The song Fire serves as the background to this video, in the mythical version of the song performed at Woodstock in 1969 and taken from the album The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967). Doing away with opening credits, the work opens as brutally as the music, with the violent guitar riffs of Jimi Hendrix resonating in echo to an altercation between two young men in a parking lot. The action takes place in a single location – a fast-food joint in Los Angeles – around which Dara Birnbaum films various events. In the style of a music video, the lyrics of the song are sometimes inlaid on the image and very conspicuously resonate with the scene: the text Give me your money thus appears during an exchange of money, and Fire, the title of the track, is superimposed onto the image of a flaming glass of beer. The formal organisation of this video, structured like a television clip from the 1980s, contrasts with its subject, emblematic of the late 1960s. Dara Birnbaum "wanted to define the language of video art in its relationship to the televisual institution, in the same way that Buren and Asher defined the language of painting and sculpture in its relationship to the institution of the museum." [1]

A discrepancy emerges between the energy of the music and the disenchantment of the scene. The eroticism of the lyrics, through which Jimi Hendrix screams his desire, oppose the solitude of the young woman on the verge of the drive-in, a place where encounters are virtually impossible, since cars file past one by one, without anyone getting out of them.

Patricia Maincent

[1] Christine van Assche, L'époque, la mode, la morale, la passion, aspects de l'art d'aujourd'hui, exh. cat, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, ed. Centre Pompidou, 1987, p.335.