Cathy's Art Diary

Dull exhibition at Tate Modern looking at the life and work of the Korean artist Nam June Paik. In some ways this show was very innovative but I found the works needed such long explanations that I found I switched off and didn’t engage. It’s a while since I went and reading my notes back I find that very little of it has stayed with me. A lot of it represented performance art and I find that is difficult to demonstrate in a static exhibition. I did quite like “TV Room” a room full of plants and tv screens and the candle in a TV shown here. Closes 8 February 2020 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Quirky exhibition at Tate Modern of work by the pioneer of media art, Nam June Paik. These works combined images on screens with objects, often those used to make them or deliver them. OK that’s not a great way of describing it so have an example, two old televisions showing images of famous Nixon broadcasts with magnetic coils in front of them which distorted the image. Oddly enough he looked more sincere when distorted. I also liked “Three eggs” which included a an egg being filmed, it’s image on a TV and a real egg in a TV box. Although these works were from the 1960s they felt very fresh and quirky. I mush prefer them to acres of humourless contemporary video art!