DeCordova Rolls Out Video Sculpture by Nam June Paik: Requiem for the 20th Century

LINCOLN, MA — DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is excited to announce the installation of its first outdoor new media artwork. Requiem for the 20th Century—created by Korean-born video art pioneer Nam June Paik—combines two of the most significant inventions of the last 100 years: the automobile and the television.

Requiem for the 20th Century is Paik’s only extant outdoor sculpture. It consists of a 1936 Chrysler Air Flow sedan, which the artist painted silver and outfitted with four 13” television monitors, three 9” television monitors, a video disc player, as well as an audio disc player. Each of the monitors plays a 25-minute continuous video loop of classical Paik images— personalities, milestone events, and broadcasting benchmarks—which span his entire career as the “founder” of video art. In fact, the video loop constitutes a compendium of Paik’s work from the 1960s through 1997. While the video images play across the car windows, Mozart’s Requiem plays softly from speakers within the car for a total audio-visual experience.

The Chrysler sculpture was originally created as part of a temporary installation Paik completed in Germany for “Sculpture: Projects in Münster, 1997,” which included 32 antique cars from the 1920s through the 1950s. Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic/information based society. For Paik, the automobile and the television figure as the most significant inventions of the century, as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism. As Paik himself put it, only half-jokingly, “Parking is the most serious problem confronting twentieth-century man.”

Requiem for the 20th Century is located on the central plaza of the 35-acre DeCordova Sculpture Park, between the Museum and the Museum School buildings. It is protected from the elements by a canopy designed and fabricated specifically for this site by Shade Structures Birdair. Birdair has designed and built shade structures—highly durable tensile membranes—in some 30 different countries around the world, including the performing arts stage in Boston’s inner harbor.

General Information

DeCordova Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm and on selected Monday holidays. General admission during Museum hours is $9 for adults, $6 for senior citizens, students, and youth ages 6–12. Children age 5 and under, Lincoln residents, and Active Duty Military Personnel and their dependents are admitted free. The Sculpture Park is open year round during daylight hours. The Store @ DeCordova and the School Gallery are open Monday through Thursday, 9:30 am to 7:30 pm, Friday through Saturday, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm, and Sunday 11:30 am to 5:30 pm. The Café @ DeCordova is open Tuesday from noon to 3 pm, and Wednesday through Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. Free guided public tours of the Museum's main galleries take place every Thursday at 1 and Sunday at 2 pm. Free tours of the Sculpture Park are given on Saturday and Sunday at 1 pm from May to October. Visit www.decordova.org or call 781/259-8355 for further information.

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