TV Buddha

TV Buddha created by Nam June Paik in 1974, A closed-circuit video installation with bronze sculpture, monitor, and video camera; black and white, silent demensions vary with installation. Now at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. (The Worlds of Nam June Paik) Quoting name June Paik "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.


In this work of Nam June Paik having a sculpture representing Buddha watching himself on the monitor live. I take this as an image as being self indulged in our selves and the television, yet on a bright insight wanting to be the star of your own show. This piece looks a bit minimalist to be but I believe that it is part of the neo-dada. This having three components yet makes a technology state in bold.For Paik, television provided an enlightening experience where one transcended the self––not in a mystical or religious way, but though the material technical system that was grounded in the real world. World as concept, mind as space. (http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2586)

Paik's possibly most famous video work was produced as a gap-filler for an empty spot in his fourth show in the Galeria Bonino, New York. Shortly before the opening, he hit upon the idea of making a TV viewer out of an antique Buddha statue once purchased as an investment. The subsequent addition of a video camera meant the Buddha now watched his videotaped image on the screen opposite – past and present gaze upon each other in an encounter between Oriental deity and Western media. During the 'Projekt '74' exhibition in Cologne, Paik took the Buddha’s place in his recent creation, suggesting the implicit antithesis between transcendentalism and technology was equally present in his own personality.(http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tv-buddha/images/2/)



John G Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik
New York, New York Guggenheim Museum Publications 2000


http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tv-buddha/images/2/


http://www.paikstudios.com/gallery/1.html


http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/nam_june_paik.html