Exhibitions of the Week: Nam June Paik at the Asian Society, Sturtevant at MoMA

Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot at the Asia Society Museum (Until January 4)

One of the most endearing touches in Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot is a wall-sized photograph which shows Paik--video artist, performance artist, all-around master of the ridiculous--sprawled among snaking electric cords and defunct television sets. He looks up at the ceiling, a grin on his face that seems at once blissful and knowing, his hands raised in something like victory. The same attitude of exaltation and silliness is struck again and again throughout the Asia Society Museum's two-floor Paik retrospective, which casts Paik as a canny entertainer, a weirdly prophetic commentator, and a guy who would be "awesome to invite over for dinner." (You will hear plenty of comments to that effect, if you visit at a time when the exhibition is full of Paik newcomers.) Alas, Paik can't be anyone's dinner guest; he died in 2006, leaving behind a miniature universe of recorded spectacles and wearable televisions and golem-like robots. In Becoming Robot, the Paik personality lives on.

Born in South Korea and educated in Japan and Germany, Paik eventually found a home with other artists who fused medium-bending inquiry with good-natured nonsense. Among his comrades were composer John Cage, dance impresario Merce Cunningham, and self-advertised "topless cellist" Charlotte Moorman, who would become Paik's most reliable collaborator after 1964. (He also finds a kindred spirit in Asia Society curator Michelle Yun, whose approach to Becoming Robot is crisp, lyrical, and never too solemn.) And if these folks weren't enough company, Paik also had an entire clique of robots at his disposal: he created Robot K-456 (1964), a sad-funny jumble of lattices and circuits that was programmed to walk and talk and defecate white beans, then Family of Robot (1986), a father and mother and baby ensemble, each family member made out of stacked televisions. These creations have some of the loneliness and ominousness of old science fiction--traits that, elsewhere in his work, Paik was bent on banishing. His chummy embrace of a technological present reached its peak in the televised special Good Morning Mr. Orwell, a vaudevillian rebuttal of 1984. Why bother with dystopia when we can all just sing along?

That was Paik's approach to the immediate moment, and his approach to the future was no less free of flair: he envisioned a "video telephone" (think Skype), imagined a digital "graduation book" (think Facebook), and coined the term "electronic superhighway" well before the Internet existed. Considering the here-and-gone, funny first impression video clips in Becoming Robot, I think he would also have been delighted with SnapChat and Vine. But Paik and the past? Amazingly, there was something backward-looking in an artist this frenetically forward-driven, and this sense of the past unfolds tenderly in Paik's 1993 Room for Charlotte Moorman. With its empty clothes and mementos of the just-deceased Moorman's performances, it is a reminder that much is lost even as technology gains. Not the losses of tradition or intellect or meaning that technology's critics so often cite: the loss, instead, of the individuals who make techology something worth being a part of.

Sturtevant: Double Trouble at the Museum of Modern Art (Until February 22)

It is easy to read the career of Elaine Sturtevant as a project in self-effacement. She dropped her first name from her work in 1960, then around 1964 began creating precise copies of avant-garde paintings, sculptures, and assemblages. Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann were all subjected to the first round of Sturtevant's copycatting. After taking about a decade off from art-making, she returned to create Sturtevant duplicates based on a new set of big-name experimentalists: Robert Gober, Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. With its responses to all these artists and its rambunctious video art, Sturtevant: Double Trouble is both a monument to Sturtevant's legacy and a funhouse of post-modernism--an intriguing bid to enhance Sturtevant's often shaky art historical status, and one of the most diverting things presently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

In every way possible, Sturtevant has lucked out here. As realized by curator Peter Eleey, the quirky yet unhurried format of Double Trouble draws attention from the quibbles that can be picked with individual Sturtevant works, if not with the whole Sturtevant endeavor. And there are quibbles to pick. Truth be told, there is not much allure to a Sturtevant work seen in isolation: her imitations are too rote either to really subvert her originals or (taking a cue or two from Cindy Sherman) to infuse them with new tones, moods, shades of personality. Art as susceptible to theory as Sturtevant's needs this allure, this immediacy, this fluency of emotion to succeed, and so it is that, while they may be grist for a graduate seminar, all those duplicates certainly aren't the best nourishment for museum-goers. In some of her works, Sturtevant dresses up as a more famous male artist, such as Joseph Beuys or Marcel Duchamp. The humanities professor in me wants to say something about gender roles and ironic appropriation; the human being in me couldn't care less.

Somewhere around 1998, Sturtevant changed course and began composing video art--and managed, finally, to broadcast her personality. Among the best entries in Double Trouble are Finite Infinte, Dillinger Running Series, and the low-culture mash-up Elastic Tango, which helped secure Sturtevant a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. In these, the hokiness and forcefulness that can be glimpsed (but only glimpsed) in the duplicates are almost overwhelming; in later, independently Sturtevant creations--such as a 2003 wallpaper, which reiterates the word KILL in yellow boxes--that forcefulness becomes almost menacing. This late flourish lasted up until Sturtevant's death earlier this year, and it resulted in art that nobody--not even a latter-day Sturtevant--could successfully imitate.