Video Art and Venus Girdle

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Bert Stabler pointed out this Dara Birnbaum video to me…because, of course, it’s about Wonder Woman.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 
So my first reaction to this was fairly intense visceral dislike. The goal seems to be to deconstruct icon and narrative to reveal a subtext of explosive violence, gender dynamics, image making and, most of all, manipulability. The stuttering spin and spin again as Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman and then turns and turns into Wonder Woman, or runs over the same segment of forest and then reruns over it, makes us see both the narrative and the heroine as constructed and artificial. Like much appropriation art, it’s using camp to destabilize the normal and the normative, so that, for example, when Wonder Woman breaks out of her mirror prison, the rhythm comes not as climax, but as anti-climax — culminating in her stale banter with the inevitable man she saves.

The problem is, this camp undermining of Wonder Woman is significantly less camp than the source material. The intimations of dominance and power from manipulating the tape, for example, or from the connection of WW’s transformation with explosions, are far more muted, and far less sexualized, than the compulsive bondage games in Marston/Peter. The replicated Wonder Womans in the mirrors are less daring, less loopy, and again less sexualized than Marston/Peter’s precocious dabblings in pomo themes of replication and artificiality. The disco double-entendres at the end, rhyming “under” and “wonder”, again seem positively tame compared to Marston’s spiraling fantasies of women dressed as deer eating each other, or giant vulva-flowers consuming men and women alike. Christopher Reed in his book “Art and Homosexuality” argues that the avant-garde always lags behind pulp sources in its use of homosexual and controversial content, and this seems like a painful case in point. Marston and Peter created an incredibly sexually daring, homoerotic, and feminist comic book, and some three decades later the art world comes along and preens itself on “discovering,” in much less confrontational form, all the themes that were there to begin with.

So, like I said, that was my initial reaction. On second thought, though, I probably don’t need to be that harsh. In the first place, the Wonder Woman television show was not the Wonder Woman comic by a long shot. With that in mind, Birnbaum can be seen in part as re-excavating the invention and the sexual charge that the TV writers largely removed. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene. That explosive (orgasmic?) moment spills out of its original context, as if Marston and Peter’s original erotic vision has shattered the dull genre narrative built to contain it.

Beyond that, it’s probably worth noting that Birnbaum isn’t really part of the avant-garde, at least as Reed discusses it. Feminist art and pop art were both still very much outside the institutional art world in 1978. From that perspective, Birnbaum might be seen not as (or not just as) appropriating Wonder Woman and television, but as identifying with them. Diana Prince’s explosive, exciting transformation into Wonder Woman is also Birnbaum’s accession to the wonderful, gleeful joys of control. Wonder Woman stutters back and forth and spins around and around and runs over the same ground not to subvert her, but because the power over those images, and the power of those images, is just so darned fun. Birnbaum’s video, then, might not be so different, in concept or execution, from those Yourtube compilations of every Lynda Carter transformation ever:
 

 
In other words, I like it more as a fan video than I do as avant-garde art — which isn’t necessarily a dis, since part of what it’s doing (especially in retrospect) is anticipating, or forecasting, or helping to bring about the (ongoing) collapse of the walls between fandom and art. I still wouldn’t say it’s great, and it’s still very simple-minded, ideologically reticent, and formally underwhelming compared to Marston/Peter. But I can see its historical importance and appreciate its energy. It’s certainly one of the most inventive uses of the character since Marston died — which may be damning with faint praise, but is praise nonetheless.

14 thoughts on “Video Art and Venus Girdle”

  1. It’s worth noting, at least, that there is a book-length study of this work by art historian T. J. Demos: DARA BIRNBAUM: TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN (Afterall Books, 2010). The piece also gets attention in the book produced for a retrospective of Birnbaum’s work, DARA BIRNBAUM: THE DARK MATTER OF MEDIA LIGHT (Prestel, 2011).

  4. Okay; read a bit of the book on Amazon. Amusingly enough, he basically says that my initial read of the piece as critique was how it was originally intended, and it’s later been read more like my second read (as affirmative.)

    So it initially saw WW as a repressive sexualized media image of women…which seems fairly stupid, honestly. Admittedly the show was no great shakes, but Ms. put WW on the cover…it seems weird to do something like this from a feminist perspective without a sense that WW was seen by lots of people as a feminist icon.

    I’ll get it out of the library though…maybe she wasn’t quite as unaware of WW’s background as those couple of paragraphs made her sound.

  5. Ah…okay. Not that anyone else really cares, but it appears to be a false consciousness argument. People see Wonder Woman’s transformation as empowering, but actually it’s manipulated and false, done with special effects, and therefore not real.

    Which just seems intensely stupid to me. Narratives have power, images have power; pointing out that they’re not “real” or done with effects — I mean, everyone knows WW isn’t real. Marston even has her made out of clay. It seems like a really banal insight to say “this isn’t real,” and then a kind of doubled stupidity to believe that since it’s a story, it isn’t feminist, or can’t affect women positively.

    I mean, I’m open to the argument that the television show was not feminist, but arguing that it isn’t feminist because it uses special effects, which is how the book frames her piece, seems insane. It’s like saying Orlando isn’t feminist because people can’t actually live that long. Progressive change requires imagination and utopian thinking. Without fantasy, how can you imagine changing the world?

    The book at least does mention Marston. Doesn’t seem to really know quite what to do with him, though….

  6. Heavens! I’m heartily agreeing with everything in your last post. Guess the universe balances out that way…

  7. Here are the thoughts I brought up that didn’t get into the post… Birnabum’s working with an icon, and icons are pretty important in visual art. Love identity art, love appropriation. Making a narrative character into an empty signifer is something we’ve grown used to, but it’s not an entirely empty gesture. And if nobody made Wonder Woman into art, maybe it wouldn’t be thought about by people in the same way.

    And it may be the most well-known art piece about either a superhero or a TV show, which I think makes it pretty important right there.

  8. I’d totally love for you to write something about it if you wanted, Bert.

    I did sort of come around to your view at least a little way…and I’m going to read the book Corey mentioned. A lot of my antipathy comes down to just being sick of Wonder Woman the character erasing the original comics. But so it goes….

  9. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene.

    So now I am thinking about anime transformation scenes, and wondering if they were inspired by the WW transformation sequence. A lot of them do involve spinning… and I wouldn’t put it past the animators of Sailor Moon (still the original and best) to have watched an art video like that.

    And if people are gonna be passing you WW videos, here’s a Kpop music video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CflEmGB9MI

  12. I’m not a huge fan of Birnbaum– I enjoy Martin Arnold more as a moving image appropriator, for just one example we discussed. But the wholesale dismissal of fairly significant feminist and identity art always makes me a little uneasy. The piece was a lot about performance and gender, which Cindy Sherman may have nailed more convincingly, but not as straightforwardly.

  13. I don’t think I dismissed it wholesale! I had sort of positive and negative reactions, many filtered through the fact that I think the source material is/should be seen as much more significant feminist art. FWIW.

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