Nam June Paik, TV Buddha, 1974
TV Buddha is one of Paik’s most well known pieces, perhaps due to the fact that the Buddha Statue can iconographically be easily identified and objected. Yet, Paik does something that defies the East v. West symbolism and moves towards the surface.
The Buddha statue is presented in a quiet meditation mudra, however the video camera is simultaneously recording the statue and displaying the image on the television screen . In this closed circuit loop, the buddha is sitting opposite his own projected image, disallowing his transcendence from his own physicality. Instead he is caught in his own reflection, doomed to stay on the surface of reality.
Media Theorist Marshall McLuhan, stated in his seminal 1964 book, Extensions of Man.
“It is the continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of Subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves.”
Like Zen for TV, the TV Buddha denied the image the act of transcendence, instead it captured it in an entropic stasis.
Real Fish, Live Fish, 1982
Try to guess which screen is the Real Fish, and which one is the Live Fish? Let me describe them briefly before you guess. One of the televisions tubes was replaced withan aquarium while the other television displays the recorded images of the fish in the tank. I had to re-read the description for the piece several times (in different books) to finally grasp the corresponding titles. The television on the left is the “Live fish”, while the television on the right is titled “real fish”.
In this work, Paik plays with the notion of the word “Live” in relation to the medias common usage. Without even thinking, most people would automatically refer to someone who is broadcast in real time as being “LIVE”, whereas in this piece. The in this piece, the world live operates in opposition of death, rather then time.
Paik was playing with, what Baudrillard would later coin the simulacrum- or a replication where the difference between the original and the copy becomes almost impossible to identify. However, because of the technology, there is a noticeable timelapse between the movements between the “live” fish and their images of the screen. This discrepancy in time creates a slippage between the meaning of the word “real.” If the images of the live fish are named “real”, but their movements are followed by those of the “live” fish, then what exactly is Real (with a capital R)?
Clip from Video Fish, 1975, Color Televisions with Aquariums. First shown at the famous Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.
Are the experiences that involve all of our senses more real then those which only engage one? As seen in “Real Fish/ Live Fish“, both the live and the real fish can only be experienced visually, since the aquarium and its water act as a buffer from sensorial information. Neither the real, nor the live fish can be engaged further then their visual information. Thus these two televisions no longer exist in a hierarchy of original and copy, but as parallel realities.
