Every once in a while, you'll see an artist portrait documentary that's so beautifully done, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is displayed so perfectly in the documentary format, that when it's over you can't believe the movie didn't exist until now. It feels, in its own way, essential. “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is like that. Directed by Amanda Kim, it's a tantalizing portrait of Nam June Paik, the revolutionary Korean-born video artist who, in the late '60s and '70s, did nothing less than invent an art form.
When it first became famous, about 50 years ago, you would go see an installation by Nam June Paik in a place like the Museum of Modern Art, and it looked quirky and exotic: a tower of stacked TV screens, all showing what it looked like the wavy visual equivalent of feedback. It was weird and kind of exciting, but a part of me would think: What is this doing in a museum? It's not that it didn't have a place there. It is that the notion of “video art” seemed, in its formative days, to be a kind of wise contradiction of the technological age, almost a conceptual conceit, like the art of Marcel Duchamp or the music of John Cage.
Director: Amanda Kim
Star: Nam June Paik
In fact, as the documentary shows, Cage, with his visionary and avant-garde classical music concert stunts to attract audiences, was a god to Nam June Paik. Paik first saw Cage perform in Germany in 1958, a night that changed his life. He came to see all of his existence before that as having taken place "B.C." (before Cage), and the two eventually became close friends. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Korea, Paik originally planned to be a classical pianist, and the first 20th-century pioneer he joined was Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-American pioneer of 12-tone music, i.e., the the kind of shocking non-harmonic harmony that, for decades, left classical music audiences occasionally ecstatic and mostly stunned. Paik first wanted to play the piano and compose like Schoenberg, and once he saw Cage, a world of danger opened up before him.
Having fled with his family from Seoul in 1950 during the Korean War, Paik lived and studied in Hong Kong, Tokyo, West Germany, and then Tokyo again. It was there, in 1962, that he acquired a Sony Port-a-Pak, the first commercially available video recorder. That same year he joined the experimental artist collective Fluxus, whose 20 members included Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Jonas Mekas. They saw themselves as a rogue force, which spoke to Paik. He was in rebellion against his father, whom he hated, and part of what drew him to John Cage is that by doing things like smashing up pianos, Cage, in Paik's view, was overthrowing the primacy, almost the colonialism, of Western music. .
However, part of the fascination of Paik's story is that even when he moved to New York and joined what would become the guerrilla art movements of the late 1960s, he had no clear idea of what what he wanted to do. He wanted to attack the status quo, which a lot of people did at the time, producing a lot of really bad didactic "destructive" art. (One could argue that nothing was more bourgeois than his attempt to destroy bourgeois values.) Paik's take on this was his collaboration with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, who at one point performed topless, getting them in trouble for violating codes of decency. All very insurrectionary, but on a creative level they were preaching to the avant-garde choir. And Paik, who literally had no money (he fed himself on $10 a week that he begged and borrowed), was in the United States on a travel visa and was at risk of being expelled from the country.
It was when Paik clung to the television screen, and also to the television iconography, that he began to find a way to unite his artistic impulses. You applied for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and here's an irony for you: The foundation executive who oversaw funding for the arts, Howard Klein, had been a music critic for The New York Times, where he had criticized a Paik performance. But he immediately grasped the possibilities of Paik's video vision and, in time, became his financial godfather. One of the first collaborations with WGBH, Boston's public television station, was an experiment in turning television on its head. Paik's Visual Noodles aired a little after prime time, but proved too expensive to produce.
He realized that he would have to find a way to do this that would be, in his words, as cheap as making a photocopy. He came up with it by collaborating with Japanese electronic engineer Shuya Abe to invent the Versati synthesizer.
Watch Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV 2023 Movie Trailer
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