In the 1970s, Nam June Paik directed thirty-minute programmes for the American production company WNET-TV which were broadcasted on Channel 13. Guadalcanal Requiem which was created in 1977 and reedited in a shorter version in 1979 is amongst those produced for the television, like Allan’n’Allewis Complaint (1982), Living with the Living Theatre (1989) and Global Groove (1973). These videos are first and foremost discourses on history and the importance of the interpretation and understanding of the past. They also demonstrate video techniques and the use of the medium by television. Paik does not consider his works to aver any message, but aims to liberate the spectator from the monopoly of conventional televisual productions. Conversely, the television becomes the means of taking art out of its formal framework to reach a larger public.

Guadalcanal Requiem is one of Paik’s most politically engaged works. It unfolds in Guadalcanal in the archipelago of the Solomon Islands where a battle between the Americans and the Japanese took place in 1942 and 1943 during World War II. In collaboration with violoncellist Charlotte Moorman, Paik visited the island in the late 1970s to film the combat sites.

Guadalcanal Requiem shuffles different temporalities. With in situ images, the artist composes a testimony of the past combined with black and white archive images and interviews. Short sequences of war records and images of Paik’s performances from the 1970s are presented alongside the island’s inhabitants’, American veterans’ and Japanese soldiers’ accounts. Images of Moorman playing the violoncello at the island’s war memorial are similarly juxtaposed with the performance of TV Bra (1969) which took place in a studio in New York and was presented again before the public on the island.

The video documents the event by presenting its historical and geographical context, while also setting up a process of recollection and of rituals of commemoration created by Paik and Moorman on the island whose landscape is ravaged by war. In working on memory and contemplation, they accomplish a series of rituals. The musician first plays her instrument on various parts of the island before wrapping her violoncello up in a felt cover, evoking Joseph Beuys’ Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano (1966). As Moorman in canvas crawls on the beach with her violoncello strapped to her back like a rucksack, Paik drags a broken violin behind him, bringing to mind Violin with String realised in 1961.

Using montage and post-production techniques characteristic of Paik, these images of varied sources are juxtaposed, linked and reworked. The artist employs the video synthesiser Abe-Paik in particular, which was conceived in 1969 with engineer Shuya Abe. This equipment allows the generation of forms and modulations, the synthesising of colour and the creation of distortions on the video image.

The fragments of memory and episodes from the past which are revisited through Moorman’s performances and Paik’s images attest to the importance of the imagination in representing and understanding the trauma of war.

Priscilia Marques