Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV opens with footage of the titular multimedia artist holding a microphone that’s connected to a television. A gorgeous loop of colored light is pictured floating on a black screen and slowly rotating. But as Paik chants and hums and sings and coughs into his microphone the light transforms in response to the sound. It’s a performance of a kind, resulting in something between looking at a painting and watching a very odd television show.
Amanda Kim’s directorial debut is a portrait of the Korean artist who is known as a video art pioneer and a cultural visionary who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway.” Nam June Paik’s father owned a textile firm and the artist grew up in one of Korea’s most prosperous families. He received an elite education in classical piano and Western music before earning his BA at Tokyo University, writing a thesis on composer Arnold Schoenberg. Paik was a leading light in the genre-bending Fluxus art movement where his works combining video, performance and music were emblematic of Fluxus’ focus on experimental art-making processes. He had a PhD in philosophy and was known to speak about ten different languages very badly — the film’s subtitle is a prime example of Paik-ish. Nam June Paik died in 2006 from complications resulting from a stroke he suffered in 1996.
Paik was studying music in Germany and hoping to make a career as a classical music composer before he saw a performance by John Cage 1958. Cage was an avant garde music pioneer whose works embraced everything from complete silence to pure noise. Paik felt he’d been transformed by Cage’s liberating embrace of radical sonic possibilities, and he referred to his life through 1957 as “B.C.” — before Cage. Paik and Cage became lifelong friends with the younger artist feeling that he’d found his creative father figure.
“Cage gave me the courage to be free,” Paik explains in a voice over in the film. “A license to kill.”
Kim presents Paik’s life and art chronologically, using voice over and narration, and pairing archival footage with original interviews of Paik’s friends and colleagues and assorted art experts. It’s a very traditional structure compared to her radical and eccentric subject and some critics have called the director out for her conventional approach. I understand where they’re coming from, but I also hate documentaries where the director inserts themselves between the audience and a fascinating subject. Kim’s first directorial effort is a straightforward affair, but I suspect that she made the right choice, giving viewers a calm and focused window into a life and a creative practice that was anything but.
Paik’s Exposition of Music – Electronic Television at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963 was a watershed. The show represented the first time that television sets were featured in an art gallery display, and the interactive nature of the works transformed visitors into artists who created new images on the screens by scrambling their signals by pressing foot switches. The show also featured altered pianos, tape machines and record players. Paik hung the head of a freshly slaughtered ox above the gallery entrance. The show confused contemporaneous critics, but is now recognized as the arrival of a giant of contemporary art.
Paik was one of the great artists of his generation and he’s a national hero in Korea. But he was always more than just an artist, and when Paik came to New York for the first time in the 1960s it was because of the city’s reputation as the global capital of broadcasting as much as its reputation as a visual art Mecca. Paik’s art asks questions about our relationship to technology and the aesthetics of technology. He predicted the internet era and foresaw how communication technologies would connect the whole world, but he wasn’t naive about it. He saw that these new tools could educate as well as deceive and divide people, as well as bringing them closer together. In our age of artificial intelligence, virulent algorithms and eroding digital privacy this film about an artist who liked to “make technology look ridiculous” feels timely and profound.
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV screens at the Belcourt as part of their Science on Screen series on Wednesday, April 26, at 8 p.m.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.