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The gangways and cobbled dockside spaces at Liverpool were almost spectrally quiet, even at the weekend; I flicked my eyes over my shoulder regularly, waiting for the packed throngs of gallery-shufflers who just never appeared. Like Tate After The Triffids.

There's a genuinely meditative air around some of the pieces, particularly the candle being CCTV'd and re-projected on the walls of the space it sits in, surrounded by the paraphernalia of camera, tripods, wiring.

At moments it all looked very dusty and old, the battered instruments that he disembowelled and jury-rigged with barged wire and glued-on detritus appeared as if they really belonged in Paik's garage, as they carried only a very poorly mediated folk memory of the incidents they lived and were destroyed in.

As if the Aktion, performance, Moment that was constituted by the physical violence visited on them necessarily meant their uselessness as Memoriae of that event. The pianos, especially, were almost bathetic, only ever gesturing at what was absent from them.
The 'family' of robots, even though apparently the most recognisable of Paik's work, were quite sad specimens, museum pieces, garden-shed approximations of an idea.