Santa Monica

Nam June Paik, the Korean video artist who uses television sets like others employ oils or bronze, has finally arrived in Los Angeles with a major exhibition of his technological wizardry. As expected, the show is an ambitious, eye-popping affair that includes more than 100 TVs, dead and alive.

The gallery is ablaze with flickering, computer-generated images on TV monitors, plus related mixed-media collages united under the theme of “Bogie and Beuys--Two Hats,” in honor of actor Humphrey Bogart and German artist Joseph Beuys, two quite different performers identified with their hats.

The largest room is installed like a theater. “Antique Proscenium,” a backdrop and stage built of old and new TV sets, fills the front. Aged models in quaint wooden housings don’t work, but new sets scattered among them are going strong. Paik’s heroes, the two Bs, watch from the back, portrayed in massive portraits that have small TV monitors built into the men’s hatbands.

Visitors may sit in TV chairs arranged in rows of paired seats; monitors attached to the tacky chairs are decorated and fitted with videotapes that relate to various arts. The duo called “Dance Is Not Jumping,” for example, is decked with dance trophies spinning on tiny phonographs. Monitors in “Drama Is Not Theatre” have red velvet curtains and masks to be worn by those who watch theatrical images parading across the screens.

As you look down rows of seats called “Painting Is Not Art,” “Literature Is Not Books” and “Music Is Not Sound,” you wonder if Paik is really saying “Television is not life”--or only offering traditionalists a diplomatic way out. The irony that allows Pop art to be read as a celebration or a castigation of consumerism, or both, operates effectively for Paik. By playing TV overload to the hilt, he creates a visual orgy that can be perceived as a saturated essence of electronic art or a stinging criticism on the vulgarity of life with the tube. Either way, he cannily uses the medium to comment on itself. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to March 26.)