On a piercingly cold Thursday afternoon in January, the sixth floor of the Whitney Museum had been temporarily turned into a techno-synth club featuring Kraftwerk’s distinctive “boing-boom-tschak” off their 1986 hit “Musique Non Stop.” Accompanied by a booming bass and an electronic snare beat, the song rumbles off the 218-screen floor-to-ceiling sculpture by the grandfather of video art, Nam June Paik. Showing at full scale for the first time since its debut in 1989, Fin de Siecle II is an amalgamation of clips taken from tv shows, music videos, and advertisements. A grid of naked women walking against a fleshy backdrop; 3D renderings of a bald man's head; stars that rotate as if they were doing somersaults; and the silhouette of a woman bearing some resemblance to Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. The images move too fast for the brain to process, and by the time you think you understand what they are, they have disappeared. The sculpture remains relevant as an all-caps commentary on how digital content saturates our lives, with new Netflix tv series and movies released every week, and 300 hours of YouTube content uploaded every hour. Although made in 1989, pieces like these remind me to close my laptop, and go see an exhibition once in a while.
Nam June Paik (1932-2006), Fin de Siècle II, 1989. © Nam June Paik Estate. Photograph by Ron Amstutz