ART : This Guy Does Wonders With TVs : Nam June Paik is a cultural terrorist, a high-tech guru and a funny guy to boot. He also happens to be the godfather of video art

Nam June Paik is late, very late, for an afternoon lunch meeting. So late that his assistant leaves the SoHo restaurant to see if the artist is still at his studio just around the corner.

“It’s pretty early for him,” the assistant says apologetically on his way out. “He works all night. But he should be up for his breakfast by now.”

After a week of postponed appointments, the odds are still good that he will show. Paik, a fixture on the international avant-garde art scene for more than 30 years, is known to be elusive, but he is hardly publicity shy. As a pioneering performance and video artist, he has encouraged--and gotten--all the publicity he could muster to promote his costly and financially unrewarding work.

(“For a long, long time, I didn’t sell anything,” he says later. “I owe my entire career to having gone to two of the right parties in the ‘60s. I met important people who gave me money. First time in years I make living as an artist. My advice to all young artists: Go to the right parties and master an important skill--how to talk about money with rich people while loud rock ‘n’ roll plays. Very difficult!”)

Paik’s stature on the art status scale is about to take another quantum leap. In a typically Paikian twist of colliding nationalities, the artist, a Korean native who is now a naturalized American citizen, will be the official representative for Germany at the prestigious Venice Biennale, the Italian showcase for international art opening June 10.

His visibility in Southern California is about to rise to new heights: A video sculpture recently went on permanent view in the lobby at the Korean Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard, another is to be installed next month at the new Anaheim Arena, and he has a solo show opening Friday at Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Paik finally arrives, a short, stout man swathed in layers of shirts, sweaters and heavy jackets, even though it’s a warm spring day. The 61-year-old artist looks, as always, extremely rumpled, with uncombed hair, shirttail hanging out and a wristwatch pinned to his suspenders. He puts a foot-tall stack of press clippings, monographs and catalogues on the table and says to the interviewer in his staccato, heavily accented English, “Always I am asked the same questions. Always I give the same answers. They’re in these books. You can read them for your article. Then we don’t have to talk about art so much. We can enjoy our food.”

This “test” is delivered with a genial smile, but there’s a meaning behind it. Paik is so used to being written about by journalists who are light-years behind his history and concepts that he has devised what he believes is a useful shortcut to what really counts: a sociable meal.

His past and his ideas are better known than he thinks. Paik was born into a wealthy Korean family that during the Korean War resettled in Japan, where Paik studied music and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. He traveled to Germany in 1956 and eventually met several mentors: the I Ching-driven composer John Cage and the electronically obsessed composer Karlheinz Stockhausen; George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement (a loose association of artists who shared an aesthetic Maciunas called “a fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gags, children’s games and Duchamp”), and Joseph Beuys, a then-unknown professor, later to become famous as a mystic, social critic and artist.

In this neo-Dada, performance-oriented milieu, Paik became known for his outrageous gestures (in one “composition,” he destroyed a violin by smashing it on a table; in another, he toppled the piano after playing it).

In 1964, he made his way to New York, where, three years later, he amplified his reputation as a “cultural terrorist” by being arrested for presenting a topless cello player in concert. More significantly, the day the Sony Portapak (the first portable video camera-recorder to make the medium really accessible) was released, he bought the first to be sold in America. This, coupled with his co-invention (with computer wizard Shuya Abe) of the first video synthesizer to generate electronic special effects, launched Paik as the godfather of a new media age.

“Paper is dead, except for toilet paper; the cathode ray tube (TV screen) will replace the canvas” was one of his typical early announcements about the coming technological changes that would change art as they would change all of society. “Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.”

Since then, Paik’s computer-altered videotapes, interactive live broadcasts of avant-garde performances and video sculptures have captured the attention of an increasingly technologically aware culture.

Paik’s prescient prophecies are very much on his mind. “I see that Clinton has stolen my ideas,” he says, laughing. “I wrote a report in 1974 about the future, about a new media age, that I hear Bill Clinton talk about--exactly. It was printed only in German, only 2,000 copies--how did he know about it? Very smart man!”

Being ahead of his time and talking about almost everything with head-on wit are two qualities that have become identified with Paik during his long career as an artist. “Looking back, I think I was quite right about everything,” he says, laughing again, with a mixture of vindication of his passionately held ideas and humor at the absurdity of the remark.

Among the things Paik has been right about: rapid-fire electronic imagery (although Paik’s signature flash editing style makes MTV look like slow motion). Aquarium imagery for broadcast and video viewing (fish are a recurring motif in Paik’s tapes; “where are my royalties?” he exclaims, when reminded that the commercial versions of fish software and aquarium cable channels are incredibly popular). Interactive video. The need to “humanize” technology. (“A car has both brake and accelerator. With technology, we need to stay in the middle, not too slow, not too fast,” he says, in his neo-proverb manner.)

“Humanization” is why so much of Paik’s work combines old forms and new technology. His sculpture for the Korean Consulate, “Scott Joplin as the First Digital Composer” includes a player piano that plays Joplin rags while its frame, made of stacks of multiple monitors, display a melange of found and computer-altered imagery. The work also includes a robot made of TVs: “It’s like life: half-natural and half-technology. Also, life is progress, which is high-tech, but memory, nostalgia too, which we also have. Scott Joplin’s music is old, but it belongs with the new, video, because always, old and new are together in life.”

Behind the work’s conceptual philosophy and sheer entertainment value, however, lurks a blunt social message that Paik intends as well. “I chose Scott Joplin because Koreans need to learn about black people,” he says, matter of factly.

Paik’s piece has brought a steady stream of visitors to the consulate. “Many, many people are coming,” confirms Moon-Cho Lee, the director of the cultural center at the consulate, with delight. Dorothy Goldeen, Paik’s Los Angeles dealer, goes further: “Nam June has made them into a must-see destination on the city’s art map. The piece is a mix of so many things: It’s visually seductive yet has a tremendous social consciousness. It’s a very, very provocative statement for Los Angeles.”

Another permanent Paik creation will be installed soon at the new Anaheim Arena. The main entrance will feature an arch of 60 monitors, 13 feet high and 18 feet wide; the images will be tapes of sports events, altered in Paik’s trademark style by computers and high-speed editing. “They had to spend some money for art, 1% construction cost rule,” explains Paik, when asked how he was chosen as the site’s public artist. “Maybe the public interested in sport doesn’t like art, but they would understand TV--everybody understands TV.”

All of Paik’s main traits will be on display at the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s show, which will offer a mini-retrospective of his ideas. “TV Clock,” a work first built in the ‘60s and remounted in the ‘80s, consists of 24 “prepared” monitors placed in a row. On each is displayed a static bar of electronic light--actually the set’s compressed image. Read in sequence, the entire piece shows the bar rotating through two 12-hour cycles, marking the hours of a day.

Two other video sculptures feature a more politically charged imagery: The monitors of “Paranature” and “Buddha Morphosis” are hidden behind carved Indonesian screens that allow only a partial view of their pulsating, rapid-fire edited scenes. Lights on top flash “Stop,” “Look.” The overall effect is a sense of pervasive social chaos.

Then there’s Paik the entertainer, represented by one of his robots built from odds and ends, in this case, “Chadwick” (Paik gives them all names; Chadwick is his misunderstanding of the name of the inventor of the robot, Capek). Like all such Paik-created creatures, this clunky device radiates a kind of benign magic in its clumsy animation--it’s just sheer fun.

Fun, provocative imagery, social consciousness, high tech with human emotions: These themes come together in Paik’s room-size video installation for the Venice Biennale (a version of the work was recently previewed at the new SoHo home of the Holly Solomon Gallery). In the work, titled “The Sistine Chapel,” Paik clearly means to comment on Europe’s Old World culture and the new international technology.

In Paik’s electronic environment, video images are sprayed around the walls and ceiling of a large room by projectors arrayed on a scaffolding in the center of the space. The predominant image is of fish, shown in kaleidoscope-fragmented multiples; there are also classic images from moments of avant-performance by Paik’s heroes: Beuys chanting in German, Cage talking about mushrooms, Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane.”

It’s a cacophonous multichannel projection matrix, a sight-and-sound electronic extravaganza in which viewers are encouraged to immerse themselves, courtesy of the many small stools scattered about the room.

Floating in the middle of this sea of images is one of a lolling female nude, sprawled on an American flag. (“Unsuccessful punk rocker from East Village,” Paik explains. “Very beautiful.”) From his 1969 “TV Bra,” made for cellist Charlotte Moorman to wear in concert, to his sometimes lascivious tape imagery, Paik has been known for adding sex to the electronic mix.

In a gallery next to “The Sistine Chapel,” another of Paik’s video sculptures focuses on this randy element: In a tape shown on a monitor topped by a reclining Buddha, Playboy’s “Miss April” also lies prone, occasionally shifting to fully display her nude body. East meets West: Her blatant carnality contrasts with the Buddha’s otherworldly bemusement. Why Miss April? “A very nice girl,” Paik says, deadpan. More seriously, he adds: “Playboy is American ideal for sex. Buddha is icon for spirit. Here they meet.”

Why is sex so important in his work? Paik considers the question with amused disbelief. “We are made by sex. We are always making sex. It’s natural. All major religions suppress the sex instinct, except the Hindu. That’s one advantage of the Oriental!”

Paik loves to use sexual metaphors, a habit that never fails to get a rise out of supposedly sophisticated art scenesters. “Art world is like a chicken farm,” he says, talking about the unwritten rules of art stardom. “Only one rooster gets laid.”

What’s next for this most surprising of artists? “If I may say so, without sounding too proud, at 61 I’m still changing. Most artists, from the middle 30s, they stay the same. For financial reasons, I think: They make what the market shows and wants to buy. For so many years I sell nothing. So I have a freedom. Only in the last few years have I sold work. So I am used to making what I want to make.

“Besides, in electronics, things change all the time: Industry makes new products. When the hardware changes, when it becomes cheap enough for me to buy, I have to change. New hardware gives me new ideas, new combinations of things to do. So I have to progress, whether I want to or not.”

But his goal has not changed: “The purpose of video art is the same: to liberate people from TV.”

When a recent Time magazine cover story on the information highway (about the changes taking place in the culture as a result of the technological revolution in electronics) is brought up, Paik says, laughing: “Sounds like they’re catching up to me.”