Here, Dara Birnbaum portrays a teenager confronting her inner world with reality, by developing a form of treatment specific to video technique. In a typically New York setting, young children are filmed in the fenced playgrounds of the city. Amid seesaws, sneakers, and group games, the children go about their business on their own turf, far from adult supervision. Then the age category changes, the camera turns to teenagers who present a similar group dynamic and carefree attitude. The film returns several times to a young girl reading alone on a street corner. Shown at a distance from the others, and set to darker music by Sonic Youth, she observes from afar.  

Dara Birnbaum creates a visual game with the theme of the fence. Omnipresent in these public spaces, this limit creates a boundary between the groups, highlighting social divisions. By alternating different fade effects and focal lengths, the artist modifies the relationship between interior and exterior: children glimpsed behind the fence are later reunited in the foreground, marking this idea of belonging or lack of belonging, inclusion or exclusion, personal space or sociability. These effects reinforce the isolation of this young woman. Her nostalgic and distant gaze might just as easily refer to a radical break with her childhood (both far away yet close), as it can be seen to represent a contradictory feeling of desire for belonging and withdrawal.  In the last shot, the teenager is immersed in nature, behind a 'fence' of rushes. The allegory of outdoor freedom is ambiguous, due to the superimposed framework of the metal fence, and the manner of filming the rushes that seems to recreate a fence. The evocation of the damnation of Faust invites a dualistic reading between the wealth of an inner world and the desire for a social life, characteristic of the transition from childhood to adolescence. This young woman is reading, unlike the children playing, and this knowledge isolates her yet gives her a special status, just like that of Faust, who, through knowledge, becomes a powerful but cursed man. This work belongs to a trilogy that initially explores the character of Faust in the feminine; then in the second part, Birnbaum focuses on Marguerite, Faust's unhappy lover. The final part describes the city as the site of loss of identity.

"I think the work is about identity and the individual voice. [...] I tried with Damnation of Faust to see what could be said when dealing with children in a New York City playground. I did not want to be either a spectator or a director. I wanted to get at the essence of what I was seeing in their activities. Their activities became the last remnants of an attempt to establish their identities in a neighbourhood that was being heavily gentrified and restructured." [1]

[1] In Dara Birnbaum Video Art (1995), interview by Errki Huhtamo, exhibition booklet in Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden, March 1995

Patricia Maincent