Boston Gems #2 – TV Buddha & Global Groove, Nam June Paik

TV_Buddha
Global Groove – Nam June Paik

A version of the classic TV Buddha, one of several made by Nam June Paik, can be presently seen at MIT’s List Visual Art Center, as well as other key video works in Sounding the Subject. Sitting on his own in the otherwise sparse room the Buddha views a TV screen displaying an image of himself that is arrived at from a camera pointing at his head from behind the TV. The video loop becomes great metaphor for the idea of self contemplation and meditation (and the flow of consciousness being conscious). Even though the TV signal is live and time-based recording events occur, the final image of the Buddha is frozen and timeless. I like the fact that if you stand behind the Buddha you appear on the screen as part of what the Buddha can meditate upon. So deep in contemplation, however, the Buddha fails to notice anything that could possibly remove him from his infinite loop of contemplation.

Video Trajectories, in a space nearby, is a videotheque collection of early American video art shown on DVD players including works, among others, by Mariko Mori, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Pipilotti Rist. But again it is the June Paik piece, Global Groove, that draws me in the most with its mish mash of psychedelia, mysticism, John Cage, Burlesque strippers and advertisements of the day mixed together in garish colours and using effects from the Paik-Abe video synthesizer. The 29min film completed in 1973 has a fantastic voice-over, ‘This is participation TV, this is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any television station on the planet and the TV guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book’.

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