Nam June Paik was a Korean video artwork pioneer, experimentalist and avant garde disruptor whose wonderful, anarchic profession – which flourished in Nineteen Sixties and 70s New York – is recounted on this amusing and interesting documentary, the title of which is taken from considered one of his works: a luminous disc on a display screen, telling us we gaze on the TV within the submissive method we as soon as stared on the moon.
Minari’s Steven Yeun gives the voiceover for the artist’s personal phrases and, amongst different issues, this movie exhibits us how exhausting it should be to do what he did: to insist, for many years, that his artwork, an artwork which bore no resemblance to something that had gone earlier than, had validity and that means, whereas all the time being on the verge of poverty and bodily breakdown. The overwhelming sense of vocation obligatory for such a life is sort of awe-inspiring, though Paik’s personal jokey, opaque persona appears to exist as a rebuke to any response as bourgeois as that.
Paik was a music pupil and pianist, radicalised by his interval in Nineteen Fifties West Germany throughout which he encountered Schönberg, Stockhausen and particularly John Cage, who turned a lifelong ally. Cage has a droll comment about Paik’s wacky, confrontational concert events and happenings: “Extra entertaining to recall than to expertise on the time.” A Cageian motion in his personal work led away from music to an curiosity in soundscape design, radio and TV and eventually video artwork; Paik was the early adopter who noticed video’s potential.
Paik’s work additionally concerned the manipulation of TV photographs, a creative “speaking again” to the TV, and there’s a sense that he foresaw the entire of the web and Internet 2.0: his 1974 work Digital Superhighway arguably anticipated the phrase “data superhighway”. He was a sort of Warhol determine (and even Godardian determine) in his fascination with the picture: a really fashionable creator.
