Damnation of Faust: Evocation

Dara Birnbaum

1983, 10:02 min, color, sound

Evocation is the prologue of the three-part series Damnation of Faust, in which Birnbaum transforms the Faustian myth into a dreamlike introspection on the duality of the internalized self and the external world. A playground scene, shot in the streets of lower Manhattan, is the work's literal...

Local TV News Analysis

Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham

1980, 61:08 min, color, sound

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneous realities of the news are revealed within one composite frame: the receivership of the family at home; the...

Minor Threat

Dan Graham

1983, 38:18 min, color, sound

The function of both popular and underground music in contemporary culture has long been a point of inquiry for Graham in his analyses of the social implications of cultural phenomena. Here he documents Minor Threat, a "hardcore" band from Washington D.C., in a performance at CBGB in New York....

MTV: Artbreak

Dara Birnbaum 

1987, 30 sec, color, sound

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television.

Performance and Stage-Set Utilizing Two-Way Mirror and Video Time Delay

Dan Graham and Glenn Branca 

1983, 45:45 min, b&w, sound

A restructuring of the gaze informs this installation/performance work, produced and performed by Graham and musician Glenn Branca for Graham's 1983 retrospective exhibition Pavilions at the Kunsthalle in Berne, Switzerland. The audience was seated on the right and the musicians on the left, both...

PM Magazine/Acid Rock

Dara Birnbaum

1982, 4:09 min, color, sound

PM Magazine/Acid Rock is a spectacle of visuals and sound, a delirious collage of appropriated TV imagery and dynamic pop music. The introduction to the nightly television broadcast PM Magazine and a segment of a Wang computer commercial are the sources for the highly edited and computerized...

TRANSVOICES: transgressions

Dara Birnbaum

1992, 60 sec, color, sound

Birnbaum swiftly traces the geopolitical history of the U.S and then France, charting their constant reconfigurations across maps rendered malleable through special effects. A densely layered soundtrack guides the viewer through this "anti-terrain," in which boundaries are arbitrary and national identities unstable.

Westkunst (Modern Period): Dan Graham Segment

Dan Graham and Ernst Mitzka 

1980, 7:10 min, color, sound, In German and English.

Graham's analysis of the ideological and social function of urban and suburban architectural spaces, and the role of television in private and public spaces, is featured in this segment of a West German film on contemporary artists. Documentation and illustrations of the concepts and format of...