TV Garden, 1974 (Version 2002) video
installation with monitors and plants
in „Moving Pictures“, Guggenheim Foundation , New York, 2002
A living television landscape that has to be fed or watered: in Paik’s works,
it almost seems as though the electronic medium had become inextricably
united with natural phenomena. While earlier performances and actions
involved rooms, viewers, and accidental sounds, Paik now expanded his
oeuvre to include the virtual world of television. His work
TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), made for his muse and partner
Charlotte Moorman, showed that media images envelope people like a second
skin. Moorman was a key figure on the New York cultural scene of the
sixties and seventies, attracting international attention both with her
performances and as the organizer of the legendary
New York Avant-Garde Festival. Following his move to New York in 1964, she
began working closely together with Paik, whom she had already met in
Germany. A classically trained musician, Moorman was a fascinating
personality: regardless of whether she was playing the cello on a trapeze
or making music with robots in performances, she always wore a formal
strapless concert gown and exuded tremendous dignity in spite all of her
eccentricity.
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The scandal that her arrest was to unleash following the
nude performance of Paik’s Opera Sexotronique of 1967
deflects attention away from the fact that Paik’s performances were about
much more than merely introducing sex into the hallowed spheres of
Electronic art music. TV Bra for Living Sculpture consisted of two
tiny picture tubes in Plexiglas cases that were attached to the upper body
with transparent plastic straps.The small screens on Moorman’s breasts
showed running television programs, art videos, and viewers filmed live by
a camera. Describing this work, Paik said: ”By using TV as a bra … the
most intimate belonging of the human being, we will demonstrate the human
use of technology and also stimulate the viewers NOT for something mean,
but stimulate their fantasy to look for the new, imaginative, and
humanistic ways of using our technology…”
At the time of the
student revolts, when many women were busy burning their own bras, the
six-pound video bra must have seemed monstrous indeed. At the same time,
it demonstratively liberated its wearer from the power of the images
infiltrating the consciousness of millions of people on a daily basis
through the mass medium of television. Moorman wore her media images over
her breasts instead of carrying them inside her head. In an act of irony
with deeper meaning, Paik robbed television of its ethereal quality and
used it irreverently as a robust material for making music, painting and
sculpting, or designing furniture. As in the performances of the Fluxus
movement, improvisation played an important role in the development of
certain works of art. Thus, the TV Bed (1972) came about after
Charlotte Moorman felt too weak after an operation to perform. And so Paik
designed a bed made of six television sets arranged together to form a
rectangle with their screens facing upwards. Already in 1965, he predicted
that ”someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semi-
conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.”
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