Paik produced his own set of instruction-based artworks in the same year that he interpreted La Monte Young’s Composition #10 to Bob Morris, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” This volume includes scores with instructions such as “See your right eye with your left eye” and “1,000,000 white pages follows––imagine.” Paik conceived these works as “music for the mind.” The viewer is encouraged to use his or her imagination to fulfill the work in the absence of a physical object or “answer.” This reflects Kosuth’s philosophy that art must require the viewer to activate his or her intellectual capacity and, similarly, employ imagination in the realization of George Brecht’s event scores, which could be realized in terms of “noticing” a situation, rather than performing them. Paik, through the open character of his scores, assigned authorial agency to the interpreters. Each interpreter could follow the instructions so that, rather than having being realized by achieving a certain end result, the artwork’s realization lay in its performance. —LH

Image: © Collection of Fondazione Bonotto, Nam June Paik Estate.