![]() (You could argue that nothing was more bourgeois than their attempt to destroy bourgeois values.) Paik’s version of this was his collaboration with the classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, who at one point performed topless, which got them in trouble for violating decency codes. 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. Yet part of the fascination of Paik’s story is that even as he moved to New York and signed on to what would become the guerrilla art movements of the late ’60s, he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do. He was in rebellion against his father, whom he hated, and part of what had drawn him to John Cage is that in doing things like wrecking pianos, Cage, in Paik’s view, was overthrowing the primacy - almost the colonialism - of Western music. They saw themselves as a force of revolt, which spoke to Paik. ![]() That same year he joined the experimental artist collective Fluxus, whose 20 or so members included Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Jonas Mekas. It was there, in 1962, that he acquired a Sony Port-a-Pak, the first commercially available video recorder. 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. Paik first wanted to play piano and compose like Schoenberg, and once he saw Cage, a world of avant danger opened up to him. Paik, born into one of the wealthiest families in Korea, originally planned to be a classical pianist, and the first 20th-century groundbreaker he cleaved to was Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-American pioneer of 12-tone music - i.e., the kind of clashing non-harmonic harmony that, for decades, left classical-music audiences occasionally entranced and mostly befuddled. He came to see his entire existence prior to that as having taken place “B.C.” (before Cage), and the two ultimately became close friends. Paik first saw Cage perform in Germany in 1958, a night that changed his life. In fact, as the documentary shows, Cage, with his visionary avant-garde audience-baiting mock-classical concert stunts, was a god to Nam June Paik. It’s that the notion of “video art” appeared, in its formative days, to be a kind of knowing tech-age contradiction, almost a conceptual conceit, like the art of Marcel Duchamp or the music of John Cage. It was weird and kind of gripping, but a part of me would think: What is this doing in a museum? It’s not that it had zero place there. When he was first becoming famous, about 50 years ago, you’d go to see a Nam June Paik installation at someplace like the Museum of Modern Art, and it would seem quirky and exotic - a tower of stacked TV screens, all flashing what looked like the squiggly visual equivalent of feedback. ![]() ![]() Directed by Amanda Kim (it’s her first feature, and so well-done that I expect it to be the first of many), 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. “ Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is like that. Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now.
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