Acid Rock, 1982
, 4 min 9 s, colour, sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Since the end of the 1970s Dara Birnbaum has been making videos and installations in different formats with which she tries to recontextualise and subvert the icons of pop culture and the mass- media archetypes related to the consumer society and television. This is why her works sometimes take the form of telefilms, soap operas, sports programmes, publicity spots or music videos, into which she inserts subtexts that critically deconstruct the underlying ideology of the images. This is the approach taken in Acid Rock, a video made in 1982 for Documenta 7 in Kassel, during the period when the MTV music video channel flourished and had most influence in the American music industry. Dara Birnbaum recomposes the Doors’ song L.A. Woman and appropriates elements from advertising as though they were ready-mades, turning them into a feminist and anti-consumer tirade criticising the sexism of television advertising.
The wind blows, rubbing against my legs made of layers of metal and wires, swaying the leaves of grass that have shot up from the cracks in the tarmac, and going off to the windows that look like the eyes of dead children in the wrecked buildings that seem to be everywhere as far as the eye can see.
We, by which I mean some of my classmates and I, knew about Paula Rego. I’ll have to admit, I didn’t know where Rego was from or even where in Europe Portugal was. I thought she was English. Let me tell you how I first heard the very un-English sounding name “Paula Rego”
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Pera Museum invites artist Benoît Hamet to reinterpret key pieces from its collections, casting a humorous eye over ‘historical’ events, both imagined and factual.
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