Created for Paik’s groundbreaking Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (Wuppertal, Germany, 1963), Zen for TV questioned established presentation modes for the televisual medium, forcing the viewer to reflect not on the consumption of moving imagery but rather on the materiality of the electronic transmission itself. In Zen for TV the vertical deflection ceases to function in the television tube and thus produces nothing more than a horizontal line. Encountering the broken monitor, Paik simply turned it on its side, making the line vertical, and in the process achieved a reduction and stillness characteristic of Zen aesthetics. A condition that might have signified non-functionality was recomposed and endowed with new meaning—an exceptional chance operation in Cagean terms that paralleled Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Paik’s acceptance of chance led to Zen for TV’s existence; it was not (pre)conceived in any conventional sense but rather was an adaptation to a given situation. Here the creative process is contingent and only affirmed as a purposeful act after the fact. —AG

Image: Courtesy Lothar Schnepf. Photographer: Lothar Schnepf. M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong, © 2015 Nam June Paik Estate.