Nam June Paik — TV Buddha

1974

Artists: Nam June Paik · Year: 1974 · Medium: Closed-circuit video sculpture — Buddha statue contemplating its own closed-circuit image on television · Substrate: Antique Buddha statue (varies by installation), video camera, television monitor, closed-circuit feed · Place: Amsterdam, Netherlands / New York, USA · Institution: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (first installation) Nam June Paik installed TV Buddha for the first time at Galerie Bonino in New York in September 1974: an 18th-century wooden Buddha figure, seated, facing a live television monitor; a closed-circuit video camera aimed at the Buddha and feeding its image to the monitor in real time. The Buddha, continuously, watched a live image of itself. The circuit had no other input. There was no tape. There was no edit. The work was the loop. TV Buddha is the single most-reproduced image in the video-art canon. It has been installed, in various versions, in nearly every major museum that collects media art — the Stedelijk, the Whitney, the Smithsonian, the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin — because the work succinctly makes three arguments at once. First, it is a work about contemplation and surveillance: the Buddha, immobile, contemplates its own image, which is also the image a surveillance camera would send. East and West, meditation and closed-circuit television, collapse into one apparatus. Second, it is a work about the live feed as a new aesthetic category. In 1974 the closed-circuit camera-and-monitor pair was only a decade old as a consumer product. Artists were still working out what the live feed did that a taped image did not. Paik isolated the answer: the live feed is a mirror that also introduces delay. A fraction of a second. A persistence. A difference between the world and its instant rebroadcast. Third, it is a practical joke in the Fluxus tradition. Paik had purchased the Buddha figure in a Manhattan antique shop for $700; the entire rest of the work was a television and a camera. He described the piece, in a 1977 interview, as "a cheap meditation" and laughed when critics claimed it for Zen. Every subsequent video installation that uses a live feed, a delay loop, or a circuit of self-regard — Bruce Nauman's surveillance rooms, Dan Graham's delay installations, Bill Viola's early video works — rests on the TV Buddha diagram. Lore Paik was running out of money in the summer of 1974 and needed a new piece for the Bonino show on short notice. He bought the wooden Buddha at a dealer on Ninth Street on the way to the gallery, hooked up the camera and monitor himself, and opened the exhibition that evening. The figure was originally labeled by the gallery as a Joseon-dynasty Korean piece; later provenance research corrected it to a Japanese Edo-period carving. Paik owned it his whole life. After his 2006 death, his widow Shigeko Kubota kept the figure in their Mercer Street loft and would sometimes sit in the monitor's chair herself, reversing the circuit. The original Bonino Buddha is now in the Smithsonian. Paik made at least seven major variants and dozens of smaller ones; each uses a different found figure — a stone lion, a bronze boy, a plastic statuette — in the same fundamental loop. Sources • Hanhardt, John G. — Nam June Paik (Whitney, rev. 2015). • Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam — TV Buddha (object file, 1978 acquisition). • Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin — archive.