Moon is the oldest TV

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, reviews Amanda Kim's documentary of an anti-documentarian.

“Once on videotape, you are not allowed to die.” —Nam June Paik

The challenge of self-portraiture, for any artist, is in replicating their essence onto the canvas. A good self-portrait does not have to convey visual likeness. The resemblance can be metaphysical in kind—a revelation, if you will, of spirit over flesh. Self-portraiture “presupposes that a self, its body, can still be recognized, delineated, and investigated,” wrote the critic John Yau. The artist’s psyche is interrogated in the process of painting. But with a medium like video, the result risks being too perceptive. Video, like photography, is exacting: The physical self is shown as it is. The depiction can be unforgivingly precise and unflattering. Therein lies the difficulty of self-portraiture for an artist who works with video. Is everything recorded autobiographical? 

“Video is a very crude model of life,” wrote the Korean video artist Nam June Paik. “With videotape we imitate God only halfway, in that we record everything. We can rewind [video] but we cannot rewind our lives.” We can, however, try our hand at playing God by meddling with recorded footage—of ourselves and others. Video can be edited, remixed, and warped into disparate narratives. Our image and life can be fashioned anew. In the editing room, reality is sculpted into something less crude and more polished for public consumption. Naturally, the documentary is the preferred autobiographical form for most filmmakers and video artists. But Paik, who has been hailed as the “father of video art,” has never once made such a film in over four decades of working with the medium.

Paik’s aversion to the documentary might have to do with his ultimate distrust of the form. He wrote in 1970: “A director of [a] documentary film is so persuasive that he is imposing his view with skillful editing and powerful zoom-up.” He took issue with its straightforward linearity, what he described as the “one-way time [and] one-vector direction” of tape. This frame-by-frame chronology, he argued, is a “tendentious interpretation of reality.” If film is to be a representation of human sight and life as experienced, it must adhere to the randomness and freedom of seeing. 

It’s ironic, then, that Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is a documentary about an anti-documentarian. Directed by Amanda Kim, the nearly two-hour Moon is the first major attempt to chronicle Paik’s life since his death in 2006. During his lifetime, Paik reached the pinnacle of artistic success. His name has become nearly synonymous with retro-futuristic television sculptures and cathode ray screens. As is the case with famous visual artists, Paik’s biography is less readily identifiable than his pervasive aesthetic vision. But Moon, unlike a museum retrospective, is a tribute delivered in the language Paik was most fluent in: pure video. 

The documentary is segmented into key periods that attempt to connect Paik’s personal life—and to a lesser extent, his philosophy and psyche—to his art. The film is comprehensive, but feels constrained by its overall commitment to chronology. The constraint is exacerbated by Moon’s presumed seniority in the line-up of future Paik documentaries. It’s the first extensive cut of his life that filmmakers and audience members will refer to, which inadvertently traps it in a biographical bind. Paik has a prescient quip for this dilemma: “We are not allowed to forget if we remember everything.” The documentary is perhaps one solution to this memory overload—or is it an overwrite?

Paik was born in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1932, and was the youngest of five children in an affluent business family. He received an elite Western-inflected education, and was drawn to music at a young age. Much of Paik’s adolescent angst stemmed from his father, who he sparred ideologically with. He joined a leftist political group in his teens and fled to Munich in 1956 to study music and composition. There, Paik became heavily inspired by the avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg, famous for his atonal compositions. But it was Paik’s encounter with John Cage and David Tudor, two New York-based musicians, that fueled his experimental nerve. At this now-infamous 1958 “concert” in Germany (it can best be described as a sound performance that baffled many attendees), Paik saw and heard new possibilities—not just with music, but for performance-based art. He has often said that his life is demarcated into two eras: B.C. (before Cage) and after. (A.D. was 1993 for Paik, the first year after Cage’s death.) 

Paik moved to New York in 1964, and quickly earned a reputation as the Asian enfant terrible of the downtown arts scene. Even before that, though, he was a mischief-maker. The German artist Mary Bauermeister recalls an early Paik “concert” that involved him destroying a piano, cutting Cage’s tie with scissors, dumping shaving cream on his head, and fleeing the space. A half hour passed before Paik phoned to inform the audience that the performance was over. Paik’s art-antics led him to join Fluxus, a global group of avant-garde artists who emphasized artistic process over product.

The first half of Moon lingers on the impact that Japanese occupation had on the young, impressionable Paik. It presents recursive footage of the war, Paik’s family, and of a middle-aged Paik counting the rungs of a bridge to emphasize his isolation. He is cast as a perpetual outsider who becomes obsessed with championing a language—a medium—for understanding others. “I’ve been away from my country for most of my life now so every day for me is a communication problem,” Paik says.

To me, Paik seems more like a social chameleon in his formative New York years than an adrift floater. It's a common narrative, one that’s perhaps overplayed in contemporary Asian diasporic cinema, that immigrants seek belonging within a home base. Paik, I would argue, didn't seem interested in finding a location to root himself to. He foresaw the world beyond traditional city-state borders. Culture could be fluid with humanity existing “in open circuits.” Paik was interested in collaboration, in those liminal, transnational spaces for meeting and meaning-making. We are, as Paik tells a friend in a prescient late night phone call, lone ships bobbing through an ocean of information. (He wasn’t wrong. Everyday we complain of drowning in online content.) How do we find each other? How can we stay connected?

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