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Evocation of Faust: Charming Landscape

Dara Birnbaum

1987 00:07:00 United StatesEnglishColor
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Description

The final work in the Damnation of Faust Trilogy, ironically titled Charming Landscape, investigates the way in which the urban landscape is a place "where you lose your identity.” Two female residents of the inner city tell their stories in casual, on-the-street interviews. Building upon the theme of submerged violence, Birnbaum presents the fiery culmination of the legend in eerie slow-motion collage scenes of political unrest — from the lunchroom protests of Greensboro, NC, to the student revolts in Tiannanmen Square.

This title is also available on Dara Birnbaum: Damnation of Faust Trilogy.

About Dara Birnbaum

An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79) and TV genres (Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new “ready-mades” for the late 20th Century—works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

See also: Dara Birnbaum: An Interview