The Essentials: Art Video and Film #2 - Pioneering Feminist Works
Online Exhibition at our Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel April 10 - August 21, 2020.
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79. Dara Birnbaum, Video (color, sound) 5.50 min.
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943. Maya Deren, 16 mm Film (black and white, originally silent) 14.00 min.
Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Martha Rosler, Video (black and white, sound), 6.09 min.
This is the second in a series of curated playlists featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art films and video.
Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, NY, New York) is an American video and installation artist with degrees in both architecture and painting. She began working with video art in the mid-to-late 1970s as television strengthened its dominance on the American psyche through popular culture and mass media. Birnbaum used video to appropriate and reconstruct common household television imagery by repeating footage and interrupting traditional narrative flows with text and music. Sources include TV dramas, game shows, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her important early feminist work, Technology/Transformation:Wonder Woman, from 1978-1979 deconstructs the gender biased ideology embedded in the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman. The work opens with a repeated series of fiery explosions accompanied by the sound of a warning siren. Birnbaum then isolates, repeats and distills the moment of the ordinary character Wonder Woman portrays in daily life, Diana Prince, transforming into an archetypal super-hero. Writing about the "stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman," Birnbaum states, "The abbreviated narrative—running, spinning, saving a man—allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to "do good" (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society."
Maya Deren (b. 1917 Kyiv, Ukraine - d. 1961 NY, New York ), was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker, choreographer, dancer, poet, photographer and proponent of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience. Deren shunned traditional notions of narrative, space and time in creating haunting dream-like black-and-white short films using jump-cutting, multiple exposures, slow motion and superimposition. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration with then husband Alexander Hammid, has repeatedly been lauded as one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema. Made in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250, the film is recognized as one of the first examples of avant-garde film. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, a musical accompaniment was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952 with subsequent independent soundtracks created since her death in 1961. According to the earliest notes from Deren, she describes Meshes of the Afternoon as follows: “This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”
Martha Rosler (born 1943, Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist who works in various mediums including photography, video, collage, installation, sculpture, and performance. Rosler's work is engaged with public and private space, mass media, architecture, and examining mechanisms of political power through a feminist lens. Her works often engage social issues and systems of control from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport. Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974/75) is a pioneering work of feminist video art which parodies a typical television cooking show. In the video Rosler dons an apron and demonstrates tools of the kitchen in alphabetical order after verbally announcing the name of each tool. As the list of tools grows her gestures become errant and increasingly aggressive meandering into unexpected and alarming directions, until finally the character eventually dispenses with the tools at the letter “U” and uses her body as a kind of semaphore system to finish the alphabet. Rosler has suggested that this dark but humorous work is meant to reveal the social expectations of women in regard to food production and, more broadly, the role of language in determining these expectations. Of the works aesthetics Rosler has stated "Even though it was obscure looking (on purpose) and inelegant (on purpose) and unedited (on purpose), it began to look like a naïf moment of production that was the best that could be done at the time. In other words, was seen as a pioneering work because of its low quality of production".
Online Exhibition at our Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel April 10 - August 21, 2020.
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79. Dara Birnbaum, Video (color, sound) 5.50 min.
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943. Maya Deren, 16 mm Film (black and white, originally silent) 14.00 min.
Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Martha Rosler, Video (black and white, sound), 6.09 min.
This is the second in a series of curated playlists featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art films and video.
Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, NY, New York) is an American video and installation artist with degrees in both architecture and painting. She began working with video art in the mid-to-late 1970s as television strengthened its dominance on the American psyche through popular culture and mass media. Birnbaum used video to appropriate and reconstruct common household television imagery by repeating footage and interrupting traditional narrative flows with text and music. Sources include TV dramas, game shows, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her important early feminist work, Technology/Transformation:Wonder Woman, from 1978-1979 deconstructs the gender biased ideology embedded in the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman. The work opens with a repeated series of fiery explosions accompanied by the sound of a warning siren. Birnbaum then isolates, repeats and distills the moment of the ordinary character Wonder Woman portrays in daily life, Diana Prince, transforming into an archetypal super-hero. Writing about the "stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman," Birnbaum states, "The abbreviated narrative—running, spinning, saving a man—allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to "do good" (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society."
Maya Deren (b. 1917 Kyiv, Ukraine - d. 1961 NY, New York ), was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker, choreographer, dancer, poet, photographer and proponent of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience. Deren shunned traditional notions of narrative, space and time in creating haunting dream-like black-and-white short films using jump-cutting, multiple exposures, slow motion and superimposition. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration with then husband Alexander Hammid, has repeatedly been lauded as one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema. Made in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250, the film is recognized as one of the first examples of avant-garde film. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, a musical accompaniment was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952 with subsequent independent soundtracks created since her death in 1961. According to the earliest notes from Deren, she describes Meshes of the Afternoon as follows: “This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”
Martha Rosler (born 1943, Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist who works in various mediums including photography, video, collage, installation, sculpture, and performance. Rosler's work is engaged with public and private space, mass media, architecture, and examining mechanisms of political power through a feminist lens. Her works often engage social issues and systems of control from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport. Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974/75) is a pioneering work of feminist video art which parodies a typical television cooking show. In the video Rosler dons an apron and demonstrates tools of the kitchen in alphabetical order after verbally announcing the name of each tool. As the list of tools grows her gestures become errant and increasingly aggressive meandering into unexpected and alarming directions, until finally the character eventually dispenses with the tools at the letter “U” and uses her body as a kind of semaphore system to finish the alphabet. Rosler has suggested that this dark but humorous work is meant to reveal the social expectations of women in regard to food production and, more broadly, the role of language in determining these expectations. Of the works aesthetics Rosler has stated "Even though it was obscure looking (on purpose) and inelegant (on purpose) and unedited (on purpose), it began to look like a naïf moment of production that was the best that could be done at the time. In other words, was seen as a pioneering work because of its low quality of production".