Reversing Time's Arrow in Nam June Paik's Guadalcanal Requiem

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Notes

1. George Fifield writes: “Each of the seven video signals is passed through its own non-linear amplifier and then through a matrix into a RGB to NTSC color encoder. This meant that one camera acted as the red input, one green, one blue, one as red and green, one as red and blue, etc. Aiming the cameras at roughly the same object gave overlapping color images.” George Fifield, “The Paik-Abe Synthesizer,” part of the Early Video Project website. http://davidsonsfiles.org/paikabesythesizer.html. Accessed November 7, 2011. The development of the synthesizer is also described by Edith Decker-Phillips in Paik Video (Barrytown, New York: Barrytown Ltd., 1990), pp. 152–155.

2. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).

3. My use of the term “transhuman” is influenced by my readings of Donna Haraway. Haraway's use of this term is first developed in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routlege, 1991), pp. 149–181.

4. Hysteron proteron also appears in Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World (1967). Martin Amis’ novel Time's Arrow, or, the Nature of the Offense (1991) is a more recent example of a work which, like this essay, makes titular allusion to British astronomer Arthur Eddington's 1927 concept of time as a vector phenomenon taking place in a given direction. Amis’ novel, like the hysteron proteron sequence in Paik's video, is structured around the rewriting of a “bad” history—one associated with World War II, no less—by “rewinding” it in reverse.

5. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, originally published 1969. (New York: The Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition, 2009), pp. 93–4.

6. In fact, Steven Weisenburger has counted fifty-nine separate instances of its occurrence there. See Weisenburger, “Hysteron Proteron in Gravity's Rainbow,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 34:1 (Spring 1992), pp. 87–103.

7. Pynchon 48.

8. Pynchon 139.

9. See Peter Maslowski, Armed With Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II (New York City: Free Press, 1993), pp. 70–71.

10. Paik's question could also be interpreted as an homage to the incessantly repeated titular phrase in Lynda Benglis’ influential 1973 video Now, in keeping with the artist's generally acute awareness of contemporary video practice.

11. See: Andy Warhol, “Interview With Gene Swenson,” Art News 62 (November 1963), p. 26.

12. Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” reprinted in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

13. Paik's involvement with the Fluxus movement and his relationship with Beuys have been extensively documented: see, for example, John G. Hanhardt and Jon Ippolito, eds., “The Seoul of Fluxus: Composition, Performance, and the Transformation of Video and TV” in The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2000).

14. Sources on the Beuys oeuvre include: Peter Nisbet, “Crash Course: Remarks on a Beuys Story” and Joan Rothfuss, “Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America” in Gene Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (Sarasota, Florida: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 5–17 and 37–53 respectively; also, Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979) and Alain Borer, “A Lament for Joseph Beuys” in Lothar Schirmer, ed., The Essential Joseph Beuys (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

15. Paik's apparent sympathy for the cello, obviously associated for him with Moorman, contrasts with his (in)famous One for Violin Solo, performed first in 1962, in which he slowly lifted up and then smashed a violin on a table.

16. See for instance Paik's sculptures titled TV Buddha, which he created in several different formats beginning in 1974. These sculptures are discussed by Jacquelynn Baas in Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 179–187.

17. Gene Ray has considered many of the more sinister aspects of the meaning that felt conveys in Beuys’ work, notably the history of its mass production from human hair during the Holocaust. Gene Ray, “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime,” in Gene Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: DAP; Sarasota: Ringling Museum of Art, 2001). These themes have been elaborated in Matthew Biro's essay “Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 113–146.

18. Mutilations of the Japanese dead by American soldiers were not uncommon in the Pacific war, and appear to have been legitimized in soldiers’ minds by their perceptions of the enemy as racially other and inferior. Simon Harrison has written that “The collection of skulls, teeth and other body parts seems on the whole to have been carried out as an extension of this “normal” and widely practiced looting of corpses.” In particular, “the taking of teeth seems to have been largely accepted or tolerated by both officers and enlisted men …” Simon Harrison, “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 12, no. 4 (2006), pp. 826–27. Other accounts of these practices can be found in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 63–65; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1942), pp. 15–16; and E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Presudio Press, 1981), p. 120.

19. In the mid-1970s, Paik's focus on the image of the burned Japanese soldier would have resonated with contemporary manifestations of U.S. paranoia about the Japanese economic miracle, which was rewriting the structure of the global economy from its North American and European dominance into a tripolar system. Tetsuka Kataoka's review of the 1984-inspired The Eastasia Edge (1982) by Ray Hofheinz, Jr. and Kent Calder, in the Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 433–438, addresses this theme, as does the film Gung Ho (1986), which attempts to tackle such popular sentiments head-on.

20. Sampling of archival footage bricolage appears in other contemporary filmic experiments as well—for example, in Bruce Conner's Crossroads (1976), which sets footage from the 1945 Bikini Atoll nuclear blasts to music by Terry Riley.

21. Such modernist representations are productively interpreted by many scholars, including James Clifford's early and influential “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, no. 4 (October 1981), pp. 539–564 and his “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” Art in America 73 (April 1985), pp. 164–77.

22. The art-historical scholarship on the fraught relationship between modernism and primitivism is extensive. Numerous essays on this subject were published in the wake of the Museum of Modern Art's landmark 1984 exhibition on modernism and primitivism (see William Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, 2 vols [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984].) Examples include: Hal Foster, “The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1985); Patrick Manning, “Primitive Art and Modern Times,” Radical History Review 33 (1985), pp. 165–81; Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” Artforum 23 (November 1984), pp. 54–61. More recent works include: Fred R. Myers, “Around and About Modernity: Some Comments on Themes of Primitivism and Modernism,” and Ruth B. Phillips, “Performing the Native Woman: Primitivism and Mimickry in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture,” in Lynda Jessup, ed. Antimodernism and Artistic Experience (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Steven A. Mansbach, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers (London: Iniva and the MIT Press, 2008), pp. 96–120; and Michael Richardson, “Surrealism Faced With Cultural Difference,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Iniva and the MIT Press, 2005), pp. 68–85.

23. The identity of Karlheinz Stockhausen as a Fluxus artist is disputed, especially given the Fluxus protest of the 1964 U.S. premiere of Stockhausen's Originale, which was seen by George Maciunas, Henry Flynt, and Tony Conrad as a exemplar of “cultural imperialism,” even though other Fluxus members - including Charlotte Moorman - were involved in the performance. The episode is recounted by Decker-Phillips, pp. 186–88.

24. I am thinking here about the revival of postmodern historical fiction in the 1970s. Some of these works explicitly conflate the 1940s and the long 1960s, addressing the present through an examination of the wartime past and vice versa. Examples include, most obviously, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), but also the historical novels of E.L. Doctorow, especially The Book of Daniel (1971), and Gore Vidal's Myron (1974) and 1876 (1976). Fredric Jameson refers to the compound temporality of such works as “the nostalgia mode;” see The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (Verso, New York: 2000), pp. 6–10.