26 - Gustav Peichl

Gustav Peichl (Vienna 1928 – 2019 Vienna), *Medienturm Berlin*, 1988, xerograph enhanced with colored pencil, signed, dated, and titled in pencil at the bottom edge, with a label from the architectural firm Gustav Peichl, Vienna, on the reverse, 29.7 x 40.2 cm, mounted on backing board and set under glass and a mat in a white anodized aluminum frame, overall size: 44 x 44 cm. Limited edition of 270 On the occasion of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the internationally renowned video artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006) designed an 18.5-meter-tall tower for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, entirely covered with an impressive array of 1,003 cathode-ray-tube television monitors. The artwork, titled “Dadaikseon” (The More, the Better), was intended to illustrate the diversity and rapid advances in television technology. In that same year, 1988, Berlin began considering a joint bid by both parts of the then-divided city to host the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics, respectively. Peichl, who had also made a name for himself as the cartoonist “Ironimus,” evidently drew inspiration for his vision of the “Berlin Media Tower” from the artwork in South Korea that was attracting so much attention at the time and, in turn, proposed a tower for Berlin.