Found some footage of an installation of the T.V Buddha piece by Nam June Paik. Originally exhibited in 1974. I really like this amateur documentation, the guy waiving in the background of this Youtube clip somehow draws out the sense of humour which I think is often overlooked when people consider this work, which was born from the same mischievous ‘hacker’ spirit as all Paik’s work.
Beyond this though, the work is literally about eastern philosophy meeting western media. And statuesque idols of old colliding with ephemeral electronic images in the present, unfortunately the light hearted almost kitsch appeal of the work to contemporary audiences, might overshadow a more serious consideration of what Paik was exploring here.
What is it about this narcissistic Buddha statue that is interesting?
One answer to that might come from considering Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase. The Mirror Phase , occurs in child development roughly between six and eighteen months. This is believed by Lanan to be an important part in our social development. In the Mirror phase the child first discovers an ex-centralized image of them self, an image that relates to the self, but that does not contain the self or provide any solutions to the problems posed by the physical world. The reflected image can not resolve the search for identity that is sought, and a sense of uncertainty soon fills the void between the embodied sense of self and the reflected one, a crack thus becomes apparent in our general sense of self awareness. And so the child’s first awareness of his/her own image is an awareness characterised by a split. This is supposedly when the need for language arrives, language being a tool to fill the gap between the embodied sense of self and the ex-centric mirrored self in symbolic terms. Based on Lacan’s ideas then we can view language itself as an interface that performs a functional mediation between both our centric and ex-centric notions of self.
‘The Human being has a special relationship with his own image – a relation of gap, of alienating tension’ Jacques Lacan The Seninar. Book II. Pg 323
Interestingly Paik’s T.V Buddha video work was produced as a spontaneous gap-filler for an empty space in his fourth show in the Galeria Bonino, New York.
Maybe Paik did not fill the gap but was instead filled by the gap, and in closed circuit video saw something that interacts with the gap fundamental in our sense of self awareness.
Paik’s T.V Buddha is like a sad joke, as the statue Buddha attempts to stare through the screen into infinity his vision is blocked by a symbolic reminder of his own physical situation in the world, the T.V in it’s efforts to exert it’s own physical statuesque presence in imitation of the Buddha can only fill the void within itself by an ephemeral imitation of superficial appearances . The two entities become entangled and consumed by each other.
TV Buddha (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture. image from http://www.paikstudios.com
Art Brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An Artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes fulplay in the life of phantasy. 
“A general tendency of our mental apparatus, which can be traced back to the economic principle of saving expenditure (of energy) seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold onto the sources of pleasure at our disposal, and in the difficulty with which we renounce them. With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought- activity was split off; it was kept free from reality testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.”
‘Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history, Bourguse families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the families status, where as today the family album of photographs verifies the individuals existence; it’s documentary record of his record development from infancy onwards provides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the ‘many narcissistic uses’ that Sontag attributes to the camera ‘self servalence’ ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self scrutiny, but because it renders the sense of self hood dependant upon the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world’ 
‘In fact the cult of intimacy originates not in the assertion of personality but in it’s collapse. Poets and Novelists today, far from glorifying the self, chronicle it’s disintegration.’ 
”These considerations help us to see how psychological defences against seperation anxiety – against early feelings of helplessness and dependence – can be elaborated in human culture. One way to deny our dependence on nature (on mother’s) is to invent technologies designed to make ourselves masters of nature. Technology, when it is conceived in this way, embodies an attitude toward nature diametrically opposed to the explanatory attitude, as Klein calls it. It expresses a collective revolt against the limitations of the human condition. It appeals to the residual belief that we can bend the world to our desires, harness nature to our own purposes, and achieve a state of complete self-sufficiency. This Faustian view of technology has been a powerful force in western history, reaching it’s climax in the industrial revolution with it’s remarkable gains in productivity, and in the even more remarkable advances promised by the post-industrial information explosion.” 
‘When art, religion and finally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality, the banality of pseudo-self awareness becomes so overwhelming that men finally lose the capacity to envision any release at all except in total nothingness, blankness.’ 
‘our culture’s indifference to the past – which easily shades over into active hostility and rejection – furnishes the most telling proof of that culture’s bankruptcy. The prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche and also from an inability to ground our needs in the experience of satisfaction and contentment. Instead of drawing on our own experience we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied. ‘as people become apt in learning how to need’
