unprotected music: Nam June Paik - "Solo for Violin"

[SmallRubberFeet]

He better not smash that violin!

[adamdrummer101]

Nicely performed piece. It's just a shame the person editing the video actually faded out the sound and video right after he smashed the violin.

[existentialistcat]

Watched this for the first time. At first I was like, "oh, it's about vulnerability and the end of the age tonal music." Then nothing was happening except the raising of the instrument, like it was held up in triumph and its reign would last forever. Then he SMASHES it and I was like "Nooooooooooo" D: And then there was post-modernism.

[DrTallTimber]

The first time I saw a performance of this piece, I honestly didn't think it was going to end the way it did... Paik manages to put a giant magnifying glass over time itself, and turns a couple of minutes into an eternity. Nice work!

[afried01]

beautiful!

[TheAlonetogether]

J'aime le fait de briser un violon en pensant à la caméra qui vous filme. La façon de tenir le violon est ici merveilleusement étudiée. Aisance, délicatesse, doigté, souplesse. Le chandail en interaction avec le veston rappelle ici les mesures 234-248 du Sibelius. Le mouvement des bras accentue l'aisance émotionnelle du sujet. Le regard est ferme et mobile. Le bois du violon se fend à l'endroit indiqué. On s'ennuie follement.

[cnlutube]

Some might call this art...

this ,to me is utterly irelevant and does nothing for my cultural awaresenn( kids in school smash instrument all the time, except they are not pretentious about it.

The worst thing is tho, that people film this stuff and some watch it.( yes I#ve seen it once, that will do)

Utterly pathetic and irrelevant.

[123reinders]

Never asked yourself the meaning ? Asking questions is the main lesson teaching is about. It gives them tools to learn how to you can live life. Not judging but understanding is far more important to become a skilfull, whole and balanced human being. It helps them living live at their best.

[Glass1700Z]

What the fuck? This is crap. He should have used a full sized violin. Or like a double bass. Musicians have been doing that with guitars for decades.

[egapnala65]

Isn't this the guy who wrote a series called "Danger Music"? One of which involves playing a violin whilst swimming up the vagina of a whale?

My own problem is that it is boringly predicatble. There were only two ways it could go. He could either have lowered it equally slowly, or smashed it. He chose the latter option.

So this is hardly "rich" in any aesthetic sense. Just boring and out of date.

[loobycliff]

@egapnala65 Danger Music is by Dick HIggins. Some of the series would be fatal, but some are performable.

[FaizRLZ17]

catharsis.

[cleomagoolando]

Smug smug smug smug smug smug smug. I hope you at least used a broken violin to perform this pathetic act of human weakness. Every 'piece' in this series reeks of pretention and shows me nothing but artists who would rather jerk their intellectual yerks than give something back to the world.

[mevlana69]

idiot comments like this one coming from "cleomagoolando" always make me laugh.

It is incredible to see how superficially and predjudiced some people look at funny little performances like this one. What's all the fuzz arund that "holy cow" violin and why those species of commenters always have to be personally insulted? Maybe a sign of high class of performance?

[cleomagoolando]

This piece of shit "performance" is insulting to anyone who ever wanted to play an instrument but didn't have the means to access one, sort of like when idiotic drugheads like Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix used to destroy guitars on stage. It's ludicrous masturbatory behavior, and it's even sadder that some egocentric intellectual quack had to "compose" a piece based on it.

[mevlana69]

You are a strong defender of real art, one can assume that you as well would have been an excellent curator for the "Entartete Kunst"-exhibition of the Nazis!

[cleomagoolando]

I love how not accepting avant-garde dadaist stuff without question automatically qualifies somebody as an oppressive Nazi who's trying to turn back the clock on art. I forgot that post-post-modernism or whatever the fuck this is doesn't allow individuals to have negative opinions about anything.

[barrentree]

it's very simple, like that painting of a black rift on white, and says basically the same thing in relation to classical music. it's not asinine if there was a reason for designating this act as art, he probably would have been trying to change thought somewhere, which makes it more worth considering than a non-artist doing the same thing. the same thing means different things depending on where it is done.

[cleomagoolando]

Yes, and in the world of math, people invented the zero to give more definition to the abstract world of numbers. Difference is, the zero actually spawned a lot of other great ideas. Paik's piece is one of those "well, duh" ideas that most artists would consider an artistic cop-out, like a lot of Cage's works. Music sounds best when it involves, well...sound, not when it's just lofty and snarky ideas.

[barrentree]

im not an expert, but most of paiks other pieces are much warmer than this, the space they explore is richer. 20th century maths spawned many ideas like zero with a lot less use - in fact late 19th century topology was rife with pathological 'special cases' that only served to tear down other theorems. but afterwards there was a much better sense of what the activity of math actually involved. hate means hate, but do you hate the possibility of the piece in the right way?

[gattobella7]

This piece makes me feel neither warm nor that any level of space has been explored. Nothing has been exposed except a simple possibility, like when a child picks his or her nose until they realize that eventually they will get a nosebleed. Dadaism is foul behavior in the guise of art. If this asshole feels the need to destroy something, why not smash an assault rifle or something else baleful.

[barrentree]

in the same way that "darwin was a monkey"? a child who discovers pain also discovers it's body. could it not be that you've rediscovered that you have an enthusiasm which is in opposition to your denial of 'Dadaism'? what exactly do you think it is that 'this asshole' is destroying? an eternal source of pleasure?

[bullrooster]

Asinine

[prenchito]

I think too.