Nam June Paik
Triangle: Video Buddha and Video Thinker, 1976/91

Artist
Nam June Paik

Title
Triangle: Video Buddha and Video Thinker, 1976/91

Year of creation
1976/91

Technology and dimensions
closed circuit installation, assembled

Year of acquisition
1993

The closed-circuit installation Triangle: Buddha and Video Thinker consists of four television sets, two video cameras, a Buddha sculpture cast in bronze by Paik and a scaled-down bronze replica of Rodin's sculpture Le Penseur, 1880. It is an authorized by Paik Version from 1991 based on the original concept from 1976. This concept was an extension of the closed-circuit installation TV Buddha, 1974, in which a Buddha statue was placed opposite a television, which recorded it from a camera behind the television Image of the statue shows. Triangle is a significantly expanded variant of this work, in which both a “video Buddha” and a “video Rodin” are included in the tautological circle of images. Tripods, cameras, televisions and a confusing tangle of cables indicate the technical conditions of the closed-circuit installation. While two of the televisions are set up in front of the sculptures and the full figures are shown on the screen, the other two televisions are at an acute angle to each other and only show the heads of the sculptures in a confusing enlargement. The images presented on a triangular surface move in a closed, symbolically interpretable cycle in which not only the mediality but also the associated materiality and size of the objects change: “Video art does not imitate nature, not its appearance or its material , but rather its internal 'time structure'...namely the process of GETTING OLD (a certain kind of irreversibility).” (Nam June Paik, 1976).

Michael Leilach