Since the date when it was produced in 1965, this work by Nam June Paik has appeared in different versions, passing in particular from the dozen black-and-white monitors used at the start to the addition of colour television sets. But to this day they are still being put on view in a room plunged into darkness and silence that also contains a magnet placed on a cathode tube, which interferes with the electronic signal before every transmission of recorded images, which show differing stages of the progression of light and darkness on the Moon's surface, as it can be seen from Earth. In its material form, forever advancing and evolving, the installation is a response to the different lunar phases presented to us, as if following a cycle of differences and repetitions. It is worth stressing that Paik has not, in the meantime, elected to show images of the hidden side of the Moon, which we have known about since 1959 thanks to retransmissions carried out by space probes; rather he sets store by the image which we can have of it with the naked eye. Ever since the earliest ancient writings that have come down to us, observers had already noted that this side of the moon looked like a face, a human face which would inspire many painters, illustrators, narrators, not forgetting the first film-makers, such as Méliès. Insomuch as the moon presents a form which vaguely resembles us, it is an image. If we think, needless to say after the invention of film, that this image is illuminated, it is easy to make the hardly metaphorical link with the projection of such an image on this part of the satellite. The Moon is a kind of screen on which an image is projected in the endless darkness of an endless cinema auditorium. Alternatively, according to Paik, it is the “oldest TV”. The context of the period in which Paik produced this installation is very clearly related to the invention of the television in the 1940s in the United States, followed by its rapid worldwide spread from the 1950s onwards, just as with the mass culture which it helped to disseminate on a large scale in households. This was also the period when Marshall McLuhan delivered many a pertinent reflection on television in Understanding the Media (1964), and also when men had been preparing, since 1960, to journey to the Moon, although the actual moon landing did not take place until 1969 with Apollo XI. Whether a mass medium or a mass consumer product is involved, television and television sets are nevertheless not used in this sense by Paik. He may be one of the very first artists to make use of the possibilities of the medium, and what it represents as an object, but Paik immediately took a salutory step back, worthy of an oriental sage. He prefers silence, quietness and slowness to noises, sounds and speed; he contrasts the spectacular, the narrative, and multiplication to what is evident, what is pure vision, and the passing of the same thing. The Moon has been there forever, its image is obscured and starts all over again, it recounts nothing, or, perhaps, recounts nothing other than the passing of a time immemorial. Paik actually pushes even further his rejection of the various parameters associated with this medium – live broadcasting, recording, repeats, an ongoing flood of every manner of imagery, amongst other things – because in reality the alleged images of the moon's phases are non-existent. The shapes that we may take for the various progressive stages of the lunar cresence are in fact obtained by the placement of magnets on the cathode tube, thus making it possible to obtain, without any pre-recorded image or image captured live, a supposed lunar image stemming more from an imagination than from any real vision. For the image has clearly originated from our imagination, even though it is likewise based on a phenomenon hyped by the media. As an odd mixture of the ways in which we really perceive the moon and of different images transmitted by media such as photography, television and film, these forms are not really diversions or appropriations, but rather manipulations of an apparently acquired imagery, acquired because it is indexed to the image of the real Moon. All so many memories, accumulations of manufactured images, scientific and otherwise, and direct, live visions when we turn our eye towards the sky, as if to check the permanence of the celestial reality above our heads. The Moon is always there, it waxes and wanes indefinitely and the schematic diagrams that we may make of its cycle are so simple that even any old ordinary television set contains, so to speak, this image. And if the Moon is, in this sense, the oldest television, the title seems to be turned inside out, because television also becomes an original form, present well before man was able to look at it as a natural phenomenon and as an image.

Jacinto Lageira

Translated by Simon Pleasance