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The Founder Of Video Art Gets A Documentary That is Never As Radical As Its Subject [Sundance]

January 27, 2023

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The avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik will get his personal adulatory portrait in Amanda Kim’s documentary “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.” An act of biographical restoration that additionally, someway, flattens a controversial artist, Kim’s movie offers simply sufficient contextual data to keep up curiosity, even when it’s by no means as radical as its titular topic.

Moving succinctly from delivery to dying, Kim offers a broad overview of Paik’s historical past and aesthetic pursuits. Born in Korea earlier than immigrating to Germany to review music historical past, Paik rapidly fell in love with the avant-garde compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and, most influentially, John Cage. Adopting their experimental kinds, Paik immigrated to New York City within the early Nineteen Sixties and started a profession that might merge his pursuits in new technological kinds and radical artwork, turning into a founding member of the Fluxus motion — a motion that emphasised course of over product.

Yet, for a movie about an artist who broke down the obstacles of how we understand interactions between know-how and humanity — making a cello made up of TVs or a shifting robotic that recited JFK speeches — ‘Moon is the Oldest TV’ is typically frustratingly linear. It’s basically standardized, shifting by way of Paik’s life chronologically. That’s to not say that Paik is undeserving of the sort of route biography, however Kim appears extra attuned to the wavelength of a standard hagiography than any method that Paik took in his personal work.

On the opposite hand, Kim’s conservative fashion additionally sheds mild on a considerably marginalized determine within the avant-garde artwork neighborhood. While Yoko Ono and, to a lesser extent, Jonas Mekas are extra recognizable concerning the Fluxus motion, Paik’s prophetic visible items foretell the web age’s discord and fragmentation. His items additionally gave a specific kind of credibility to the bigger video artistry motion, even when the movie isn’t notably thinking about contextualizing his work outdoors Fluxus.

When ‘Moon’ works finest, it’s inserting Paik’s work alongside the pop artwork he impressed, zooming out of the actual items or installations. A sequence of juxtapositions place Paik’s work in opposition to music movies, notably the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” exhibiting the depth of his affect on burgeoning short-form movies within the ’70s and ’80s. The use of overlaid photographs that he pioneered started to point out up in all places throughout that interval. Also, his declare that the TV Guide will at some point “be as thick as the Manhattan phonebook” feels lots like the present tv panorama, and his “TV Buddha” sculpture is, as one scholar notes, prescient for its invocation of selfies.

Further, within the remaining third, the movie turns towards the web. While Paik’s notoriety, maybe, comes from coining the time period “information superhighway” (earlier than Al Gore, as one interviewee cheekily places it), his ideas on the nonlinearity of media consumption are far more fascinating. As Paik notes, the web is extra like an ocean, with its recursive waves of knowledge repeatedly enveloping customers. His work mirrored this ethos, as his installations seemingly overwhelmed guests with tv units enjoying totally different media varieties concurrently.

Kim makes use of voice-over and collage to convey Paik’s prescience, having buddies and students speak about his work whereas additionally leaning on house movies to point out his numerous items. While it’s thrilling to see Paik work together with, say, Allen Ginsberg or attempt to stage his disastrous “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell” set up — a stay 1984 New Year’s collage that mixed stay and taped segments — anybody with a passing familiarity with Paik, his work, and even the Fluxus motion, will discover little new with ‘Moon.’

The movie barely glosses over his private life, zooming previous his upbringing in Korea and relationship together with his household and solely suggesting a “tumultuous” relationship together with his spouse, fellow artist Shigeko Kubota. We by no means actually get a way of who Paik is outdoors of the work he created, a acutely aware selection by the filmmakers that, nonetheless, feels slight. Early on, Steven Yeun (a producer on the movie) reveals as much as learn a citation of Paik’s, however this voice-over simply as rapidly disappears.

While Kim’s encyclopedic dive might not provide a lot revelatory data, it nonetheless acts as an insightful and streamlined primer into Paik and his work, permitting fellow artists and critics the time and house to talk about Paik and the unconventional shift in direction of video artwork. [B-]

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The Founder Of Video Art Gets A Documentary That is Never As Radical As Its Subject [Sundance]

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