Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is a video composed of a rapid series of short shots presenting two kinds of images. On the one hand, there are song lyrics from the Top 40 written on coloured backgrounds; the title of the video itself is taken from Georgy Porgy by the group Toto. These written words are accompanied by a voice which has been modulated by a synthesiser. Each excerpt relates to a precise lexical field, that of sentimentality, which is an omnipresent theme of popular music.

On the other hand, Birnbaum appropriates from this same pop culture excerpts from the American television show 'Hollywood Square', which invited stars from television series to have them answer various questions. In the video, the artist isolates certain images from the program and subjects them to two kinds of technical manipulation: repetition and zooming (in and out).

She focuses our attention on the guests' facial expressions in function of their gender, female or male. By taking these images out of the habitual flow proposed by the television, she brings out the stereotypes transmitted by this medium: the woman as a sex icon and the man as a shifty character. Birnbaum defines this appropriation of television images as a readymade, in the sense of the use of an existing object in a different, artistic context. Through this process, she does not aim to create a new narrative but to propose a different reading of Hollywood culture. This method of creation was initially classified as artistic piracy. In the 1990s, a more precise term was used to define it: sampling, which was democratised by the development of computer tools.

Laetitia Rouiller
Translation: Miriam Rosen