TV Buddha is a video sculpture by Nam June Paik first produced in 1974, but exists in multiple versions. [1] [2] In the work, a Buddha statue watches an image of itself on a TV screen. The screen's image is produced by a live video camera trained on the Buddha statue. [3] [4] [5]
The work was initially produced to fill a gap in a 1974 exhibition at gallery Bonino, New York. [6] [7] Paik had purchased an 18th-century Buddha statue on Canal street in New York City. [8]
The work was first purchased for a museum collection in 1977 by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. [9] [10] Paik produced successive versions of the work. A 1976 version of the work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. [11] A 2004 version is held by the Fogg museum at Harvard University. [12]
The numerous renditions of TV Buddha perfectly encapsulate the simplicity and reproducibility of this video art, as the combination of Western technology and east Asian culture is prevalent throughout this globalized society. [13] Within this variety, the 1976 version holds immense salience, as it being the oldest adaptation located in a Western setting best captures Paik’s revolutionary intentions to present the Zen Buddhism to a Western audience. [13]
Having been born into a Buddhist family in 1932, Paik had a fraught relationship with Buddhism, always believing the religion was backwards and fatalistic. This critical perspective only intensified with the Japanese occupation, as Paik saw how Buddhists could be corrupted by political ideology. [14] Growing in Japanese-occupied Korea, Paik was forbidden from speaking his own language, with Japanese Zen monks playing a leading role in war propaganda. This cold-eyed awareness allowed Paik to bring down Buddha to Earth, as if Buddhism was to have any relevance of electronic superhighway, it would not be able to float within a glorified detached realm. Thus, to Paik, Buddha would have to “engage the screen, the video camera and the rapid flow of information and image – the material realities of the day”. [14]
Not only this, the Korean War forced Paik's family to flee to Hong Kong and eventually to Tokyo in 1956, where he would graduate with a degree in aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. [15] His continued aesthetic studies at West Germany was the focal point of his career, as meeting American avant-garde composer John Cage and his inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas influenced Paik's entry into unique video and installation art. [16]
This 1976 version, like all other renditions, is an installation art with a television monitor, video camera, painted wooden Buddha, tripod, and plinth. The Buddha's dimensions are 75cm x 36cm x 36cm whilst the TV monitor is relatively smaller at 32cm x 32cm x 32cm. The Buddha statue is an old wooden Maitreya (Buddha of the future) from John Kaldor, an Australian philanthropist's collection. [17] In essence, as the Buddha stares into the spherical TV screen, the camera records this, looping it back to the monitor in real time as if the Buddha watches a mirror.
Other key features exemplify the meaning behind the piece. Paik rewires the television so that a single white line bisects a dark screen, resulting in a non-static image as the light from the cathode ray tubes are constantly in motion. Here, Paik’s revolution was to break the sanctity of the screen as the screen represents one-way communication of the broadcast. As Paik believed television is a dictatorial medium where we simply sit and watch under its authority, he tried to establish what a democracy means; an equal platform for all. [14] Like how every child who discovers the magic of dragging a magnet across a TV screen and thus alters a seemingly immovable force, Paik devotes his work towards breaking the control of imprisoning technology. The mound on which the Buddha rests on remains as another important factor of TV Buddha, as it is very similar to a stupa, which along with the Buddha itself, is one of the most important visual forms in Buddhism. [13] As a grave mound, the stupa symbolizes the complete release from seemingly endless round of births and deaths, because when Buddha, a fully enlightened being dies, he will never be born again. This reaching of an ultimate and transcendent state ties back to the importance of stillness, as the Buddha is liberated from technological manipulation through continuous contemplation of oneself. [13] This feature extends further, as Paik Nam June’s foundation states the appearance of the audience when leaning towards the screen to watch what the Buddha sees as the most prominent aspect of the installation art. By looking at their own appearance, the audience gets a glimpse of their digital existence. This mirrored reflection represents humanity’s complete immersion with the digital world, as an individual’s online version has become integral to one’s identity. [18]
Critics realize Paik’s influence on the artistic community through his work with video media, as they credit Paik with recognizing TV’s pervasiveness in which it makes it almost invisible; “he sought to create alternatives to TV’s capacity to lull, to entertain and to make passive consumers of its audience”. [19] By challenging television’s power, Paik transformed video image into a way of redefining restrictions of sculpture and installation art. Especially as the founder of the term electronic superhighway, Paik's recognition of corrosive possibilities of technology on our sense of self, community, and faith inspired resistance to mass media as undirectional, hoping citizens of the digital age to take back some control. [20]
Even regarding Buddhism, Paik is praised, especially in relation to one of the religion’s core questions on how to face the suffering of the world. Critics describe Paik as living with that question every moment, as experimentation was his art; his relentless, optimistic quest to expand the limits and definition of communication were his answer to suffering. [14] Particularly by forcing Buddha to be trapped in a closed-circuit loop of his own reflection on a TV screen, Paik questions modern vanity and society’s self-absorption driven by mass culture and technology, encouraging everyone to find more individuality in this robotic reality. [14]
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works either streamed online, or distributed as video tapes, or on DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.
Nam June Paik was a Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has increased in popularity as digital video production technology has become more readily accessible. Today, video installation is ubiquitous and visible in a range of environments—from galleries and museums to an expanded field that includes site-specific work in urban or industrial landscapes. Popular formats include monitor work, projection, and performance. The only requirements are electricity and darkness.
A video synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and "clean up and enhance" or "distort" live television camera imagery. The synthesizer creates a wide range of imagery through purely electronic manipulations. This imagery is visible within the output video signal when this signal is displayed. The output video signal can be viewed on a wide range of conventional video equipment, such as TV monitors, theater video projectors, computer displays, etc.
Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening it to a "new paintbrush." Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.
Doug Aitken is an American multidisciplinary artist. Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. He currently lives in Venice, California, and New York City.
"Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" was the first international satellite "installation" by Nam June Paik, a South Korean-born American artist often credited with inventing video art. It occurred on New Year's Day, 1984.
A video sculpture is a type of video installation that integrates video into an object, environment, site or performance. The nature of video sculpture is that it utilizes the material of video in an innovative way in space and time, different from the standard traditional narrative screening where the video has a beginning and end.
Marc Lafia is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and information architect. He is known for his contributions to the intersection of art, film, and technology. Lafia’s works explore computation and the impact of network culture on media, communication, and the self.
Paul Sermon was born 23 March 1966, in Oxford, England. Since September 2013 he has worked as Professor of Visual Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a resource for video and media art. An advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. EAI has supported the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.
Chris Meigh-Andrews is a video artist, writer and curator from Essex, England, whose work often includes elements of renewable energy technology in tandem with moving image and sound. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Moving image Research (CMIR) at the University of the West of England.
Lee Seung-taek is a Korean interdisciplinary artist. He is a sculptor, an installation artist, and a performance artist—conceptualizing in the notion of "anti-concept" or "anti-art" in the Korean art scene.
John G. Hanhardt is an American author, art historian, and curator of film and media arts. Hanhardt was the Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he developed exhibitions, collections, and archives in film and the media arts. He is considered to be one of the leading scholars on video artist Nam June Paik.
John Sanborn is a key member of the second wave of American video artists that includes Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler. Sanborn's body of work spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of MTV music/videos and interactive art to digital media art of today.
Jake Elwes is a British media artist, hacker, radical faerie, neuroqueer, and researcher. Their practice is the exploration of artificial intelligence (AI), queer theory and technical biases. They are known for using AI to create art in mediums such as video, performance and installation. Their work on queering technology addresses issues caused by the normative biases of artificial intelligence.
Kim Soun-Gui is a South Korean multimedia artist based in France. Kim was born in Buyeo, South Korea. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University in 1971, she moved to France to pursue further study in semiology, philosophy, and aesthetics. She began teaching in 1973 as a professor at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille from 1974 until 2000, and then the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Art, Dijon from 2001-2011.
Kim Haemin is a media artist currently living and working in Seoul, South Korea. One of the only Korean artists who has remained active in media art from the late 1980s to the present, Kim has consistently pursued video installations that bridge experience of virtuality and physical reality, often in ways that, according to the art theorist Min Huijeong, stood outside contemporaneous conceptions of video as a purely imaginary or cognitive realm.
The More, the Better, alternatively referred to as Dadaikseon (Korean: 다다익선), is a video sculpture created by Nam June Paik for the purpose of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art during the 1988 Summer Olympics. The sculpture consists of a tower measuring 8.5 meters in height and 11 meters in diameter, adorned entirely with an impressive arrangement of 1,003 cathode ray tube (CRT) television monitors. The work still stands in the rotunda of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.
Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, commonly referred to as Electronic Superhighway, is an art installation created by Nam June Paik in 1995. Since 2006, the work has been on display in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C. The large video artwork is composed of over 300 television sets, neon tubing, and 50 DVD players, which form a map of the United States. The map contains video clips that Paik associated with each state. Some of the states display images that are commonly associated with them, while others play video clips of people and scenes that are more thought-provoking.