also the segment that's
the Montgomery Bus Boycott documentary. And that has sections with Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X speaking. And that interestingly, the artist noted should be the most audible soundtrack.
I think that really interestingly intersects with the idea of the open road and this idea
of the highway as a space that, very often in this piece, is seen as a glittering invitation
to the fifties idealized open road. And The fact that the artist wanted that audio to be
legible, no matter where you were standing, really means that the visuals are always inflected by
this questioning of who can get on the road safely? Who will get equal treatment on that
road? And those are questions that stay really resonant and important to this day, unfortunately.
One of the things I'm always struck by in looking at Nam June Paik's work is there's this
first engagement that can be really self-evident you think, "Oh, big map of America made of TVs.
I get it." But if you spend time with it and you let all of these layers unpack,
you really come to recognize both his brilliance, how far ahead he's looking,
but also the complexity that he's willing to sit with. He doesn't need to give you answers.
Doesn't need to say that this is good or bad. But that you should be thinking about these things
and you should be attentive to them and aware that they're going to be part of how we shape
our world, how we understand ourselves and that doesn't go away. It just gets richer over time.