Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV - Father of Video Art, Impactful and Enigmatic
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
I’ve always been struck by how few, if any, “futurists” ever properly envisioned the Internet, a fully connected backwards-Orwellian dystopia where our privacy is happily given away rather than taken.
One of the closer evocations I’ve seen is in the documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV. Paik, the late conceptual artist, now known as the Father of Video Art, debuted a 1995 installation called “Electronic Superhighway.” It consisted of a huge map of the United States, covered with lines that connected 336 TV sets, each carrying different programming on a constant loop.
His tongue almost always in cheek, his message filtered through linguistic limitations (“He speaks about 20 languages – all of them badly,” an ex-Whitney museum curator recalls fondly), Paik managed to convey that, in the future, everyone would have their own channel others could watch.
Amanda Kim’s admiring documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, makes a case that Paik may not have merely been one of the most influential of the avant garde, he may have been one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century - period, one who invented a new visual canvas.
The influence is in plain sight in one sequence, where Kim juxtaposes sequences from Paik’s 1973 28-minute Global Groove (part of a longtime collaboration with PBS’s WNET) with almost identical trippy scenes from ‘80s videos for Prince’s When Doves Cry, Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime and Technotronic’s Pump Up the Jam.
Narrated by Steven Yuen, who voices Paik’s writings, Moon is the Oldest TV is a portrait of the son of well-off parents who left Korea to escape the Korean War. Where the soft-spoken Paik got his desire to shit-disturb as a career is unclear. But presented in chronological order, we see his epiphanies.
Paik was a trained classical pianist who embraced the contentious atonality of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1957, he discovered, and was eventually mentored by John Cage, the envelope-pushing musician who sought to break the traditional relationship between artist and audience with performances (“stunts” to some) called “happenings.”
The influence was so strong, that Paik referred to events in his life as B.C. and A.C. (“Before Cage” and “After Cage”).
Cage inspired the music/art community Fluxus, that included Paik, Joseph Beuys and, most famously, Yoko Ono
Paik’s whimsical attempts to shock a la Cage included a robot with breasts and a penis, walking the streets of New York, with JFK’s “Ask not what you can do for your country…” speech on repeat, and a topless cello performance by his accomplice of choice Charlotte Moorman that saw the police step in and make arrests..
But he had a special fascination with television, and the acquisition of one of the first commercial video cams set him on the career path for which he’s known. “I use technology in order to hate it more properly,” he said.
Kim provides a splendid tour of his works (my favourite is TV Buddha, in which a statue of the Buddha is seen to be watching an image of himself on TV (via a camera pointed at him from behind the TV).
And then comes the apex of Paik’s video “happenings,” the international satellite “installation Good Morning Mr. Orwell, an all-star event on New Year’s Day, 1984. Hosted by an ostensibly drunk George Plimpton, Laurie Anderson & Peter Gabriel, the Thompson Twins, Oingo Boingo, and Cage & Allen Ginsberg (both supposedly stoned out of their minds). I wish I’d seen it, but apparently many millions did.
In the end, what made Paik tick remains unknown. Little bits come out almost like aphorisms (“I don’t try to reinvent the game, but I want to make new rules of game.”).
But somehow, “We are in a boat in an ocean, and we don’t know where the shore is,” sounds like an even more relevant societal assessment today.
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV. Directed by Amanda Kim. Starring Nam June Paik, John Cage and Charlotte Moorman. Opens Friday, March 31 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema..