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The documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, which explores the groundbreaking artist’s life and work, is like nothing Paik ever would have made himself. It’s far too straightforward and chronological, far too concerned with presenting things in a clear and comprehensive fashion — whereas Paik spent most of his career seriously messing things up, whether he was doing it with musical instruments, television sets or live TV broadcasts distorted through time and space.
But that doesn’t mean director Amanda Kim’s first feature isn’t worth a look. For anyone interested in the origins of what we now call video art, not to mention mass media and the internet, it’s essential viewing. Paik was a true visionary who foresaw the virtual world we now live in, and Kim’s film chronicles how he channeled that vision through madcap sculptures and installations that took technology to places it was never meant to go. Where most people saw circuits, wires, screens and cathode-ray tubes, Paik saw abstractions, possibilities and pixilated images of the sublime.
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Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
Director: Amanda Kim
1 hour 47 minutes
Kim, who previously worked at Vice TV, dutifully retraces Paik’s roller coaster-like trajectory — beginning with his early days as a Korean immigrant in Munich, where he studied music and was an admirer of Arnold Schönberg. In 1958 he attended a performance by composers John Cage and David Tudor that would change his life, opening him up to the possibilities of experimentation not only in music, where he chose to smash instruments as much as play them, but in art as well.
For a show in the early 1960s he employed television sets for the first time, but nobody seemed to care. Paik decided to relocate to New York, arriving in a city ripe with young and bold creators — including members of the Fluxus movement who saw themselves more as saboteurs than artists. Living hand-to-mouth in downtown Manhattan (one archival letter shows a weekly food budget consisting mostly of tuna cans), Paik rubbed shoulders with burgeoning talents who belonged to the artistic avant-garde: Jonas Mekas, Merce Cunningham, George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys and Cage, who remained a lifelong friend and supporter.
What separated Paik from the others was his obsession with new technology, especially the possibilities that television, then America’s most popular form of entertainment, offered for an artist willing to twist, distort and deviate TV from its typical usage. He made sculptures out of old sets, rewired televisions so he could play them like synthesizers, or built a TV brassiere for cellist and regular collaborator Charlotte Moorman to wear during one legendary performance.
That particular show would get Paik arrested for indecency by the NYPD, while critics from The New York Times and other outlets dismissed his creations, unable to see that electronic art was the way of the future. “My work looks unusual but it has a profound background,” he tried to explain, but it would take many years of sweat, toil and repurposed Zeniths and RCAs for Paik to be taken seriously.
This happened in 1974 with his landmark piece TV Buddha, a brilliantly simple concept — a statue of Buddha contemplates his own live image on a TV set — that spoke volumes about the vast, existential abyss that television represented. The work became a sensation and turned Paik into a major figure, setting the stage for more ambitious and monumental pieces, whether they were towering TV sculptures or a 1983 New Year’s Eve broadcast that degenerated into a drunken happening.
For those already familiar with Paik, what’s perhaps most revelatory in Kim’s documentary, which is loaded with archival footage from start to finish, are the artist’s own thoughts and contemplations as read by actor Steve Yeun (Nope, Burning). We not only learn how Paik experienced the setbacks and criticisms of his early years, but how he felt about his native Korea — a country he fled in the 1950s and only returned to decades later, once he was already a famous international artist.
The more we discover Paik’s past, such as how he was estranged from his wealthy father and grew up traumatized by the Korean War, the more we begin to understand that his art was both about destruction — of violins or pianos or TV screens — and connection, using television to forge new ways of seeing and being, as well as to get past American stereotypes about Asians like himself.
By the time he was in his 60s and suffered a major stroke, Paik’s impact on art and popular culture, especially commercials and music videos, was widespread and long-lasting. His 1995 sculpture Electronic Superhighway, a massive map of the U.S. composed of TV sets playing programs by the artist, would predate the term “information superhighway” by just a year. Like everything he foresaw, Paik also envisioned the vast flux of images and content of the emerging World Wide Web.
Of the different Paik aphorisms heard in Kim’s thorough and informative film, the one that probably sticks out the most is: “newness is more important than trueness.” It speaks to the artist’s love of technology and new mediums, and also his refusal to look back despite bad reviews, poor health and long periods of failure in the public eye. In Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, a visionary is not only someone who predicts what’s coming, but who does so even if no one is listening.
Full credits
Production companies: JBS Arts, Curatorial
Director: Amanda Kim
Producers: Amanda Kim, Jennifer Blei Stockman, David Koh, Amy Hobby, Jesse Wann, Mariko Munro
Executive producers: Kenzo Digital, Steve Jang, Florence Sloan, Steve Yeun, Fab 5 Freddy, Alexandra Munroe, Michael Kantor, Brandon Chi-Wei Chen, Gyopo
Director of photography: Nelson Walker
Editor: Taryn Gould
Composer: Will Epstein
Sales: Dogwoof
In English, German, Korean
1 hour 47 minutes
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