The Dortmund Museum Ostwall discovers the performance master and father of video art, Nam June Paik, as a musician and composer with a passion for crossing borders.
From
Alexander Menden
The orchestra is said to be made up of “bad musicians”. This is an explicit instruction from the composer of the 1961 “Symphony for 20 Rooms”. Further instructions call for a Bach chorale to be played back from the tape at half speed, illuminated by a “red lamp such as is used in an X-ray room”. The audience should move freely on a metal footplate, on which one can also “fight”. The composer’s name is Nam June Paik, and the 1961 “Symphony for 20 Rooms” was never performed during his lifetime. Now the wordy score drawing can be seen grown up on a wall in Dortmund’s Museum Ostwall, as part of the exhibition “Nam June Paik – I Expose the Music”. The graphic, as accurate as it is wild, is the epitome of what the show focuses on: Paik’s work as a musician.