Je voulais écrire une poème
Je voulais écrire deux poèmes
Ce voulais écrire dix poèmes
Je voudrais écrire cent poèmes
mais je fais la révolution.(2)
In Dara Birnbaum's single channel videotape, Canon: Taking To The Street, (1990), the political act of taking to the street is framed and reframed through an iconic evocation to the Paris uprising of May 1968 and a digital reworking of amateur video footage from a Take Back the Night march held at Princeton University in April, 1987. In the opening sequence of the videotape, the words from a poem of art and revolution appear line by line on the screen. The background, a faint rose colour, turns to a vibrant revolutionary red as the lines of the poem add up to an affirmation of action over art. Then images from the silk screen posters made by students in 1968 burst upon the screen, and as quickly disappear. In quick animated succession, a line drawing of a woman throwing a brick with the accompanying slogan "La Beauté et dans la rue," is followed by a figure muzzled by the hand of authority with the slogan "Sois jeune et tais toi," a blindfolded figure speaking into a microphone with the slogan "Informacion Libre" a fist with the slogan "Leur compagne recommence. Notre lutte continue," and a final image of the Sorbonne With the words "université populaire. OUI." In the wake of this quick time accumulation of historical references, video footage bursts through a line drawing of the brick: transforming a weapon of the street into television screen within the screen. Still-born icons of another era cast into motion, the hand made posters give birth to the indistinct and grainy black and white video images of a march held fifteen years later, and they in turn give birth to a complex entanglement of recorded fragments of history and their artistic representation. On one hand, the sharp contours of the poster's line drawings, embued with the confrontational patina of an historical specificity, contrast starkly with the abstracted and dreamlike images of the Take Back the Night march, in which shadowy figures of an indeterminate darkness could belong to any street and any protest of a post-Vietnam era demonstration. On the other, the "speeding up" of historical time through the animation of inert posters, and "slowing down" of historical time through the digital manipulation of the video footage collapses temporal demarcations between these two moments of passionate resistance, blurring the boundaries between authenticity and simulation. Doubling back upon each other within an electronic sphere of mediation, the images in Canon become a series of ghostly echoes that displace the nostalgia for a representational purity with a slippage between art and action. Recasting the recorded fragments of the past as both the subject and object of a technological repetition, Birnbaum points to the fragility and the potency of image appropriation as an artistic gesture of remembrance and of re-enactment. For while the students of the Ecole des Beaux Artes in Paris worked feverishly through the night to produce artisanal images heralding a revolutionary daylight it was the visual remnants of their failure that inspired the students of Princeton to take to the streets with portable video cameras to claim back the night.
A deftly wrought play between the specificity of history and its re-imaging within an electronic sphere of mediation, Canon's conceptual framework pivots on the use of a double-edged strategy of appropriation and repetition: a strategy that has been central to Birnbaum's artistic practice over the last two decades. From early works such as Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman, ( 1978) that takes as its subject the image circulation of gender through television, to her recent work, Hostage, (1994), that takes as its focus the media coverage of the kidnapping of a German industrialist, Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction in 1977, Birnbaum has explored the entanglements of identity and ideology through the juxtaposition and recirculation of found images. An image flaneur of the global village, Birnbaum takes as her site of investigation the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision, described by theorist Paul Virilio as the "the handling of simultaneous data in a global but unstable environment where the image is the most concentrated but also the most unstable form of information." (3) Prowling on the edges of this vast technological apparatus, she isolates and recontextualizes fragments from a swirl of electronic data to reflect upon the ways in which culture remakes nature and mediation reshapes identity.
In so doing, Birnbaum's artistic practice aligns itself philosophically and conceptually with a vision of technologically saturated environment that extends from Marshall McLuhan's claim in 1964 that "after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace, abolishing time and space as far as our planet is concerned,"(4) to Jean Baudrillard's assertion of a post-modern condition as one of a simulacrum, in which "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." (5) Yet despite the obvious affinities in Birnbaum's work with the ways in which McLuhan's global nervous system or Baudrillard's simulacrum challenge a representational purity that privileges originals over copies, she shares little of McLuhan's unbridled optimism or Baudrillard's pessimistic passivity for technology's omnipotence. Rather than succumb to McLuhan's enthusiasm for technology's potential to refashion the self, or surrender to Baudrillard's modernist lament for a reality lost in the shuffle of degraded copies, Birnbaum's artistic practice calls into question the ideological underpinnings of a global nervous system, locates within the simulacrum the potential to destabilise the fixed identity of gender, to pry loose history from its temporal moorings.
In seeking to inscribe a site of intervention upon the smooth surface of the simulacrum, Birnbaum's complex play in her work upon copies within copies also finds a resonance in Gilles Deleuze's critique of a Platonic idealism that underpins the ordering of representation in Western culture (6) in Deleuze's reading of Plato's hostility to an imitation or mimesis of appearances, he notes that Plato distinguishes between good copies and bad copies. Good copies are based upon the degree to which the representation of appearances resemble ideal forms or Ideas. Bad copies, on the other hand, are imitations of appearances that while seeming to perfectly mimic reality are upon close inspection not even like the originals they profess to resemble. In Plato it is bad copies that give rise to the simulacra; to a false representation that challenges the primacy of sameness linking appearances to models to Ideal Forms And it is the simulacra that Plato represses in the search for a knowledge and truth that enlightens rather than deceives, purifies rather than contaminates.
In turn, argues Deleuze, Plato's decision to exorcise the simulacra from the order of representation constructs a legacy in Western culture of repressing difference in favour of sameness, in repressing the power of mimesis to conjure phantasms of indeterminacy, to infuse the copy with the power to affect the original. What is condemned in the process, writes Deleuze, "is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions, and crowned anarchy"(7) Thus to assert the primacy of the simulacra is not to give into a world of degraded copies, but in Deleuze's words to "render the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, the determination of hierarchy impossible."(8). For Deleuze, then, what is at stake in the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision, in the sense of each image of reality in turn affecting reality, of a nervous shifting and sliding of constants into constant flux of exchange, is a reordering of difference and sameness, an unravelling of fixed identities and representational certainty.
In one of Birnbaum's earliest works Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, (1978) it this primacy of the simulacrum that is asserted in her image appropriation of a popular American television show of the 1970's. Similar to other video works produced by Birnbaum from 1978-1982, she describes her strategy in Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman as one of "attempting to slow down the 'technological speed' of television and arresting moments of TV time for the viewer, which would then allow for examination and questioning."(9) in so doing, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman becomes a crucial example of Birnbaum's ongoing investigation of the ways in which an interrogation of identity and ideology cannot be disentangled from the proliferation of images within a contemporary field of vision. Distilling from the smooth narrative space of television the explosive moments of Wonder Woman's transformation from office girl to all American Amazon, Birnbaum reveals in Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman a doubling of identity within mediation, points to gender as subject to an image chain of reproductions. For as the figure of Wonder Woman repeatedly "appears" and "disappears" in a puff of smoke, it is not the difference between her two selves, but their sameness, that becomes visible. Within this image play upon temporality and repetition the fluidity of identity is unveiled as an optical illusion; the ordering of difference and sameness is called into question. A seemingly simple act of isolating fragments from a global nervous system of image circulation, Birnbaum's gesture points to both the determinacy and the indeterminacy of gender within the simulacrum: in which the accidental and the heterogeneous reworking of television destabilises identity as that puff of smoke occurring between images.
In choosing to focus upon the "special effects" that enact Wonder Woman's dizzying metamorphosis from a secretary to a prototype cyborg, Birnbaum's intervention upon the smooth space of the simulacrum reveals not only a doubling of identity but of ideology. For in Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, it is not only the fixity of identity that is unveiled as an optical illusions but the emergence of a 'new' woman through technology. In so doing, this early work by Birnbaum offers an interesting counterpoint to the feminist artists of the 1970's who heralded the video screen as an emancipatory interface of self and technology that would undo an ideological and historical overdetermination of gender within mediation.
For curator Mary Jane Jacob, "access to video allowed women and others- until then marginalized by the mainstream - to have an equal voice,"(10) while critic Martha Gever proffered that video reproposed a redefinition of reality by asserting the validity of women's existence and experiences, by challenging accepted ideas about those experiences." (11). With its grainy white and black images, awkward close up framing and image feedback capabilities, feminism with a portapak appeared to offer the opportunity to turn the technological eye of the camera back upon the simulacrum, to refuse the narrative devices and encoded repetitions of television through a fluid mirroring of body and machine that art critic Rosalind Krauss has termed an "aesthetics of narcissism."( 12)
Upon a closer examination, however, the utopian aspirations for this "new" interface of technology to challenge an overdetermination of gender through self-exploration and self-representation disappears like Wonder Woman in the lightning flash of an explosion. For while video offered women artists the potential to explore the identity of self as an ever-changing, shifting, and unstable reflection of "reality," the ease with which they entered the arena of video art also can also be traced to an already predetermined system of ideological coding; a coding in which the entrance of women into the work force and public space at the turn of the century was linked to the gender-typing of the typewriter and the telephone. In turn, the attribution of technological innovations in the industrial work place with specific gender traits can be traced to a nineteenth century speculations upon the relationship of electricity as the "vital source" of female energy: a speculation that finds its materialisation in the telephone operator, the office girl, and in the contemporary armies of word processors and micro-chip fabricators.
For example, a recruitment catalogue for secretaries from 1892 notes that "as stenographers and typists (women) have special qualifications in neatness, taste, deftness of action, and quickness of perception, and there is no line of industry to which they are better adapted ... possessing nimble fingers, nervous and delicate organs and being quick to hear, think, and comprehend." (13) Similarly, the decision of the Bell Telephone company in the 1890's to use women operators instead of men was accompanied by an assertion of femininity as essential to a human interface between a flow of electricity and the voice. The trade magazine of Ma Bell, as the company is informally known, praised in 1898 the "clear feminine quality of the voice" as best suited to "the delicate instrument of the telephone," proposing that women could "put their femininity to the service of the community"(14) through their occupation as telephone operators. In turn, the gender-typing of technology at the turn of the century finds its contemporary echoes in Marshall McLuhan's description of the telephone as a kind of electronic call girl, and his argument that ' the typewriter and the telephone are most unidentical twins that have taken over the revamping of the American girl with a technological ruthlessness and thoroughness." (15)
In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, it is the "technological ruthlessness and thoroughness" of this gender-typing that becomes visible through Birnbaum's double-edged strategy of appropriation and repetition. Isolating from a global swirl of images those of an office girl and her Amazon double, Birnbaum highlights the simulacrum's fantasy projection of an instant emancipation from the dreary and everyday exploitation of white collar labour. Simultaneously, Birnbaum's constant repetition of Wonder Woman's explosive moment of transformation bears witness to the violence that the simulacrum enacts upon the social body. Reworking the narrative devices and encoded repetitions of television, Birnbaum turns the eye of the camera back upon the simulacrum to reveal in the "new" interface of the video screen a container of old and problematical ideologies. For, as Wonder Woman stares into a mirror during a sequence of the tape, it is not a fluid exchange of identity that is reflected back, but the chimera of a technologically induced liberation. Here, the narcissistic gaze of video art is hemmed in by the insistent glare of the mass media; the utopian aspirations to refashion the self through a "new" interface of technology are encircled by the image proliferations of a central nervous system. A subject produced not only by technology, but also by ideology, Wonder Woman's "good copy" of her former secretarial self offers up an illusory emancipation: an illusion that is echoed by the soundtrack of the videotape, in which Wonder Woman's image is framed by the overtly sexual lyrics and fabricated voices of The Wonder Woman in Discoland Band - a group explicitly engineered and marketed during the height of the television's show's popularity to cash in on the commodity fetishism of Wonder Woman's mystique.
Playing a double game with technology's seduction in Technology/Transformation : Wonder Woman, Birnbaum unveils with in the simulacrum a seamless web of images that tightens imperceptibly around a capacity to distinguish the self from its technological interface. Responding to this spectre of a technological omnipotence, she repositions the viewer as a smart agent of mediation navigating a nervous flow of images and data. In so doing, this early work by Birnbaum becomes an example of counter-modernist or anti-modernist strategy: locating within the simulacrum a site of ideological contestation in which a cybernetic collapse of TV's, VCR's, PC's, satellite transmissions, and cable networks threaten to redefine consciousness as subject to the interfaces of a global feedback system. Here, the entanglement of technology and ideology is externalised in the sensation of surveillance cameras stalking one at every turn, like a secret agent who is discreet in his distance, but nevertheless persistent in his task of shadowing one's every activity. It is internalised in the rarefied experiments of corporate laboratories such as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre in California, in which a visionary investment in the development of ubiquitous computing leads Mark Weisner, the head of its Computer Science Laboratory, to proclaim that "the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."(16)
Notes
1. May 1968 document reproduced in 'The Situationalist
International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb. (Berkeley,
California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 344.
2. Anonymous author, reproduced in Dara Birnbaum's Canon: Taking
to the Street, 1990.
3. Paul Virilio,War and Cinema. Translation by Patrick Camiller.
(New York: Verso, 1989). p. 71.
4. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
(Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964). p. 3.
5. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra" in
Simulations. Translation by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman.
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 2.
6. I would like to acknowledge Paul Patton's superb synthesis of
Gilles Deleuze's critique of Plato and Seth Benardete's commentary on
Plato in formulating my summary of Deleuze's theory. See Paul Patton, "AntiPlatonism
and Art" in Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy. eds.
Constantin V. Boundas & Dorothea Olkowski. (New York: Routledge, 1994)
and Seth Benardete, Plato's Sophist. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984).
7. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Translation by Paul
Patton. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 265.
8. Cited by Paul Patton in "Anti-Platonism and Art" ,in
Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy. op. cit., p. 152.
9. Dara Birnbaum, "Author's Introduction" in Rough
Edits: Popular Image Video Works 1977-1980. ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
(Halifax: Nova Scotia pamphlets 4, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, 1987), p. 13.
10. Mary Jane Jacob cited by JoAnn Hanley in The First Generation:
Women and Video, 1970-75. (New York, Independent Curators Incorporated,
1993), p. 10. Exhibition Catalogue.
11. Martha Gever cited by JoAnn Hanley, The First Generation:
Women and Video, 1970-75. p. 14.
12. This phrase was coined by Rosalind Krauss in "Video: The
Aesthetics of Narcissism," in New Artists Video, ed. Gregory Batcock
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978), p. 43.
13. Cited in Graham Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution:
The Feminization of Clerical Work (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 75.
14. Cited in Michele Martin, "Hello Central?" in Gender,
Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems,( Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), p.59
15. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
op cit., p. 266.
16. Mark Weisner, "The Computer for the 21st Century" in
Scientific America (Vol. 265, No. 3, September 1991), p. 94.
Copyright © : Dot Tuer,1995.
N.Paradoxa : Issue 3, May 1997