Dimensions / 40.2×30.4cm
Medium / Black & white photograph on baryta paper

Taken by Manfred Montwé, this is a photograph of Prepared W.C., one of the works featured in Nam June Paik’s first solo show Exposition of Music – Electronic Television held in Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in March 1963. Paik suspended a mirror in front of a toilet and a plaster head upside down above it. If you sat on the toilet, the top of your head would touch that of the plaster, and if you looked at the mirror, you could observe four eyes looking back at you. He wrote in his 1965 score Symphony No.5 that “3rd JANUARY, 14.68 to 21.00.08: Read for seven hours Baudelaire’s collected works, on the Prepared W.C. sitting like this genius, here Peter BRÖTZMANN (Federal Republic of Germany) or start on the toilet The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) to read and only come out again, if you have them!!” Next to these sentences are a photograph of Peter Brötzmann sitting on the toilet of Prepared W.C. in Exposition of Music, and a newspaper clipping of the exhibition review from NRZ Wuppertaler Stadtnachrichten dated 15th March 1963.