Some of the most interesting books on music I have read are about artists or albums I otherwise could not care less about. Some of the most interesting special features I have encountered on blu-rays have accompanied movies I didn’t like. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have surprised me to find myself intrigued by 2023’s documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, a profile of an artist whose work I actively dislike.
I encountered some of his work early on in local museums, discovering at a young age how much of a difference there is between pieces that are intriguing and those that are only baffling. I couldn’t see an in-road to appreciating these tall humanoid sculptures with television sets embedded in them. I didn’t find them whimsical, nor did I detect any intended statement. Encountering his art is one of the few times I have understood the outrage some groups feel when faced with such works they don’t understand. And yet, I couldn’t even be worked up to feel outrage towards what I had seen, and a shrug is probably the last reaction any artist wants to receive.
One of the first statements we hear from the artist in this film is something I locked onto: “I use technology in order to hate it properly.” Much like some of the things Warhol said, I wondered if he really thought he was being clever, or if these kinds of potential catchphrases were akin to a stopped clock being right twice a day. But, using that metaphor, wouldn’t Paik be a broken digital watch and, therefore, wrong all the time? Here’s a quote for consideration: “I’d rather make mistakes for a reason than be successful for no reason.” That scans as witty on first read but feels less so upon closer inspection. Regardless, I like the sentiment and the quote.
Much like that other artist, I was curious as to how brilliant he really was versus how the public shaped a narrative that built him up as such. He originally left his native Korea for Germany to study classical music. Despite apparently having a PhD in pre-renaissance music, we largely see him abusing pianos in various ways, such as smashing a camcorder onto the keys repeatedly. We will repeatedly see him dragging a violin behind him while walking the streets of New York, as if it was a reluctant dog on a leash. Um…genius? Also, it reminded me of the story of poet Gerard de Nerval walking a lobster through the street of Paris, which I think is funnier.
It was seeing a John Cage performance in Germany that completely changed the direction of his art: “My life started one evening in 1958. 1957 was B.C.: Before Cage.” Cage was an artist who believed all sounds were equally beautiful. His audiences may have largely felt otherwise, as indicated by those booing the recital Paik attended.
From there, we encounter a veritable who’s who of artists working in the Avant Garde at that time. Cage leads to Stockhausen. Paik works with Fluxus, introducing him to such artists as Jonas Mekas and Yoko Ono.
But even among those outré artists, he chose television as his medium and that lands him in the lowest castes of artists. As one talking head here explains, art at the time had a hierarchy with painters as the most respected, photographers begrudgingly becoming acceptable and movies regarded as trash. If the hierarchy of respectable arts was a totem pole, video art would be several feet under the ground.
It came as the surprise to everybody (including, I suspect, the artist) when his TV Buddha became a phenomenon. This simple piece has a buddha statuette watching itself on a tv courtesy of a camera placed behind the set. The work does have a weird attraction to it, sucking the viewer into a kind of ouroboros, with the media snake biting its own tail. It’s like a different kind of video feedback loop. In the tradition of Warhol, Paik proceeded to churn out a great number of the pieces for museums and collectors around the world. I guess if you’re making a statement about any kind of consumerism, whether it be silk screen reproduction of soup cans or commentary on our obsession over ourselves through media, you might as well make a buck off it. Once again, the ouroboros comes to mind for me.
One element of his work and life I found interesting was his interest in communication and barriers preventing it. Admittedly, television is a medium that has had a huge impact on how we communicate, whether facilitating it or complicating it. Paik’s work seems to explore both.
The pieces of his shown here I found most fascinating are where he uses large magnets to distort the imagery in unexpected ways. I was less intrigued by his fixation with robots. In the 60’s, he built a shambolic thing that he would demonstrate on NYC streets, with all of its ramshackle inner working on display. Questionably, he used as its “voice” a recording of Kennedy’s “ask not what you can do…” speech despite the assassination of that president being fresh in everyone’s minds. Later, of course, he would make many immobile, robot-shaped sculptures with functional TV screens in them, making me wonder if the design of the Teletubbies is somehow a tribute.
Sometimes, he ends up accidentally demonstrating how disastrous technology can be. A prime example is Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a variety show he organized for satellite broadcast around the world on New Year’s Day, 1984. By all accounts, this was a fiasco, and I feel bad for the millions of Koreans, in particular, who were up at 2 am to witness this folly. From the clips we see, it is like bad community television was given a global audience.
In addition to communication barriers, Paik was intrigued by the physical barriers we put between each other. This was understandable, given the nation of his birth was suddenly divided in two, with a border that is still one of the most heavily secured in the world. It is interesting the first place he lands after Korea is Berlin, which was divided by that famous wall. In an another odd parallel, both nations also had uncomfortable war-related matters in its recent past to reconcile, with Koreans dealing with the atrocities the Japanese had committed there.
In the end, Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV did not change my opinion of the artist’s oeuvre, but it did give me greater insight to him as a person, and I found him rather fascinating. I still don’t believe he was a genius, but why should somebody need to be one to create art? I’m just glad the world has weirdos like him, people who playfully tear down idols and explore new ideas with an almost childlike naivete. It may not result in art I identity with, but it is important it is there, regardless.
Dir: Amanda Kim
Documentary
Watched on Kanopy