Nam June Paik
Tate Modern, London

Retrospectives of artists working primarily with contemporary technology offer a unique opportunity to say with some conviction whether or not the oeuvre on display has genuine artistic merit. By the time of its showing, the novelty of a new technology will have been stripped away, enabling a clear-eyed judgment of the work as either nostalgic kitsch, or something more engaged, universal, and timeless.

Sook-Kyung Lee, the curator of Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Tate Modern, may have had this in mind while putting together this exhibition of the late video-art pioneer, because it opened with two works that are aesthetically enduring, if technologically, and perhaps conceptually, outdated. In the first gallery was TV Buddha (1974), in which an 18th-century wooden sculpture of the spiritual figure sits facing an equally rotund TV set, showing a closed-circuit image of the statue. The Buddha is intended to be both “the viewer and the viewed image,” says the adjacent caption—a statement that seems as conceptually rudimentary as the small, low-quality screen is redundant. Yet, while most conceptual or technology-based art arguably won’t stand the test of time, TV Buddha does because it maintains the fundamentals of symmetry, simplicity, and harmony; for all of these things, it is ultimately beautiful. One finds a similar example in TV Garden (1974–77/2002), composed of differently sized monitors scattered at a variety of angles among live plants. Here, the contrast of rich, dark green with the neon colors on-screen achieves a composition that again, regardless of medium or concept, has an enduring aesthetic value.