Nam June Paik
Kölner Dom als Video-Skulptur
1985
© Nam June Paik ; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media, photo: Franz Wahmhof
- Artist / Artist group
- Nam June Paik
- Title
- Kölner Dom als Video-Skulptur
- Year
- 1985
- Category
- Drawing
- Material / Technique
- rollable school map mounted on two round wooden rods, wax crayons
- Dimensions / Duration
- 67 x 85 cm
- Collection
- Loan of Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation
- Description
- On a colorful classroom wall chart of Cologne Cathedral—a teaching aid still widely used well into the twentieth century—Nam June Paik drew numerous small television sets across the façade of the sacred building using wax crayon. The cartoon-like monitors, with V-shaped antennas and stick-figure faces that laugh, cry, or stare blankly, recur throughout his drawings. This altered school map served as a draft for a video installation that Paik proposed to Sony on the occasion of Photokina in Cologne. The project was rejected. Nevertheless, the work marks the starting point of the large-scale installations composed of hundreds of televisions that would define Paik’s later practice, such as the monumental video sculpture »The More, The Better« (1988) or »Turtle« (1993). Already in works like »TV Buddha« (1974), Paik had placed technology and religion into dialogue by turning the television screen into an object of contemplation. With his monumental conception of Cologne Cathedral built from hundreds of monitors, he again addressed the relationship between mass media technology and spirituality. The cathedral becomes a “media cathedral”: where stained-glass windows once made the divine perceptible through light, flickering screens now generate a new, profane liturgy. Paik thus raises the question of whether the flood of television images has displaced spiritual experience—and whether electronic mass media might also open the possibility of new forms of community and transcendence.
Author
Margit
Rosen
Images
Nam June Paik, »Kölner Dom als Video-Skulptur«, 1985, rollable school map mounted on two round wooden rods, wax crayons, Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation.© Nam June Paik ; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media, photo: Franz Wahmhof