Performance Art #2.1

Three of my favorite performance artists are Nam Juin Paik, Laurie Anderson, and Rashaad Newsmen. Nam Juin Paik was a performance artist, composer and visionary, but he's best known as the creator of Video Art. He transformed a video into an artist’s medium with his media-based art that challenged and changed our understanding of visual culture. He also developed TV Cello in 1971 for his longtime collaborator Charlotte Moorman. The piece mixed live musical performance with pre-recorded broadcast (or live broadcast), playing with issues of simultaneity, mediation, and mass media. Three televisions made up the body of the cello, and displayed a direct feed of the performance itself, a video collage of other cellists, and an intercepted broadcast. 

TV Cello