Hans-Ulrich Obrist: To begin I thought it would be nice if you talk a bit about your time in Berkeley.
Dara Birnbaum: My time in Berkeley. I felt that I grew up in Berkeley. It was 1969, and the people around me had been through the free speech movement in ‘65. I can talk any way you want to about Berkeley in particular.
HUO: I thought it's interesting in terms of like...in the '60's, late '60's, but also '70's having counter cultural activism and all really focused on colleges. No one like really having centrals. And then like in the '80's having it, it's all about dispersal, also about the ethnic dispersal.
DB: Well, there was a concentration in Berkeley. Berkeley became a kind of spot on the map. And I had come from New York City and then went to a college and went back to New York. And I was looking for a place that could be different for me. And I think a lot of people went to Berkeley thinking it was somewhere else that it was like the Mecca of the alternative spaces, you know, at the time. And the university was still very, very active. And the streets, you had this kind of, what we can make now a very romanticised image of alternative politics. If I look backwards, the streets were lined with national guards, sometimes. The shopkeepers on Telegraph Avenue, which was this predominant activist street, the shopkeepers would sometimes put up these boards because everyone was always throwing rocks and there was a kind of revolution in the streets, you know, if this term was used by Abby Hoffman and other people, certainly Berkeley was a site of revolution in the streets.
HUO: And you went directly from the campus then into the architecture…
DB: No, I never made it to the campus. I had already gone through my own schooling in architecture, and I had heard of someone called Lawrence Halprin, and he was quite well known. And I tried to think, well, if I've already worked on buildings that look like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, that looks like sheet glass – you know, this kind of curtain wall designs – what else could I do? I was very young. I started architecture at 16. By the time I graduated, I was one of the youngest people graduating, I think, in the history of that school. And I had a lot of idealism and a lot of energy. And all I heard of was that Halprin did what was then starting to be called environmental design. And I thought it was very, you know, that one had to stop building actually. So, I think I went to Halprin because he was working not with immediate architectural plans, but with a kind of territory of space and this territory of space – we would look at it in the present, five years from now, 10 years from now, 50 years from now and in the future. And that was the perspective that I wanted to have. And we also worked with the community so that supposedly we were doing not an act of making monuments – we were doing an act that our language and the community language should become one and somehow merge. And from that point, we could then design.
HUO: And concerning Halprin, the whole participatory notion. Maybe it's a theme?
DB: It's a theme. Yeah, it was a theme. It was in the air and it was a strange time. So I always think that I grew up in Berkeley, because it was very formative years, and everything was participatory, which is also interesting in relation to your work and curation. But in relating to how I was formed, I think, yes, we tried to go with the community, and we did it by air, by sea. We would go and rent a boat and get the community on the boat with us – that you have to observe the land from the sea and from the sky. And it's the first time ever that I saw a video in use, because we had someone documenting what we did. And my big problem with it was that we then took the language of video, and we vaulted it away. It was a document that was kind of kept a little too sacred for my taste. But other participatory action was that with Anna Halprin, the wife of Halprin, Lawrence Halprin, she was doing workshop, and this was dancer's workshop in Berkeley. And they were taking people, taking street language, and putting it into dance – that the performance of life itself, and of course this goes toward a kind of activism, was actually the motion that dance could be concerned with. And these boundaries and borders that had been established between the one who acts and the one who looks at the action were attempting to be dissolved in many ways – through project D'ORO D'ART, which recreated the theatre of D'ORO D'ART; through Julian Beck coming and forming the Living Theatre; through Anna Halprin's Dancers workshop; through protest in front of the University Art Museum at Berkeley, where people would be painting the streets and saying, ‘This is the art, not the art that's inside. It's the art that is outside the system.’ So, this is the beginning for me.
HUO: And so, having worked for Halprin, when did you first think of entering the art context? How did it happen?
DB: Oh, it's method of falling out. There was a recession in building, and I was one of the only women in the office. So, the guys got to play one role and the women the others. So the men had to be busy every day and we would come in to see if we had a job. And the men, they were cleaning up drawings. And as a woman, they asked me to answer a phone or two. I took off and with their permission, I took. And I said I never was allowed to draw. At the age of 16, I went into architecture, and right away you draft, but you don't really draw. And I had tried very hard to always get courses to try to feel differently in the drawing. And then I was good, I think, so in architecture I would do renderings, and I have a lot of drawings in the books of Halprin that are not credited. And I decided to go to the San Francisco Art Institute. So, at the end of one summer, I was offered a scholarship at the Art institute. And Halprin said to me,‘we are still slow in the studio.’ And anyway, I had to make a decision, and I took another term in the arts. And the more I took of the arts, the harder it was to come back to architecture.
HUO: And at this time, have you been involved directly in political activism in terms of like Vietnam, but also in terms of like feminist activism? Has it been a theoretical involvement, or have you been involved in direct activism?
DB: Well, it's like the Battleship October, I guess. It's like when one makes revolution, you don't call it revolution, you're simply doing it – the action of doing it. And you can't call it that. Yeah, I tried very early on, my brother and I were out there when we lived in New York. I guess we took a very, what could, in retrospect be called perhaps a liberal Jewish position. And when I came to Berkeley, this was one reason I went to Berkeley. I thought we are going to find their solutions that perhaps are not possible yet to find elsewhere. That this would be a, you know, it's a locust, it's a centre that drew many people. It drew strange people; it got strange names. It was called Berserkley instead of Berkeley. And yes, of course it was a focus for activism against the war in Vietnam. And I think I was marching in the streets from very early on. And I think by the time I made Berkeley, I also made the FBI list.
HUO: And it's at this time you've been also like reading Abbie Hoffman? I think it's very interesting in your very recent text. The text you've just finished is like dedicated to Abbie Hoffman with very long Abbie Hoffman citation. So, were you reading of Abbie Hoffman at that time?
DB: No, I got to breathe him – not read him. He was still alive. And I got to see him years later in 1988. I think it was the last time, one year before his death, when I did a recording that eventually went into the work for Documenta 9. And that was a reading of a poem at a national student convention by Allen Ginsberg, "Hum Bom!". And he, Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman were there. They were the elder statesmen. And it was very interesting because it was the first time after 22 years that students came together nationally, and they didn't want any cameras and any press in. I was teaching at Princeton University, and I was getting really down, you know, that nothing could happen again in the United States, and nothing would happen from a kind of youth activism. And one of my students said, ‘Don't get so down.’ It's not there on the surface, but it's underneath, and within a few months we're going to have a national student convention with campuses all over. And everyone came back, and they got me in, and I was one of the only people who could film it. And then there was Abbie Hoffman and Ginsberg. They were speaking from a position of 20 years later and saying to each other, and then to the students, how they were opposite. But of course, opposites attract.
HUO: So that was like after, because I remember we had this discussion about the Gulf War and this shock that the Gulf War took place and just nothing happened. Just nobody…
DB: Protested?
HUO: Yeah
DB: People protested, but the media made a collective pool of imagery. I don’t have all the thoughts that I want on it. And this has to do with inside and outside – you're inside or you're out. And the media representation chose to turn away from many of the smaller demonstrations that were orchestrated throughout the United States against the Gulf War. Perhaps some weren't even that small, but you had the feeling they were very fractured and fragmented. And the media, who sometimes takes the role to be the eyewitness too, right? So that you think it can bring you there and give you a uniform picture, of course, gave this kind of huge image of the Gulf War – a very controlled image.
HUO: But that's very interesting because it leads back to this dispersal idea – that like, during the Vietnam War, there was a concentrated, concerted activities in like the dispersal notion. From the '80s onwards.
DB: It was a little, the same time as Woodstock. You remember Woodstock? Almost. You were just born at Woodstock. It's… ah, but I think of that because I – it's in the film anyway, Woodstock, where you look out and you say, "Hey, you know, someone I forgot, like country Joe and the fish, someone was looking out and saying, ‘We've got almost 500,000 of you motherfuckers out there, you know, we're not alone.’"
The point was, is that if you could be seen, you weren't alone. And to be seen in this mass group – and this was true also for the anti-war movement – the object at the time was to be seen. By the '80's, I was almost thinking that the object of the time would be to disappear. To not be seen, was much more activist, you know… to become, as happened, the computer virus. You know, this kind of…this kind of invisible…
HUO: The hacker…
DB: …the hacker. Exactly. And this was the meaning. To take the Abbie Hoffman and call him, within an article that I was writing on cyberspace – my first article ever on a cyberspace – maybe the first hacker. He looked for the weakness in the system. He wasn't in, in '68, in the Yippie movement. There was Chicago in the United States, and then there was May '68 in Paris. And I started to write also on these differences because I thought in Chicago, from one perspective, like of the yippies, the idea was that we have a system in place: television. It has the pretense of being everywhere. You have to get onto TV to get your message heard, so how do you get on TV? You make the best street theatre possible. If you're the most dramatic, you get the most time and space. In France, in a very contradictory position, was to look at the system and to say that the system is not in good order. We'll never go into the system until we reestablish what the structure is. And so, this was, the worker and student coalition were actually to tear it down – to the point of even stopping the festival that year. One can't speak from a structure that is not in an integrity in its place at that time. Whereas with Hoffman, it was kind of go grab it, grab what you can from it.
HUO: So you're talking about the text finding any place in cyberspace about…
DB: Yeah, in any place.
HUO: When you talk about the membrane, about the inside and outside, with regard to cyberspace...on the one hand, this is an Deleuzian idea, but it's, at the same time an Lacanian idea of various scenes inside various the outside.
DB: Yes, it is, it's the part I couldn't write is the Lacan. This is helped by my assistant and Scott Lyle. But I think it's the place that I was describing to him that there is a kind of…The strange thing is, if you take kind of a public place – because this article was written for an architectural symposium – and they were trying to show that the architectural language, and this new territory, if we can call it that…that this new territory of cyberspace, in part, was being systematised through architecture. In fact, if you go to public space and you take a kind of Greek look at polis, you know, this idea of a public gathered, then I would say that in cyberspace there's the absence of that. Although it seems that everyone can enter into it. In fact, the dispersal is such that I find it again, this contradiction. I'm not your best lover yet of cyberspace. And it's a strange position for me as an artist working with media, because now I think for 15 years I work with media, and I have to rediscover it again, you know?
HUO: And the hacker on discussion in the text, because we talk with regard to, Abbie Hoffman a lot about the hacker, about the disruption, the inconsistency, and the unpredictability. The three notions with regard to the hacker, you see it with regard to the role of the artist in a certain way? The idea of the hacker, like a visual terrorist or?
DB: Sure. Well, I don't know if I'm capable of it anymore, the visual terrorism. Probably the last works I've been doing that touch upon that, might in fact be somewhat anti-terrorist, such as hostage. But…
HUO: The piece with the targets…
DB: The targets. And to be targeted within that – to have not only a hostage in that case. For example, Hans Martin Schleyer, this was the events with the Baader-Meinhof in 1977. So I try in that work to look at it from many different positions. Everyone has a voice, and you have to question as the viewer – because it's still a viewer piece in a way. It's interactive, but I would say you're still a viewer in it. What role you have? And when you participate in that system, I think there's a tension where you are held hostage within it. There may be a hostage, you know, as such, but when you're participating in it, you become both a hostage to each other. There's that. And then as walking into that representation as a viewer who can interact with the installation – who can kind of cut across it, break the beam of transmission, make a kind of change in the rate of the representation and such – how are you participating? And then, you know, when you're outside looking in again, you see that a viewer has already been targeted. The laser beam hits the viewer. He's not always aware of it. He's sometimes aware of it because of the effect he has had on the motion of the representation. But it's always the other who is viewing – that one step removed – and that, also for the artist is: do you become always the…are you the observer of your culture, or are you observant of the culture and active within it? It's a strange boundary, all the time for me. I don't know. I always am questioning that, at least for myself, and maybe for the people who have seen my work and will see it. And even in a work that was created for TV, like the Damnation of Faust Trilogy, in the last part there's...I tried to give a gift to the two young women who I used in the first part. You see two people, young women, they're seductive. That's a big “no” sometimes to use. Why are you using seductive images, so much, of women? And then, when you're looking..I bring them back in part three, and when I bring them back, I ask them to look at themselves. And then the second half of part three is a timeline, and its documentary footage, and it's appropriated again. And I remember always one scene, because it came from the Civil Rights Movement: there was a lunch counter demonstration in the South, where for the first time, someone Black tried to sit at the counter and order like a white person – and he was viciously attacked. When you appropriate the images again, and you take them out of the original narrative flow, out of the original documentation of it and re-represent it. I think in that work, you feel the line that the person who documented that action had to take. He seems to me to be standing just on a line of looking into a scene where a man is being viciously beaten and I try to get, in a very guttural way, meaning get the feeling aroused in the viewer. If you took one step forward, you would be in that action and you would have to either, you would put yourself into a victimised role, or into a hostile role, yeah?
HUO: So that's very, like in the Paula Cooper show, in the very recent show about the targets, I had the same impression: like being a victim in the door at the same time. It's like targeting while looking outside, and being targeted all the time. It's both.
DB: Yeah, exactly. And so, I think that's it. It's just within the current of my work. It's good you say that, because I can only see the older works more than I see the more present ones. But it is there again, and if you take a half step backwards, you're a total observer. And I think the works for me, they don't bring an answer. I've never quite known how to do that. They always bring the question, and sometimes I think it's okay – because it's very good that if you have a good question, it's the first answer.
HUO: So, could one say that it's really like an osculation at the very thin, porous membrane, so to say, like back and forth?
DB: Absolutely. I don't know what the membrane is made of anymore. You know, it's a kind of intriguing issue: what substance it’s made of, how porous it is, how transitory, what speed it takes to get through it, or what slowness it takes to get through it. There was a wonderful book by Stanislaw Lem, and in this one he's working with two systems. The leftovers of previous generations, I think. Only what's leftover are machines, yeah? These, and there are very small units and very large units, and these large units are kind of like a clunky industrialization, I guess. And the smaller units perhaps are becoming the pieces of the computer we're getting exposed to. But it's the small units that don't think for themselves that come together and formulate a large unit when they're all acting in unison, it succeeds. It succeeds over a larger, like a colossus, a strength of a giant.
We were talking the other night about, for example, raves. Yeah? And if you go into the rave, you have to be almost a particle in it, you know, not a part of it, but a particle within it. And if the oscillation in that particle is different, you're almost expelled out, you know, with a force field you can feel yourself being pushed out. If you're within that system's oscillation, you are engulfed within it. And this is a lot of what needs to be constantly be a reminder of that – through media and through the relationship of how media now extends through computer, and obviously becomes the divisiveness of communication.
HUO: And that, I mean, appropriation you bring in with regard to the Faust piece. It is like in your very early video works like Wonder Woman, Kojak and so on. Was there a dialogue with other artists, having been in the '70's, mainly in the late '70's in New York, working around appropriation? I mean, you've much more been into appropriation of TV, appropriation of video. Other artists have been more into an appropriation of art history. Has there been a dialogue, or was it…?
DB: I didn't feel too much in a dialogue. But early on, I actually belonged to a group of artists. I got there because my boyfriend's best friend was in the group. They would come over late at night, and the men would discuss what was going on – then they realised I had a lot to say too. At first, I helped someone put their work together, and then they told me – this group, some whom have become quite well known, ‘Oh, you can make your own work.’ We were always trying to express ourselves in alternative spaces. Not like the kitchen in New York as an alternative, but more like finding a loft here, a space there – something that can work. And I think it's still a belief that I have. I'm on the board of directors for Creative Time, like an organisation that has a nucleus but determines the spatial properties each time in relation to the need of the artist in determining the work. Maybe this is also the kind of thing with museum in progress: What happens, what space is occupied. Do you use the space of media as the holes that are left in it? I mean, to reoccupy the newspaper, Der Standard, is very much like, you know, in a way that you use the halls of a medium: radio, newspaper, television wherever you can…
HUO: That leads maybe to your barbershop installation.
DB: It was a salon. It was a very posh salon in Soho. Not really, but it pretended. You know, it was a very fashionable place. I liked it because “barbershop” is wonderful. It's very 19th century America. You could go and get your hair cut there, and you didn't try to be in style, you just tried to be trim, yeah? And I think in the salon, they were trying to be a little exotic. I think they were the first store in New York to have a monitor. So now, when I have to talk to people – especially when lecturing to younger people – you know, their history is one where you can't get away from the monitor. And our history was more like, ‘oh, it's coming in,’ you know. So here was this one monitor. That was the installation. They had the monitor in a window, and they had their own photography montage in the background. I thought: ‘okay, they have their own representations in static form in photo.’ And it was great because they had three images of a woman, and her hair is being pulled back away from her and it's the man's hands coming after her with a scissor. So, it's a complete reverse mythology of power on the monitor. And then the monitor could play to the street or could play in and entertain the customers in the barbershop. They had the sound going out to the street too, which was a great advantage. So, they had one videotape at the time, and I always make everyone guess what it was. Can you guess?
HUO: A videotape of yours?
DB: One videotape. They had the Italian version of "Woodstock". Yeah. And I just played it, I don't know. So, I said to her, "Yeah, I would like to show, could I show my work, you know, in this window?" And she said, "Well, what is your work?" And I never know how to say exactly what my work is. So anyway, the easiest thing is to say, oh, "Wonder Woman", that's what it was. You know? And she said, "Oh, that's great. I love Wonder Woman." And then, well this is always my example of getting into the right spot, but for the wrong reason. And she said, "I've been told that I look like Wonder Woman," her, not me. And she did. Yeah? And so, she said, "Great, we'll put it on." We put it on a few weeks and people stopped in the street one Saturday. I went because it was Soho, a lot of people watching, you know, I felt very pleased.
HUO: Like Passerbys is like…
DB: Yeah, passerbys who became stopper-bys. Yeah? And I looked and I said, "Well, it's working." I told her I was very excited, I was also very young. And she said, "Yeah, but you can put TV on anywhere and people will stop."
HUO: But like, it leads to your real world somehow, doesn't it? This idea of…it's like the first time you put the video in a public space. And you have the people walking by.
DB: I think it is in the public space. It's interesting because there's so many different kinds of public space. And so later, when we do – actually; it's not later, it's now – face this aspect of virtual reality and cyberspace, we have to ask: what kinds of public and private spaces will there be? I do believe that last week, or maybe two weeks ago, it was the first time that finally a police force was put on through the worldwide web to patrol the system. The dynamic of the passerby on the street of New York, looking in a shop window, is perhaps different than a plaza, but not really. It is just a different…it's an attract loop, and in video you would say there's an attract loop to come to this plaza to shop, again to shop. We consume a lot in America. And the thing about the Rio VideoWall is actually, instead of Wonder Woman's body, the projection becomes…there are two cameras, and they pick up your body as you enter into this supposed public space or public dynamic.
HUO: So, it changes permanently?
DB: Yeah, it had to change to be permanent because I had the feeling that if you…maybe what they wanted was in my mind to make a beautiful video water fountain. This is a kind of static permanent. And I thought: how do you use imagery in video related works, in public space, that don't become old? What kind of flux can they have? So, the importance was to use three types of imagery, each one representing a different aspect. Historically, a video that would merge and form a kind of montage, and that the montage had to be always excited. Always stimulated. So, when you came into the shopping center from two points, it was your body image, and it was made into a silhouette. You became like a black hole. And this went up on the wall. But I had a filler because from satellite transmission, beamed down, whatever was being satellite transmitted for the feed for CNN, which is the headquarters was Atlanta, where the wall is. So, our CNN feed would fill your body. The news of the moment filled that area that had become voided, yeah?
HUO: It's permanently renewed.
DB: Yeah, so you are opening up a space. You open it up on the original visual imagery. The whole wall is actually the landscape that had been there before the plaza was built. It was land elements that were natural, they were ripped down, and there was the artificial, but the new natural was introduced. You saw this landscape and you're going shopping, right? So, you're getting away, usually. But here, as you enter into the shopping arena, you break open the memory of the old and you, your body, transmits the memory of the new, the cable axis, satellite axis. And you have no control over the imagery coming through your own body.
HUO: You really all talked about the dynamic standstill. What do you think about this notion? It creates a standstill in a certain way. A break, a rupture. A stop, which is dynamic.
DB: Yeah. In in which one are we talking?
HUO: The real wall?
DB: Oh, the real wall. What I tried to do, I think – I wonder if it ruptures – I was more ruptured by the corporate system that put it up than perhaps I was able to. When this project was started, it was seen as this perfect marriage by both the corporation and the arts organisation presenting it. And this happens again now, in years later, in St. Fulton, that we make an attempt to have a permanent artwork – a permanent artwork that is involving media. In Rio, what happened is, it was to bring a history together into a collage – a fluid collage. Your image is captured perhaps before you notice it. Upon entering into what was designated as a public space, which was a plaza and actually functioned well as a public space, it was surrounded by the shops. It's designed by a fairly well-known fir: Arquitectonica. The interesting thing is that both the developer and the architect said that they want to change a kind of philosophy toward these malls, these shopping malls in America, and to make their project different: the design of it and perhaps the structure of it. They would eliminate the anchor store. There's always an anchor, right? It's the big – you know, if we were talking about large and small – it's the one that has the power, the big name, the Bloomingdale's, et cetera. That's the attractor. Then stores feed off of it. Here, they took the anchor store away and said the anchor store will now become some kind of artwork for the public. Yeah? I have a wonderful videotape that in my old age, I want to look at and laugh many times. They recorded for the artists who would join this competition. It was an open competition: the meeting between the arts organisations, the advisors, the developer, the architect. The architect and the developer said, "But what can we have that would attract people?" The developer says, "We want to attract the new gentry." Do you know what that is?
HUO: Yeah
DB: I didn't actually, but it meant like a yuppie, I guess. In a way that term – it was the upcoming people, young people. That's who we wanna attract. “Oh, very good. How do we attract them? It's gotta be something.” And they're looking for a word and the word they come up with is finally electronic. That something electronic will bring them in. And the developer says, "Yes, once in England, I saw this.” What he meant was like a video wall. I think one of the first ones that went into the minds of the young people and pulled things out. They go to the media organisation down in the south, in Atlanta, and say, "What should we do?" "Oh, have you seen any video art?" Then they put out an international competition for video art. I was so afraid of what they would get that I decided to compete.
HUO: So it was basically a criticality of the proposal, which led to the… I always thought about the video wall as like – there is this book of Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, which he took as a point of departure for his film. And there’s this like, almost tyranny through a big video wall at home. It's also like an inversion.
DB: This is funny because, for example with Nam June Paik – one of the walls, I believe it was the wall created during a show called Image World at the Whitney Museum, around…I don't remember the year, let's say in the early '90's. And perhaps a piece of that wall was sold to someone in Hawaii, and they made a big wall. And I just can't imagine kind of looking at the wall and the water. I guess this is perfect for some kind of states of mind. Nam June always wanted to go like into a bedroom where the whole wall was video. And I think sometimes it's crazy that I do video and media-related work because, just as I did in architecture, when I said I was actually against building, and I think with the video sometimes I'm kind of against too much of a proliferation of imagery – electronic imagery. I don't have a compulsive love of electronics surrounding me.
HUO: And you would, in a certain way…didn't it change a lot since, in the last years? Like in terms of blurring of categories. I was always having categories: it’s either it's cinema or photography or video. Or painting. And I think the whole question now is just about images and what happens between images, and passages of images. And I think it might be interesting if you talk about your very first work, which was very much about the L’entre-images as Ballour called, the in-between space. These photographs you took from TV as a sequence.
DB: Yeah, yeah. It was…
HUO: '77?
DB: '77. Do you remember it?
HUO: From you telling me.
DB: Thank you. Well, I think this is the thing too, is that, you know, now everything comes in this way, digitally. And one could become, perhaps, quite cynical. Because if you spent time arguing the difference, as was taught about a lot at the end of the '70's into the '70's, between film and video – there are differences. Now everything becomes just information bits, you know, bits of information and such digital bits. So, it's a strange way to look at the world. The beginning pieces…I did some very early work that I would like to rescue, and one was called Mirror. This one, I think it's a good work, but I haven't seen it in many years because when you first made work in 1977, you had, as an artist, not as an industry person – we had the open reel system. And also on video, this is a great thing, you can't hold it up like film. You can't see the image. And I think, for me, I like the idea of playing chess a lot more, you know? And I felt video was like this: that I had to be seven moves ahead and seven behind, and I could never see one. I only saw it in my mind. And this was like a good excitement. But the first things were static. You're right off TV, to say, because in '77 you didn't have Betamax and VHS or anything. You just had imagery coming at you. And I thought, how do you capture these images? So, 20th century, you know, photo. And I tried to look. I say, what are the main images? It’s very structuralist, yeah? What is the C major chord of the images? Oh, it's reverse angle shot, prime time. When everyone looks the most – people look in America – what do they see? Oh, they see crime drama. That's the most. What is crime drama? Oh, it's a lot of reverse angle shots, showing, creating the tension of, you know, who you're identifying with. And so, I took these, and I put them up and surrounded the gallery wall with this image and then took the audio out. Very kind of typical when you look back at that period. So, the text is the visual text and the narrative. If you really stop action at that time, and you read what was being said in that framework of the visual representation. For me, it was even worse than I had imagined. Two policemen in a car look out through the windshield at the other. The other is a Black man. Well, even today in America, of course he must be the perpetrator. He must be the one we have to get. He did a crime. They say, "Oh, you think that's our guy?" "Yeah, that's our turkey." He says, "Yeah, I want him so bad I can almost taste him and eat him." That was American TV.
HUO: So, it became an instant critique of cliches.
DB: Yeah, it was unfortunately the cliches. Everything was stereotyped. And especially, I think, when I wanted to deal with the role that was assigned to women, you know, you see that in all the early pieces. Like Wonder Woman, I, she transformss. She saves mankind. Of course, it's good to have a Wonder Woman, because there’s a Superman, Batman, Hulk. So, they had a woman transforming into a more primitive race. She's kind of asexual. You don't have sex in there. She changes her image from normal secretary into Wonder Woman. And as an Amazon, she goes forward to save mankind.
HUO: And you changed speed also with when you went in, after the, the images you took out as photographs, you went into video with "Wonder Woman", Coltrane and so on. You changed speed, you accelerated, you slowed down. Was this about creating other narratives, or?
DB: Never. Not at the beginning. I never, I took exactly what was there.
HUO: It was only repetition.
DB: Yeah. And the thing is, when you see it, because it's taken out of the narrative flow and you look and you think the speed is wrong, you know, or if you have to, like in "Laverne and Shirley", which was called "Adrift of Politics", it's my first installation, there are two women and that was all about two shots. They confront the world together. They face the world together. This was the end of the so-called nuclear family in America. Meaning that where's the father? Where's the mother, psht? No, we're, we are as adolescent Americans kind of alone now. They're women, but girlish women, they go out, they work on an assembly line. When you see the original programme, "Laverne and Shirley", they have working on a Coke, a cola bottle line. They finally take, I didn't think of this. They took off their rubber gloves, okay, this is around 1977 and put the rubber glove over the Coke bottle. So now with AIDS, unfortunately, I guess, and the need for everything having the rubber membrane. But here they cover it with these rubber gloves and they leave the plant and they go out into the world and they are their own nuclear family. And the first shows I presented it with another woman, Suzanne Kuffler. And we were both doing our own work, but we had the feeling, I mean for me it was "Laverne and Shirley" that I had to go out and face the world together. And at least I had another very bright woman to talk with. And we wouldn't make collaborative work, but we would collaborate in getting the work out there. But I thought it's really important, you don't change the speed, you don't change the medium. You know, you don't speak from another voice, you speak from that voice. And if with "Laverne and Shirley", for example, I took only, you know, you butt edit, you take it and just butt edit it. Assembly edit, two shots. Then I made a subtitle because I took the audio and I put it in a separate room. And I thought, let the audio be like a radio play when you go in there. And let this be its imagery, the two shots. But you could read in the subtitles what they were saying and frame. The subtitles went so fast you couldn't believe what they were saying. You know?
HUO: So all this became visible through shift of context, through…
DB: Absolutely. And through not shifting the medium, because there was a peer group, as you mentioned. I did relate myself in a way to people dealing early on with media related images like Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine. But if Robert Longo, as an example, would take an image from a fast bender film and he would freeze the moment and isolate it, he would take someone like this, you know, someone back who had been shot in the back. And they, meaning Robert and Jack Goldstein for example, talked about media space as a kind of new empty space. And Andrew Pike talked about it as a non-gravitational space. Yeah? So you had, the image was extracted also, Robert made it into sometimes relief painting early on, very early on. Jack Goldstein sometimes made it into painted form, took a rotoscope, isolated the main object of the image, or did some very brilliant films that no one watches enough anymore is, you know, and isolated these images. For me though, they always were translating the medium and I wanted the medium on itself. And so eventually this became, I remember in Amsterdam they had an, not an exhibition, but a kind of multi parted exhibition talk symposium. And they were, the organisers gave me a compliment and said, they named it in part after what I was doing. And they called it talking back to the media. And I think this was it. I wanted to arrest the image without translating it. And I thought, how do you put video onto video? You know? Television on television, especially at a time when you don't have the Betamax and the VHS. So people said that I became a pirateer. Oh, she's the one who is the pirate of the images. And it's interesting because in the '70's I had this ferocious image, you know, I had, I was just a singular woman pirate, not so often and got, you know, my photo around a lot. Yeah, she's the pirater of the images. Then we were teasing and saying maybe in the '80's you, oh, in the early '80's you say, oh, she was pirate of the image. She appropriated images. She stole images. Oh she samples image. You know, it kind of goes like that as the generations change.
HUO: And then you made a book sometime ago, quite shortly indeed. That in short, with exploring sources like an explosion of sort through regard to situation. In terms of stealing, I mean…
DB: Well I did steal…
HUO: In a sense creative thefts, creative theft.
DB: But the creative theft process was absolved by the situationist. And at the very beginning, it's dedicated to these people who made these anonymous street posters. And it's something I really respect with the original, that the original was seen as a multiple and it was owned by everyone. And when it was produced, it was basically, I think silk screened, yeah? They became plastered on the walls, like in, you know, in Paris. And it was said, you can take these images, you can take these words. There is no copyright. I am actually in a dilemma. I took images that I felt belonged to me, that didn't. Like "Wonder Woman". No, you cannot make my landscape into that image of a woman. You cannot only send that one way at me, a woman who transforms by a burst of light and spinning around in space three times. This was a special effect in 1977. Now you know what you see in special effect, in a burst of light she changes. And I said, "No, it's not acceptable. And it's my landscape." TV at that time was being watched by the average American family, seven hours and 20 minutes a day on the average. So I said, "It's landscape. I can paint my own landscape, I can take from it. There's no difference." And I took the imagery. Now the strange thing, the images were put back out again, like a kind of throwing up almost again of the double, right. Taking it in, throwing it back out in a kind of sense. If it was thrown back out, I put it on cable TV opposite the real "Wonder Woman". I put it into Film Festival of Avantgarde Film. I made it a film like a barroom B film. It penetrated the storefront. It was the image that's sold now in the storefront of a chair. But what happens after that years later, is the nightmare in a way. I felt like I owned that image. And that's the strangeness of art making practise forming.
HUO: Like a boomerang.
DB: It's a boomerang, it comes back again. But what I'm saying is that with the situationists, they created images as with the posters that were sent out to affect mass numbers of people if possible. And they didn't attempt to own those images. The images were made to affect a relationship with a viewer.
HUO: There was no signing. Nobody signed,
DB: No one signed it. And you were told these are anonymous and you can take them. Okay, I've become an owner in some ways, only of "Wonder Woman". And I think for me, I have to constantly now always again ask questions of myself. What images am I making? What am I making that's consumed? How saleable it becomes, what marketplace am I playing into? You know, there's an image highway, not only an information highway, and the image highway in part was the galleries and the system of selling of images. And for us, meaning a peer group more like let's say of Bill Viola or Gary Hill. It's different now again. But I would say at the very beginnings, Mary Lucier, we got into video because we thought it's a multiple, you know, it doesn't carry the aura.
HUO: Was it also against, in a certain belief system, Lucy Lippard one said about feminism, she said "The goal of feminism is to change the character of art and to directly attack in a certain way the infrastructures of the art world." Was it also at the beginning, this idea of attacking the infrastructures of the art world. Or at least undermining.
DB: I think we thought there would be something else. I don't think it was made so much to directly to undermine. I think I had such a non-belief in that structure that it didn't matter to me. My belief, and I hope this, I want this still to be true. The belief was in the message. So I don't know how McLuhan I am, you know, or such, but I just knew something has to be said. And I did perhaps see art for me, very idealistically. It was an activist position. It was one of the few positions that could be held in a society that was activist. Then the more I learn, the more you see what is controlled and how do you become the one who penetrates and perhaps becomes, do you wanna be the hacker? I don't know.
HUO: That means a vehicle. You always saw video as a vehicle.
DB: Maybe I saw art as the vehicle
HUO: Just before coming maybe to the last couple of questions, we are running out of time. With regard to your recent installations, I had one question about the sources that the, in, with regard to the early works often started Raymond Williams. What was the importance of Raymond Williams texts?
DB: Well, the, the importance is probably very early on, I, I became, I had lived in Italy. That's where I found video-
HUO: In 75 Florence. Was it Florence?
DB: Yeah. Yeah. In Florence, in little, little gallery with a big message. And they were doing videotapes. And originally I thought that they were, I was very homesick. I didn't know one word of Italian. I went there for my lover. And I went to, and I hate to say this, but I like the story so much because we thought, he wanted to make me feel better. And he said, "Look, Dara, we can go to see an opera tonight and we're going to see an opera." So we go in and it wasn't an opera, it was an opera. And people came on the stage, yes? In pageantry dress at a long table. And then they took out the budget for the year for Florence. And they started to read the numbers of the report of the budget, yeah? Of the public works, the opera. And I looked and I thought, "Oh God." And I said, "No, I can't stand this anymore." Typical of me and in a kind of fit I ran away. And I said, "I remember seeing something that I all found interesting and I'm going down the street to look at it." Well, what it was was two pictures in a gallery window in a small shop, one of which was, you know, this one, the , this one had an image, I didn't know it at the time. And one was the book against Dennis Oppenheim. The book in the sun.
HUO: "The Burn", sunburn?
DB: Yeah, "The Burn", yeah. I didn't know this stuff. So I can, what is this? You know, in the back of the gallery they were watching television, but they weren't watching television. They were watching video art. I didn't know. They said, "Oh, come in, come in." And it's the first video artwork I ever saw was in that gallery. Yeah. And it was very potent for me. You know, I saw it as a tool, really good tool. But I didn't answer your question. I think.
HUO: With Raymond Williams.
DB: Oh wait, Raymond Williams. So in this thing of meeting my first video artworks, video artist, artists using video, whatever it was, one person I met back in New York immediately was Dan Graham. Dan Graham had wonderful books. He still does. And I think he was the one who said, well, you can read this, I lend it to you as a friend. Or, so I think the Raymond Williams was on his bestseller list, you know, and he was the one at the time that was showing us from the stance of England that still had a nuclear family, that in fact TV was programmed structural way, that it had this kind of good record format, right? For people at home, especially housewives and how they brought it up and et cetera. So this was the beginning, you know, that's why from Raymond Williams, primetime, what is it in America? The writings that were being done, the best writings were on film in England in the '70's, in my opinion. And it was semiotics first and then psychoanalytic, then feminist psychoanalytic, et cetera. And you know, in America we just eat popcorn and watch movies.
HUO: Maybe about TV.
DB: What better way to end?
HUO: Because you're talking the salon, the barber shop.
DB: The barber shop,
HUO: Than the real world. So about most besides museums, art gallery is most different context where you contextualise, show your work. You also place exhibition, so to say, or interventions within television directly. What does this mean? I mean, for you like, like your MTV, maybe it would be interesting to talk a bit about your more recent MTV project.
DB: There were two only. One was an art break where MTV came to me. Yeah. And so in 1983, I think early on they took six artists in the United States, but I was the only video artist. And they said, you do whatever you wanna do. And everyone was so hot, you know, to look at the new kind of graphics that could be made and digital processing or at that time Claymation, how to animate the image, you know? And they had really the most grotesque representation of women as they still do in my opinion. And maybe of men also. So they said, "You've got 30 seconds, and you have no budget, okay?" And I said, "Yeah, well you know, as an artist working with video, I never have a budget". They said, "No, we mean that you go wherever you want. We're paying your bills. Okay?" So for an artist, that's a very privileged position in a way. The art world in America, I thought was already beginning to feel censorship that was getting very strong now, unfortunately. Okay, so 30 seconds, what do you say? And I had friends, I remember very stern warning coming from someone like Benjamin Buchloh, critic, with Marxist based, "What are you going to do for MTV entering into the supermarket of imagery?" And I said, "I'd rather enter and risk and fail and someone learn from it than not enter it." And so I went for a very early cartoon animation of Max Fleischer, "Koko the Clown". And he came out of the inkwell and he, they, so out of the inkwell pen Fleischer drew Koko the clown. And Koko used to get into fights with the guy who animated him, Fleischer. And take the pen away from him and say, "You're not going to animate me anymore. I'm animating myself." So I guess I was very sympathetic to Koko growing up, very much. And now as a woman in America, I thought, "Oh, fuck your images of women on MTV, you know, this is really getting ugly, so I'll animate myself. Anyway, I took the flasher, cut it up a lot, very quick, 30 seconds. And anyway, in this kind of quick mini narrative, you see Fleischer drawing Coco, Koko looks up the machine is a machine drawing now, a woman for Koko he has to have a woman. I don't blame him. And then he looks up and he gets really excited looking at the image of the woman. And then the machine has an erase arm and it erases the woman. And he gets very, you know, anyway, in this case, we changed the animation. I found someone who did illustration for Fleischer's Studios in the '40's. and he did sell animation. I thought, I'm going back to original animation in Americ that was really strong because everyone was looking for the newest digital, or a digital version of a film scratch. You know, people would be sitting there wasting a fortune of money trying to make MTV videos that look like scratch film. So instead of making scratch film, they would make beautiful image, you know, in a three-tube camera. And then they'd get someone in post-production to put in the scratches. And you're sitting there for a thousand dollars an hour putting scratches on film. So I thought, I'm going to the original animation, I'm getting the cell animation, we are redrawing it. And in this case, the kiss that she blows to Koko becomes an MTV. It's a rock of MTV. It lands on his crotch, she falls out of the frame and at the end you see a woman animator now trying to make a new image and in her palette already is Fleischer. So the history already becomes just simply the digital information, you know, we're all becoming part of the palette.
HUO: So that was the second…
DB: That's the first one. I didn't even get to the second one. Yeah. And that was Thursday. Years later they come back, they didn't come back. The Whitney Museum, the American Centre in Paris and the public art fund came and said, "You are one of seven people we picked who do work with video imagery. We will be able to give you some money. In that money, you'll create a piece that will be shown on MTV. And this was called "TransVoices". And my piece was called "Transgressions". Now in a history of practical history of video art making, let's say, or art making with video, if the year was somewhere around, again, 1992 or so, then you have almost 10-year difference. Now the difference was I got twice as much time, so 60 seconds instead of 30 seconds to express myself in and about less than half as much money. It was very funny. There was no limit of budget at that time. MTV went anywhere, everywhere they wanted to go. And by '92 you're offered freely as an artist using this kind of visual medium, almost no money unfortunately. Someone in a commercial area doing commercials for MTV would use the money that was given to us to make the entire 60 seconds. They would use it in a few hours of time in house. That one though, was about taking in the ones that went to MTV also went to Canal+, and it was to have a dialogue. It was '92 because it was about where are you now in 1992? For America, it's a celebration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus finding America. And in France you have the EEC. So I mean, these wonderful things you have that don't exist for me at all. So, you know, the EEC didn't go together in '92. If you're a little wise, you know that it's a little perverse to say that Christopher Columbus founded America. Of course, he did find one history that did find America in that way. And who, who do you speak? So we had a cross dialogue of trans voices. And in my piece, it shows a lot of mappings and its mappings of the growth of the United States, of France, everything in transition, boundaries in transitions. And you know, from Virilio anyway, I did, 'cause I did read all those books that now we deal with invisible boundaries or boundaries much less visible to us. This again becomes part of the work for St. Paulin. Again, if you are making a new capital of lower Austrian St. Paulin, it will be on May 31st, 1996. And I thought, I'm going to find St. Paulin all the way back, I can find it. And I said, you won't find. I found it on the old Roman Road. It was there so early on. So I want, for someone who travels through the space and time of the new government complex to see the constant fluidity of what we make as boundary.
HUO: So, and San Pertin leads in a certain way, the San Pertin project to also to the project in Austria. I mean, besides the the most different exhibition you've spoken about, there is also I think a shift in your, a large scale installation in the 1990's to more and more a passage notion in a sense. And the idea that that basically there is not one viewpoint, is like lots of different plateaus within the exhibition. Maybe as a last point would be interesting if you talked a little bit about the Tiananmen piece, about the transmission power, the "Transmission of Power" you've already mentioned with regard to documenta as far as the content is concerned, but maybe also formally as... Somehow in the space and also your war after war.
DB: Yeah, I think they're each a little different, but they're each, for me an investigation. Tiananmen Square was, and that came after the Rio VideoWall. So here we have for Rio, this television box is one of the units, you know, and you could eventually relate this to pixel and just use a microcosm and a macrocosm. But anyway, television box breaks through its frame, whatever that means. First time in history. Well, because the image was contained and then the image pushed out right into multi framed, making it larger than it could be. For me, Tiananmen Square was a very large image. It was CNN round the clock, bringing you images that I had no way and still probably have no way to really absorb. Certainly, if there was Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War did it better and worse at the same time. And in seeing that, I then made very small boxes on a landscape of imagery, which was the LCD monitor of the moment. An image that you can see only frontally. And if you go to the side, it goes out. That's the mechanics of it, the technology of it. You see them only as lights hanging from the ceiling as if information has come down at you. Not video pedestals that put video work on the pedestal. Here was always the attempt to hang, I think, because the feeling was already, as with "The Transmission Tower", it's coming from out there, here. I just think that, you know, it was such a tradition in video that does develop this bedrock foundation for video sculpture, right? And at the time, a lot of people working in it, and the way museums and institutions chose to contextualise it was to build a platform for it as a base for a sculptural event. You put the monitor on, you see the image. So here was coming like lights. I thought they have to be something between utilitarian lights, small, right? At at a distance, you only see light. When you come closer, you see image. So in the proximity of the viewer in the space, the viewer has to travel through that space to see many small images. There is perhaps my point of view, no eyewitness news, we have that slogan for channel seven. It's one of the basic, ABC, one of the big networks, "We bring to you eyewitness news." No, you bring to me obviously a mediated portion of news. And in America, since about the year 1965, they own the news. Before that it was in public domain. So here, if you say ABC, Tiananmen Square, they own the news, you have to buy it from them. And so if you go and say, I really want to do this work and we represent the news, oh, and who do you make it for? Will you make it for the state of New York? We charge you one rate per minute for the news. And do you make it for the country of America? Oh, you also wanna go to Europe, which countries? And then you get all different amounts you have to pay out and you even have a rate now for the cosmic, for the universe and you pay for that. So it knows already where it's going out there.
HUO: Like a TV bank. Like an image bank.
DB: Yeah. Not only a bank, but they wanna own territory. You know? it's very, I mean, I like it, I think the most important thing for me in my work has been to find out first what the mechanism of television was to question it. And then to find this larger mechanism, developing this communication, that networking that happens. And even television knew and projected itself out into space already. You know, so it had that idea of going out there and then you had all this writing about when it goes out there, "Wonder Woman", you know, eventually someone in a distant planet will pick it up and they will see "Wonder Woman" at a different time and space than we ever have. So I think with the works of Tiananmen Square, et cetera, it was to say, you've made an awfully large image for me on TV. I have to deal with that size and I have to know that there's no unity really in that image.
HUO: So you show different views, basically.
DB: Different views, from student kind of garage-y song they composed, "The Wound of History" to the exact moment, which for me was a very important moment in the history of television. It was the exact moment that CNN and CBS were taken off air, where they were told you will cease to exist in that way. There will be no satellite transmission of images. This is by the Chinese government, knowing that they would eventually break down, you know, and crack down on the students. They ceased it. There's a very good thing, it's an interesting thing for me that signifies what in my artwork, the pulse I wanna reach. Yeah? To take and to give back again. Dan Rather, Scorpio like me, he goes and he's hearing on his headphones, okay, he's trying to do an interview out of giving up to the minute news. They knew at any minute, any moment, not a minute, but any moment perhaps this goes to violence. That's what everyone looked for. The break, the rupture, okay? Where this would happen, he's there to have the image of him headphones on a big satellite dish in the background and so what he's hearing in his headphones is they just broke transmission of CNN, okay? And he's hearing from their field reporters, we're getting the first images of violence happening by the police cracking down on people. And he, CNN, when I show you that, we show you, we represented it. You see that in the CNN newsroom when the government comes in to issue, stop it, right? They're pushing them back out. They're trying physically to say, "No. What are you doing? You can't stop us." Dan Rather makes it a diplomatic moment. He stalls, he says to the government as they come in, "I'm sorry, I don't understand. Oh, you need to shut us down?" What he's doing is buying time. He bought 1/16 of a second or so. And by buying enough time, really just few seconds there, he got the first images that there was violence happening out to the audiences worldwide. Okay? That's my interest there. To see these historic moments in time and how they affect us. I think I want to leave a kind of totem, I wanna leave pieces of the history in this crazy, industrialised telecommunication that affects all of us. You know, maybe it's the telecommunications that are making an envelope that's a membrane.
HUO: I thought also there is not a path given. There's not any path given. It's a backlog where every viewer finds her on his own path.
DB: Yeah, this is true because, and this too, that I, you can be a director of no path. It's very important that, and there is still a viewer in a very traditional sense. One comes and looks at this and it's usually encased in art. And each one, yes, should very much find what images. But overriding the small images are repeat loops of different aspects. There's a large monitor in the background and there's a surveillance switcher. And the surveillance switcher is going around the room and taking grabs of these images and putting them up on the large monitor kind of randomly. So if you're viewing an image, that image may be by the surveillance switchers taken away from you and all of a sudden put on the large monitor as TV. So there's all of this too. And I think maybe that in the work, maybe it is about control. When are you in control or out of control? When are you in control of your own representation or out of control of it? Do you have the ability to control it? Even going back into 1979 and "Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry", it shows women presenting themselves. They're all in a kind of grid structure of a tic-tac toe board of boxes. And I very purposely use the images of women and stereotype them even further. So to look at the cliche, a blonde, a brunette, a young girl, a redhead, you know, and each one makes a different gesture. And you see it because I've dislocated it, I've repeated it. And you see how they're fighting to find an identity to ride over the stereotype. How do you introduce yourself to an audience of millions? What becomes your identity? Is it in the smallest nuance of gesture or form? And this, thou, how do you introduce yourself in, and now we go into worldwide web. Okay? So we have a big, big television audience in a certain way. You're introducing yourself, you're going on a bulletin board, which bulletin board? And if would say, "Ah, video. Very good, no gravity." Now, you have no identity. You make your identity. Right? Well, I think I'll be Laura today. I mean, only because it's happening, that to escape, I think really one says, "This is great, I can live my fantasies in a good way." Okay? The first case already of stalking, of a man pursuing a woman, it happened that way. Came about I think a few months ago. Can you sue someone? Can you make a judgement, a legal judgement? Stop him. He's stalking me. You know, you've become a raper. You know this, can you rape through the system, and can you rape identity? So I guess that maybe it's been that there is an evolved crisis of identity and the ability to act as an individual in a highly technocratic society. And I know from the very beginning from "Wonder Woman", I knew that that's a very technocratic view of a woman. You either heroize her or you underrate her as a secretary. And where did you ever create for me, just meaning my representation. Where am I in between? There was no space in between. The burst of light said that I'm a secretary, I'm a wonder woman, I'm a secretary, I'm a wonder woman. And nothing in between. And the in between is really the reality we need to live in.