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Sistine Chapel is an audio-visual collage of new footage and samples from Paik’s past videos, which featured many of his friends, collaborators, and public figures. It was Paik’s own way of summarizing his artistic career with video. The film installation consists of fast-paced and overlapping images that completely cover the gallery walls and ceiling—one of the most under-appreciated parts of architecture, according to Paik. With its electronic visuals and booming audio, interspersed with periods of silence, the immersive installation stands in stark contrast to the experience of its namesake.
One of Nam June Paik’s most iconic works, TV Buddha expresses the contrasts and parallels between East and West and between technology and spirituality in a very simple and direct way. A CCTV camera films a Buddha statue, which Paik bought from an antique store. Its static, silent image appears live on a round TV set, inspired by popular sci-fi imagery. Here the Buddha is both the viewer and the viewed image, mirroring our own experience as mass media consumers.
In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).
Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.
The influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (whose father Louis was a poet in his own right) and performance artist/sculptor Allan Kaprow (whose father is a high-powered lawyer) are the sons who struggle with and against the influences of these patriarchal figures.
Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments”, is a work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. The second part, produced by Paik and Shigeko Kubota, further queries the relationship between everyday gestures and formal notions of dance.
In Missa of Zen, a TV screen, filmed from an extremely oblique angle, appears as a ghostly, flickering sliver at the side of a darkened frame. The images playing across its surface are rendered abstract by the perspective: we witness the transmission of information, but at a great distance. Isolated in silence and darkness, the television set slips into the realm of the unheimlich — an uncanny object, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Situating mediated America at the crossroads of missa — Latin for the Christian mass — and Zen Buddhism, Paik highlights the connections between mass culture and the transcendental.
TV Garden is Paik’s imagined future landscape where technology is an integral part of the natural world. Placing television sets amongst live plants, he creates an environment in which the seemingly distinct realms of electronics and nature coexist. His approach follows the Buddhist philosophy that everything is interdependent. It also suggests that technology is not in conflict with nature but an extension of the human realm.
Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. "Beckett wrote 'Waiting for Godot' twenty years ago, but instead of Godot, TV commercial after TV commercial arrived". This early example of Paik's use of appropriated television imagery as pop cultural artifact was originally created for a performance piece of the same name, which featured Charlotte Moorman and her cello.
Magnet TV is an early example of Nam June Paik’s “prepared televisions,” in which he altered the television image or its physical casing. This work, which was featured in Paik’s first solo exhibition in New York, consists of a seventeen-inch black-and-white set on which an industrial-sized magnet rests. The magnetic field interferes with the television’s electronic signals, distorting the broadcast image into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved. Paik’s radical action undermines the seemingly inviolable power of broadcast television by transforming the TV set into a sculpture, one whose moving image is created by chance procedures and can be manipulated at will.