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Mapping Intermediality in Performance (review)

Leonardo Reviews not only the technological critique of the dominant medium of these days, namely television, but also the ideological critique of the dominant cultural messages spread by television and related popular media (such as of course film and comics). Television was considered by avant-garde artists and critical theorists as a medium that had betrayed the possibilities of social interaction, dialogue and critique enabled by the very technology: Broadcasting is indeed not the only way of using television technology, and artists as well as social activists were looking for ways to “talk back” to the medium (David Joselit’s Feedback is a key publication in this regard). And the messages it carried to the public were characterized by a strong ideological subtext that was, among many other things, very womanunfriendly. On the other hand, there was an attempt to remediate these flaws, both by exploring video’s medium-specificity and by resisting the ideological meanings of the dominant media. Video was not (only) used as a carrier for other meanings, it was an opportunity to explore, that is, to invent a new visual language, which was used in its turn as a way of criticizing the belief that images, most importantly television images, were transparent windows on the world. Moreover, the new video art also investigated the (in this case sexist) ideology of the messages spread by popular and media culture, which were attacked and deconstructed through the classic avant-garde mechanisms of sampling and collage. T.J. Demos describes with great clarity the historical context of Birnbaum’s video, stressing very rightly the relationships between the beginnings of video art and the postmodern aesthetics of appropriation art as exemplified by Craig Owens’s work around the landmark Pictures exhibition. He also underlines the strong input of screenbased critical and feminist film theory, as illustrated by theoretically schooled filmmakers such as Mulvey and Wollen. Yet contrary to other works of the same artistic and ideological movement, Birnbaum’s reworking of the Wonder Woman mythology and television series has never had the same homogeneous and politically streamlined reception as that of most other works by her colleagues and competitors (one of the critical voices in this regard was that of Benjamin Buchloh). From the very beginning, there were doubts on the political “correctness” of this video, and today it is even seen by many spectators, including women, as defending a positive image of a strong, postfeminist woman. For T.J. Demos, this persistent ambivalence is not a flaw of Birnbaum’s work but one of its major strengths, and the fact that after three decades the Wonder Woman video is still producing such divergent interpretations should be the core question of any analysis of the work. Demos rejects, and I think he is right in doing so, the easy hypothesis of the multiple audiences: If Birnbaum’s work engenders various readings, it is not only because the public is different, both synchronically and diachronically, but also and foremost, and this is a much more courageous hypothesis, because Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman takes very seriously the strength of popular culture and dominant media and does not discard automatically the positive aspects of our fascination with this kind of culture. Birnbaum’s work is a highbrow critique of lowbrow culture, but one that does not take as its starting point the unbridgeable gap between both. How this complex relationship between distance and fascination works is discussed in the final sections of Demos’s analysis in reference to notions such as experience, interaction and affect (and, not unsurprisingly, the names of Bourriaud and Massumi are mentioned more than once). The aim of the One World series, which focuses on specific works, is of course not to give definitive answers to very general questions, but T.J. Demos’s discussion of Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman is a valuable contribution to a better, that is, a less a priori negative understanding of our long-standing oscillation between involvement and critical distance in contemporary mass culture.