Nam June Paik first came to prominence in the 1960s working alongside Europe's avant-garde artists. In the late 1960s he began working with television sets and televisual images, which had a profound influence on international art and the development of video art.
With TV cello 2000, Paik continued his interest in sound and video as distinctive aspects of his art. The cello, made up of television tubes encased in clear perspex cases to reveal their inner workings, is activated by a hallucinatory stream of images.
These images include footage of cellist and creative partner, Charlotte Moorman, spliced with images of archival Fluxus performances and iconic moments from twentieth-century history.
Densely layered, with witty intertextual references, these exuberant collages function as a stream of consciousness with music and electronic effects. As if tuning in on living room televisions around the world, Paik engages with global communication as a form of contemporary culture.
TV cello connects Paik's ephemeral performance works of the 1960s, represented in the Collection through documentary photographs, with his video assemblages and video works.
