Monday, February 14, 2022

Wonder Woman

                                                

We stepped into a small area outside of a gallery and this was straight ahead of us.  The thing is, seeing this video screen on a pole was what first grabbed my attention.  That just seemed so unusual, a single floor to ceiling pole with a TV screen in the middle!  The artwork was not the screen and the pole, it was the video that was playing on the screen.  And the video was Wonder Woman!  There were clips of her from the TV show showing her in action, and explosions!  The piece is called "Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman 1978-79," by Dara Birnbaum.  At that time, she began working with footage hijacked from television broadcasts.  She re-edited material from the popular program "Wonder Woman" to emphasize how mass media alternates between heroic and trivializing depictions of women.  "Where am I between the two?" Birnbaum has asked.  "I'm a secretary, I'm a Wonder Woman, and there's nothing in-between.  And the in-between is the reality we need to live in."



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