Biopic on the experimental artist Nam June Paik who pushed the boundaries of video art & avant-garde performance inspired by John Cage. We get to see an incredible survey of his creative works, which included many pioneering innovations in interactive art and image-making within the electronic era. We break down NAM JUNE PAIK: MOON IS THE OLDEST TV by Amanda Kim in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition Distribution: Greenwich Entertainment/PBS Films, PBS American Masters on May 16 2023, Premium Video on Demand on June 13, 2023
From Sundance’s website: The father of video art and coiner of the term “electronic superhighway,” Nam June Paik was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Born in Japan-occupied Korea, Paik studied as a classical musician before moving to Germany in the 1950s. Forever changed after encountering avant-garde composer John Cage, Paik became a member of the influential experimental art movement Fluxus, which created new forms of art and performance. Eventually immigrating to the United States, he became fully engaged with television and video art in a way that would revolutionize how the world thinks of image-making in the electronic age.
First-time feature director Amanda Kim tells the remarkable story of Paik as a citizen of the world and trailblazing artist, who both saw the present and predicted the future with astonishing clairvoyance. With Steven Yeun reading Paik’s own written words — showcasing the artist’s strategic playfulness and immense creativity — Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is a celebration of perhaps the most modern artist of all time.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.504] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All The Way Down, where we're continuing our series of looking at different documentaries that Sundance 2023. Today's episode is going to be focusing on Nam June Paik, Moon Is The Oldest TV by Amanda Kim. So, this is a biopic that was a part of the US documentary competition that was following the career of Nam June Paik, who is widely considered to be the father of video art. He is experimenting with using television technologies in a way that is much more artistic and interactive way before people were even understanding what the TV was. in the guts of the TVs and doing this interactive video art. So he's a part of this avant-garde movement of artists. I think he was really turned on after seeing a performance by John Cage and John Tudor. In fact, there is a quote that's in the film that says, My life began one evening in August 1958 in Darmstadt. 1957 was 1 BC, before Cage. 1947 was the year 10 BC. So he's essentially measuring his life as beginning after seeing this concert of John Cage. And you can kind of see this avant-garde I Ching inspired of chance operations and really doing this unpredictable type of music. And it felt like it was like a real liberation for Nam June Paik, who was able to take his own music and art in that similar direction. So, as he goes on, TV comes out and he starts doing all these video art installations, experimenting with live TV broadcasts, and it kind of traces his life through getting involved with these avant-garde art movements, Fluxus, and tinkering around with the TV as an art medium in a way that no one else is really thinking of. So, widely credited as coining the term of the information superhighway and Later, he tells a friend that he's wrong about the information superhighway. He said, it's more like we're in a boat in the ocean and we don't know where the shore is. So he's kind of like giving this early inklings of what the internet may be. So he's seen as this prophet of the information superhighway, but also just doing the type of art that's pushing the edge of what's possible with the communication media of his time. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about this.
[00:02:30.407] Wonder Bright: I enjoyed this film so much, partly because it was exploring the Fluxus movement of which, you know, Nam June Paik was a member, although I don't know that they necessarily thought of it as like members. They were really like, they eschewed the sort of like, all of the normal or previous established roots. I mean, this was like a really big thrust of the movement as I understand it. I mean, I'm drawing from, you know, an arts degree decades old at this point. It just sort of sparked my interest and I never really pursued that passion too much, but it's just always been like an endless source of fascination for me. So, But Fluxus was, there was just a number of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik. Yoko Ono is one of the people that I've followed through it, but it's essentially this like movement that is not seeking just to deconstruct the art world, but the world itself. So they were really interested in a kind of performance art status and way of interacting with the world and questioning the world and really introduced a new way of performance in the world. And things were just never really the same after that. So, you know, it's interesting because we this is the second film where we were introduced to John Cage. The other one that we watched was Tuba Thieves. And it was kind of wonderful to just have these cross references like this. And then in this film, we get to see John Cage himself and kind of get a glimmer of why Peck was so inspired by him. And I didn't know very much about Nam June Paik before I watched this film. This film really introduced Nam June Paik to me. And it's also interesting because it's another story that we got in the whole collection of films that we watched in this last week, that had stories about Korea show up and also the theme that we've been covering a lot around this experience of exile. because Baek left Korea and he studied in Berlin and then he ultimately ended up in New York and that's where he spent most of his career and traveled back to Korea, you know, decades later as a celebrated artist.
[00:04:49.984] Kent Bye: Yeah, he grew up in Japanese-occupied Korea and they were emphasizing that he was speaking up to like 20 different languages. They were saying that each of his languages were kind of broken, so no matter what language he was speaking, it was always kind of difficult to fully understand him. But just the ability to have the basics of having that many languages that you can communicate And he did have this sort of growing up in the context of this occupied land. And he was drawn towards both classical music that he was studying, but also studying philosophy and Hegel and really into this Marxist philosophy. And so he had this communist edge as well. And he really was generous with his time of mentoring other people and trying to really innovate with the tools that he needed to be able to do the types of interactive television art that he wanted to do. They were really juxtaposing the art that Nam June Paik was doing and then showing what was on MTV five to 12 years later, and how he was really on the bleeding edge of these types of real-time video synthesizer. You have this musical inspiration that he really got his mind lit up when he saw these John Cage performances, and they have all this footage of him doing these really erratic performances, like pushing over the piano and recount a show that was inspired by John Cage, where he gets up and cuts the tie off of John Cage and rushes out. And then he calls and says, my performance is over. And that's the end of his performance there. So yeah, just to see the footage of the type of art that he was doing, but also this inspiration that he has from Korea and the ways that he doesn't necessarily connect to his Korean culture. There was one interesting statistic that I wanted to say that he did a live stream experiment and by all accounts, there was a lot of things that went horribly wrong, but it was basically like his metric for success was that they tried it and it was interesting and he learned something. But one of the things that it said was that there was like 3.5 and 1.5 million people that were watching it in the United States and Europe. But like 6.8 million Koreans were tuned into this television live stream that he was doing. And it was in the middle of the night for them. And so it was kind of like their window into this other world. So the TV as a medium, giving people access to what's happening around the world. And that may be an instance where he's actually reconnecting to his Korean roots, where all these people were watching this live performance that he was doing based out of New York City.
[00:07:25.635] Wonder Bright: Yeah, well, this is exactly where, to me, the themes of the 12th house really come alive in this film. Because if you haven't listened to previous episodes where we've talked about this theme, astrologically, the 12th house is associated with the experience of exile. It's also the house that you associate with distance, like something is so far gone that it can't be retrieved or found or ever come back. And so whenever we have, you know, refugees or defectors or people who just leave their homeland and settle in another country for most of their lives, you'll get this flavor of that. And what I was so fascinated with in Peck's story is this sense of the desire to communicate things. And as somebody who speaks so many languages, but maybe none of them particularly well, he was able to communicate through the visual medium in a way that literally was broadcast back to his homeland. And he was able to send transmissions that were received. And the impact of that, the resolution of that is just so profound. It's also just sort of intriguing because it begs the question, do we need words to communicate? And what is it to communicate? And how does communication take place? I mean, and actually just the fact that it begs those questions is sort of at the heart of any true artist, you know, like, you know, the way that he related to whether or not people thought the broadcast was a failure or a success was very telling. That's the classic visual artist response, you know, in the arts world. If you go to school, you're trained to be as interested in the failures as you are in the successes, because the failure is when you're going to learn something new. That's when the new wrinkle is introduced and the next step shows up. And of course the Fluxus movement was performative and it was very confrontational. They were asking people to confront like their preconceived assumptions about things. And so there's just this rich curiosity about what's going to happen in all of his pieces that is so engaging and childlike. And I just defy anyone to watch this film and not fall head over heels in love with him.
[00:09:54.308] Kent Bye: Yeah, I mean, there is this element of the experimental style of this art that isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea, but I think the way they contextualize it into this broader movement of this avant-garde of the time and the ways that he's really tinkering with television as a medium. I mean, he was making the television interactive participatory medium by doing audio reactive, like using his voice to do these different visualizations. I mean, at that point, the TV was essentially a passive medium where you sit and you watch it, but he was making it interactive and really pushing the limits of what's possible with the technology. And there's a couple of quotes that they say that the artist's job is to think about the future, but also he wanted to use technology in order to hate it properly. And so he's kind of like tinkering and pushing the limits and pushing the edges with all these things. And, you know, I also can't help but make the connection between how he's from this more Eastern culture and John Cage and his work was very much inspired by Zen Buddhism. Also, the I Ching is this divinatory method where you're casting the I Ching and a lot of the work that John Cage is doing is being inspired by what he calls these chance operations. So he would cast something in the I Ching and then whatever the answer was, that would be informing John Cage's work. And there was something I think that Nam June Paik is like deeply inspired by this because he's saying that he wants to break out of the confines of Eurocentrism and really do something that's a little bit different than what we expect from the typical Western modes of music, the Western modes of story. He's breaking the mold and pushing the limits. There's these things where it wasn't legal to do any nude performances, but yet he's having his cellist basically being nude and he gets arrested and then this news gets back to his family in Korea that he's doing these sex art and it brings shame to his family. So there's all these dimensions that he's trying to reckon with what these boundaries are and the artist's role to push past those boundaries to see what's on the other side of different types of artistic expression. And so I feel like that's the main theme that I get out of this piece and just letting his interactive art wash over me because Everything he was doing was completely new and novel. There was a certain amount of recognizing certain patterns of things, but I guess I have to imagine myself never having seen any of this ever before. A lot of his work is pushing limits of what you can do with these broadcast technologies with televisions and to see the different types of installations he did and shown across the world in all these different museums. Yeah, just really deeply inspiring to see an artist who's willing to see what's possible with the technology, but to push it to its very limits and then oftentimes beyond it.
[00:12:40.226] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And you know, the performance art that he was doing with his collaborative partner, the cellist, Charlotte Mormon, where many times that they did it, there were, as you were saying, there were these iterative variations where they were naked and they were using one another's bodies as instruments. And there's really just this earnest inquiry and curiosity about what it is to be human. And he's a forerunner in the questions around how does technology interact with our experience as a human? You know, and now, of course, we're staring dead ahead into augmented reality and the interaction of technology with our human bodies in ways that No one other than Nam June Paik in the 50s was probably thinking about in quite this way. And so he was asking questions then that I don't think people even had a context for. In fact, there's a woman in the film early on who says, you know, I'm still starting to understand what he did, even though these are like pieces that were decades prior.
[00:13:44.365] Kent Bye: Yeah, she's a scholar and she said that Nam June Paik's work will keep her busy studying it for a lifetime just speaking to the prolific nature of all the things that he was creating.
[00:13:54.251] Wonder Bright: Yeah, this film is really worth watching just if you're interested in the intersection between bodies and technology, if you're just even interested in what it is to be human and the interrogation about what it is to be human. This is a film that really does service to someone who is deeply interrogating those questions, often in ways that don't immediately cause an intellectual understanding, but they will land in you in ways that will last. Yeah.
[00:14:27.425] Kent Bye: So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, some of the things that I'm bearing witness to in Nam June Paik is just that artistic spirit to create and to push the limits and to follow his daemon of seeing how he was really invigorated and inspired by the work of John Cage and doing collaborations and working with them and just to see his body of work and As someone who's been covering virtual and augmented reality, you see the degrees in which that there's video games and interactivity is mashed up with the cinematic languages of film. And yet here he is like in the 60s, turning a TV into an interactive visual representations and audio reactive participatory medium. And so, he's kind of at the forefront of showing the ways that our agency and our interactivity is going to be a part of the co-creation of that art. The work of John Cage and all the questions that it asks us to understand how we're a participant in the music. Cage's famous four minutes and 33 seconds where he doesn't actually play anything in the piano, but the piece of music's actually coming from the relational dynamics of the audience and the sounds that they're making actually becomes the performance. again, the audience becoming a part of these performances. And so, yeah, I just really appreciated the collection of all the footage and his work that we can kind of do a bit of a deep dive into who he was and his creative journey.
[00:15:58.003] Wonder Bright: Yes, that John Cage piece to me, if that's what you hear when he starts it, then that could be what the piece is about. To me, I think the evocative nature of it is that the performance becomes about listening. It's not about what you hear. It's about the act of being present. And I feel like Nam June Paik is asking us to do that through his interrogations in a way that is really evocative. what I want to bear witness to in this film is the last piece that he did that they show in the film. And I'm not going to share what it is, first of all, because I got to watch a film version of it. I'm so sad that I didn't get to see it, but I'm not going to give you a copy of my copy of it. I think you should watch the film yourself and see if you have like a similar response to it. What I do want to say is that it really felt like the next iteration of his 12th house questions. How do we transmit from a very long distance? How do we transmit when we don't know that we'll be heard? What are we transmitting?
[00:17:16.821] Kent Bye: Yeah. And there's a little bit of an Easter egg of chance operations and the credits as well that I'll leave to the viewer to watch and discover as well. It's kind of a fun callback. But that was Nam June Paik's Moon is the Oldest TV by Amanda Kim. That was part of the US documentary competition at Sundance 2023. It actually does have distribution with Greenwich Entertainment and PBS Films. And so it might be coming to a PBS station near you. Keep an eye out and we'll have more details in the show notes. And yeah, thanks for joining us here on Story All the Way Down. If you'd like more information and find out ways that you can support the podcast, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com. And yeah, thanks for joining us.
