Bob Hope
Date/ 2001
Artist(Credit Line)/ Nam June Paik
Classification/ Sculpture
Dimensions / 141×116×33cm
Medium / 2 CRT TVs, 3 LCD monitors, radios & CRT TV’s cases, 1-channel video, color, silent
Bob Hope was a popular comedian, actor, singer, dancer and author, and made appearances in different fields including radio and television programs, movies and theaters. Paik made a series of works featuring such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart, David Bowie, Lauran Bacall and Marilyn Monroe as well as Hope. This is derived from Paik’s consistent interest from the 1970s in the power of mass media, the media consumption of images, the boundary between high art and popular art. In a broadcast program produced by ‘Cable Soho,’ the artists’ collective in New York, in 1984, we can see the artist Jaime Davidovich infiltrating a press conference with Hope and asking a question about video art and Paik. Hope did not know about these at all at that time; however, he expressed his positive views on a television of the future to be developed by experimental artists, and wished to become part of the future. As if to respond to this, Paik’s Bob Hope transforms Hope, the embodiment of the American television culture, into a kind of robot that is the past and the future of Hope at once
Medium / 2 CRT TVs, 3 LCD monitors, radios & CRT TV’s cases, 1-channel video, color, silent
Bob Hope was a popular comedian, actor, singer, dancer and author, and made appearances in different fields including radio and television programs, movies and theaters. Paik made a series of works featuring such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart, David Bowie, Lauran Bacall and Marilyn Monroe as well as Hope. This is derived from Paik’s consistent interest from the 1970s in the power of mass media, the media consumption of images, the boundary between high art and popular art. In a broadcast program produced by ‘Cable Soho,’ the artists’ collective in New York, in 1984, we can see the artist Jaime Davidovich infiltrating a press conference with Hope and asking a question about video art and Paik. Hope did not know about these at all at that time; however, he expressed his positive views on a television of the future to be developed by experimental artists, and wished to become part of the future. As if to respond to this, Paik’s Bob Hope transforms Hope, the embodiment of the American television culture, into a kind of robot that is the past and the future of Hope at once
