Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is a thoughtful celebration of a video art pioneer

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV begins as many documentaries about artists do – with a profusion of news clips, interview excerpts, exhibition posters and archival footage of the subject and his works. From the cacophony, disembodied voices emerge, referring to Paik as “the father of video art”, “the Nostradamus of the digital age”, “a cultural terrorist” and a prophet of the internet. Modern-day artists such as Ulysses Jenkins and Marina Abramović weigh in as talking heads, praising Paik’s ingenuity. Gallerists and curators sketch out the polyglot Korean artist’s impressive background – PhD in philosophy, classical music training. A plucky, playful score by Sakamoto Ryuichi accompanies clips of Paik smashing a violin in his performance piece One for Violin Solo (1962) and gleefully toppling over a piano in Hommage à John Cage (1959).

These glimpses of Paik’s raucous performances and installations portray him as a subversive figure in the art world, while footage of him tinkering with TV sets and pushing his face into a large blob of white goo reveal an impish trickster and natural entertainer. But when the initial bombast clears, we see still another version of the artist – as a young boy in Japanese-occupied Korea, living with the threat of punishment for speaking his own language. “My problem,” says the voice of actor Steven Yeun, reading from Paik’s writings on leaving Korea as a young man, “is how to communicate better.” Language becomes a major theme of the documentary, and for much of its remainder Paik’s story is punctuated by his efforts to harness technology to communicate across boundaries.

As we follow the artist to Munich, then New York, then back to Korea, we witness his pioneering use of television technology in works such as TV Buddha (1974). This breakthrough installation, which features a Buddha statue apparently transfixed by its own image on an adjacent television set, was the culmination of Paik’s decade-long exploration of TV’s avant-garde possibilities. Global Groove (1973), a Fluxus video mash-up that aired on public television station WGBH-TV, and Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), a live event broadcast around the world via satellite and featuring the likes of the musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson, the pop band The Thompson Twins and the dancer Merce Cunningham, realised Paik’s vision of merging accessible, popular entertainment formats with high art in unprecedented ways.

Talking heads describe the production of Good Morning, Mr. Orwell as, essentially, a hot mess – recalling sound issues, control room drama, and host George Plimpton swigging far too much champagne on air. In an archival interview Paik excitedly describes his directors panicking during the New Year’s day broadcast. “I just let it happen really,” he says, laughing. The so-called failures of the production, he notes, made it more interesting.

Because Paik’s work plays with television and media, it seems, on the face of it, well-suited to the documentary format. But often the sense of rhythm and duration that’s so important to his compositions, performances, video and film pieces (like Zen for Film, a silent 16mm work from 1965 which consists of image-less film being projected on to a blank screen for eight minutes) feels out of synch with the quick-moving, montage-heavy narrative of Moon Is the Oldest TV.

Certainly the documentary is a polished affair – witness the Sakamoto score, Yeun’s thoughtful readings, beautifully designed multilingual titles demarcating different periods of Paik’s life, and the impressive access to archive material. There are lovely visual ideas, too – pieces of footage separate into numerous rectangles floating in a black void, creating the illusion of a multi-channel video installation in a museum. But beneath the glossy production values, director Amanda Kim is beholden to the conventional format of artist documentaries – particularly frustrating when the artist in question is known for their disregard for convention.

At one point Paik is quoted as saying, “I’m not really concerned about so-said art world, I’m concerned to whole world” – a notion that Kim, perhaps unintentionally, takes to heart. Flitting superficially from artwork to artwork, the film doesn’t quite know how to really get to grips with Paik’s oeuvre or ideas, or how to position him amid the wider emergence of new media art. Instead, it settles for portraying him as a soothsayer, a cultural emissary, or an information architect. In this treatment, the mere fact of Paik’s use of technology and his ability to predict trends – like creators having their own TV channels, à la social media – seems to have higher value than his art-making practice as a whole. Kim’s lack of interest in truly examining her subject from an artistic point of view makes the film feel less like a documentary befitting Paik’s questing pioneer spirit, and more like a high-end product.

 ► Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is in UK cinemas and available to stream on BFI Player now.