Serigraph and Silk Screen, 12 x 9 in.
University Museum of Contemporary Art, Gift of Robert Rauschenberg
UM 1997.1.20
This piece is organized around an advertisement from a 1944 science magazine that depicts a man and a woman watching television, accompanied by a text that poses three seemingly unrelated questions, the first of which suggests a future where every home has a television. Below the advertisement, Paik adds his own three questions, concerning the future of video media as an art form, drawing a parallel between the advent of entertainment television in the early-to-mid 20th century and the invention of video art in the early 1970s. This work is evidently self-referential, since Paik is recognized as the originator of the video-art genre, and participated in a movement of artists looked to the new-media technologies of the late twentieth century for alternative and sometimes disruptive means of self-expression.