American Masters: "Nam June Paik: Moon Is the First TV" (JBS Arts, Curatorial, Dogwoof, PBS-TV, aired May 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Until last night (Tuesday, May 16), when PBS ran an “American Masters” documentary on Korean-born artist, videographer, pianist, composer and all-around provocateur Nam June Paik (called Nam June Paik: The Moon Is the First TV and directed by Amanda Kim), the name “Nam June Paik” had been at best on the periphery of my personal consciousness. I’d heard of him partly through a tribute album he and Joseph Beuys recorded on two pianos in Düsseldorf, Germany on July 7, 1978 at a memorial concert for George Macunias, founder of a radical multi-media arts collective called Fluxus which was active in New York, mostly in the 1960’s. The recording of this concert got a negative review by John Ditsky in the September-October 1984 issue of Fanfare, which noted that the two pianists were set to perform for 74 minutes – the inverse of Macunias’s age when he died, 47 – though the concert only lasted a bit over 71 minutes: “During that time, two pianists with little improvisational rapport noodle around in an ambience of considerable audience and performer (microphone) noise, perhaps out of shared and understandable restlessness. To enliven things (it doesn't work), a cassette recorder is flicked on and off now and again, giving us snippets of what I take to be the dead man's voice speaking or singing. For further variation, there is a lot of breathing into microphones and such interpolated materials as a funeral march [Chopin’s, from the Piano Sonata No. 2], ‘Summertime,’ and ‘St. Louis Blues.’ Yet in the end these two mutually unresponsive pianists manage to make this ‘memorable’ Düsseldorf evening as dead as their dedicatee.” (I listened to a YouTube post of this piece while writing this and found it much more beautiful than Ditsky made it sound: its basic harmonic language is from Debussy and Bartók out of Chopin, and the interspersed bits of cassette recordings of Macunias speaking or humming aren’t as intrusive as Ditsky’s review made them sound. Try it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaiKdp0tAdc.)

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul on July 20, 1932, the fifth and last child of parents who were actually well-to-do members of the chaebol, the 20 or so families that basically controlled Korea’s economy. (You’ve probably heard the name of at least one of the other chaebol families, Samsung.) Paik grew up while Korea was under Japanese occupation, and his dad was later accused of being a collaborationist. In 1950 Paik’s family fled Korea during the Korean War and settled first in Hong Kong and then in Japan, where Paik studied classical music and wrote a thesis on avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg, whom he considered a kindred spirit. The PBS documentary includes a video clip of Paik performing the first of Schönberg’s cycle of five pieces for piano, and he makes the music sound strikingly lyrical. In 1957 he moved to Germany to study classical music at its source, but a year later he attended a concert given by American composer John Cage, and the experience revolutionized his outlook on music, art and life in general. While much of the audience walked out of Cage’s concert, Paik fell in love with Cage’s music and especially with his idea that music is simply a collection of sounds, and it doesn’t have to be organized along the traditional lines of melody, harmony and rhythm. Paik went backstage to congratulate Cage after the concert, and Cage thanked him. The experience left Paik determined to emigrate to the U.S. in general and New York in particular, and he wrote an increasingly desperate series of letters to the handful of people he knew who lived in New York searching for someone to sponsor him. Eventually he found someone who had no money of his own, but luckily for Paik the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service never bothered to check him out to see if he had the financial wherewithal to sponsor an immigrant, especially someone who wasn’t a relative.

Paik finally made his way to New York in 1960 and became a part of Fluxus, joining its events and partnering (only professionally, not personally) with cellist Charlotte Moorman. In 1967 Moorman was arrested for obscenity after she and Paik gave a concert in which they played a work of his for cello and piano during which he cut off her clothes, piece by piece, until she was performing topless at the end. (Someone should have warned Paik and Moorman that New York was never as cosmopolitan as it advertised itself; 40 years earlier Mae West had similarly been busted for obscenity for writing and starring in a play called Sex, and decades later she was still amused at the irony that she served a 10-day jail sentence for playing a prostitute on stage and most of her fellow prisoners were in jail for being prostitutes.) While in Germany Paik had also discovered television and realized the possibilities of using it as an artistic medium. When he moved from Germany to the U.S. he brought in a shipment of eight German TV’s (one wonders how he got them to work given that Germany has a different TV format and a different sort of electrical current than the U.S.), and he continued the experiments he’d begun in Germany of putting magnets on top of televisions to distort the images on purpose. During a brief return to Japan Paik discovered Sony’s first home-video equipment, a separate camera and videotape recorder – you slung the package containing the recorder over your shoulder like a handbag while you manipulated the camera – and he immediately bought one and decided to reinvent himself as a filmmaker. Later he got the more advanced version – the camcorder, which combined camera and tape recorder into a single unit – and began using it. Paik was frustrated by the fact that this early video equipment only recorded in black-and-white; he desperately wanted to incorporate color into his videos, and got the chance to do so when after years of trying he finally got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Paik arranged to work with WGBH, the public television station in Boston, though he was hamstrung by the large amount of money they’d charged for studio time and became determined to invent his own color television synthesizer, which could create abstract patterns with the touch of a few buttons on a console. Paik did that with the help of technicians at Sony, and he compared it to the then-new music synthesizers. Paik joined Fluxus in 1962 and took part in some of their multi-media “happenings.” There was at least one other Asian-born member of Fluxus besides Paik and his partner (later his wife, and after that his widow), fellow Korean avant-garde artist Shigeka Kubota: Yoko Ono (yes, that Yoko Ono), a leading light in the international avant-garde art world long before she met and got together with John Lennon and the rest of the world heard of her. (Some online sources on Fluxus list Lennon as a member because once he and Ono became a couple, he participated in some of her art events under the Fluxus banner.) The manifesto for Fluxus Macunias wrote in 1963 will give you an idea of what the group was about, and though it drew on Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists for some of its inspiration its overall sensibility was very 1960’s: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional and commercialized culture; PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art – PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” Unlike a lot of other avant-garde artists of the 1960’s, Paik not only survived the decade but eventually wore down the art establishment and got the sort of funding he’d always wanted (there are clips of him in the show complaining about his persistent poverty and in particular his lack of access to health care when he needed it), which allowed him to do multi-media projects like the 1983-84 New Year’s telecast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a reference to George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 and what Orwell had been both right and wrong about in his predictions of what life would be like in that year.

Paik also began to make a living selling multi-media art installations, including his most popular piece, TV Buddha. This featured a statue of Buddha on one end, while at the other end was a video camera and a portable TV receiver in a white egg-shaped case. The camera was placed so it telecast an image of the Buddha statue onto the TV screen, so it appeared that the Buddha was watching himself on TV. When Paik first bought a Buddha statue for this piece, his partner Kubota complained that he’d spent the last money they had on this awful, ugly statue of Buddha. Luckily for both of them, a Dutch collector bought the first TV Buddha for a large sum of money and Paik continued to make other editions of the piece and turn them into a reliable income stream. On June 22, 1984, Paik returned to South Korea for the first time in 34 years, despite his nervousness about going home because South Korea was still a Right-wing military dictatorship and he was worried his Marxist past might catch up with him there and get him arrested. Instead, the opposite happened; Paik’s international contacts enlivened the Korean art scene and started breaking down the cultural barriers between his native country and the rest of the world. As the Wikipedia page on Paik explains, “From the mid-1980’s to the mid-1990's, Paik played an integral role in Korea's art scene. As the curator Lee Sooyon has argued, Paik became more than just an illustrious visitor to Korea, he became the leader who helped open Korea's art scene to the broader international art world. In addition to opening solo exhibitions in Korea and mounting two world-wide broadcast projects for the 1986 Asia Games and the 1988 Olympics (both hosted in Seoul), Paik also organized a number of exhibitions in Korea. Some exhibitions coordinated by Paik introduced John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Joseph Beuys to Korea's art scene; others brought recent developments in video art and interactivity from Europe and the U.S. to Korea, in ways that bridged similar activities in Korea's art scene.”

Paik suffered a series of strokes from 1996 to his death in 2006, though even while using a wheelchair he still continued to create. The PBS documentary shows a late appearance of his in which he repeatedly pushed over an upright piano; two assistants would use ropes and cords to raise it, and Paik would push it over again. (This was a throwback to one of his most infamous pieces on Germany: he would methodically destroy a piano after performing on it, and German audiences, used to the tradition of treating a piano in the home with reverence, would be shocked – as Paik intended them to be.) Nam June Paik was famous not only for his art pieces but his appraisal of technology in general and the Internet in particular; he’s often credited with coining the phrase “information superhighway,” though he seems to have meant it quite differently from how the phrase is used today. Indeed, in later years he compared the Internet not to traveling on a superhighway but to being cast adrift on a small boat far from any shore, with only your navigational skills to point you in one direction or another. Paik’s work has become a mainstay of musea and collectors alike, though as his Wikipedia page acknowledges, TV and video technologies have changed so drastically in the years since Paik’s death that some of his elaborate installations no longer work in the ways in which Paik intended. Paik was a symbol of international culture and yet he also never lost sight of his Korean identity; according to the interviewees who knew him, Paik claimed to speak 30 languages but spoke them all oddly, often confusing listeners to whom he was trying to communicate. (At the same time, the documentary contains an anecdote about Paik being interviewed by a Korean reporter on his 1984 return to Seoul, and Paik telling the interviewer, “I speak better Korean than you do.”) Even the different pronunciations of his family name – sometimes “Pake,” as in “bake” or “cake”; sometimes “Pike,” as in the medieval weapon – add to the confusion and uncertainty surrounding him; at different points in the film Paik himself is heard using both pronunciations.