TV Buddha

 

TV Buddha, 1974

American Masters episode on Nam June Paik references Buddhism throughout.  There's an article about his fraught relationship on American Masters here.

If the Buddha were here today, what would he do with television?

Nam June Paik answers with his famous TV Buddha installation of 1974: a statue of Buddha sits in meditation facing a television set; on top of the set, a closed-circuit camera points at the Buddha and feeds a live image of it into the screen. The work is simple and funny, yet, like Paik’s best work, allows multiple and contradicting interpretations

Is the Buddha lost in its own image, entranced as we are by the magic of the closed circuit, a forerunner to the selfie?

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Is the piece a joke, cutting the gravitas attached to Buddhism? Or is it a reverential update to Buddhist art, Paik’s answer to the brush masters and sculptors of the past?

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One of the main questions of Buddhism is how to face the suffering of the world. Paik seemed to live with that question in every moment, driving himself into endless experiments and collaborations, generating countless works in many media. His answer, unlike many artists, was not in beauty— “newness is more important than beauty,” he said, and it’s hard to call many of his works beautiful, or even pleasant. Experimentation was his art; his relentless, optimistic quest to expand the limits and definition of communication were his answer to suffering.

Paik’s landmark Good Morning Mr. Orwell, a live variety show of avant-garde art that featured friends like Merce Cunningham and Laurie Anderson, broadcast on New Year’s Day of 1984 and reached an estimated 25 million people across America and South Korea, Europe and the Eastern Bloc. Despite technical issues, Paik considered the project a success. If only artists, rather than nations and corporations, could harness the TV’s power, perhaps we could use it not to control, but to astonish, to show us new possibilities.

If the Buddha were here today, what would he do with television? Paik’s TV Buddha shows us that he’s already here, both watching and broadcasting into the screen. What to make of this broadcast Buddha, and how to use that screen to face our suffering—Paik leaves that for us to figure out.

In the main page about the episode: "Avant-garde artist Nam June Paik saw a future in which “everybody will have his own TV channel.” With the advent of social media and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Paik’s vision of the future looks startlingly like the present."