This post was originally published on artnews.com
Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who forever changed her medium with works that rebelled against the mainstream media, has died on Friday at 78. A spokesperson for Marian Goodman Gallery, her longtime representative, confirmed her death but did not specify a cause.
Hosts of video artists working today owe a debt to Birnbaum, who found clever ways of upending the one-way stream of information that pours forth in the media, and in particular on television. During the late ’70s and ’80s, she began harvesting images from pirated tapes of TV programs, then reediting their images. Resequenced and remixed, these images now stuttered and repeated, discouraging passive viewing.
She produced installations from her televisual material, utilizing technology that was at the time relatively new to the art world and difficult for artists to wield, and in the process, she found ways of creating tears in the media’s fabric, exposing latent forms of bias that often went invisible to most watching at home.
In an Art in America interview with curator Lauren Cornell, who would go on to organize the artist’s first US retrospective in 2022, Birnbaum said, “I’d like to create a space for viewing and reflection that doesn’t usually occur within this society, especially through mass media.”
Her most famous work remains Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), in which clips of Lynda Carter playing the titular superhero are looped, with the blasts and musical cues from the TV series now creating a musical soundtrack of Birnbaum’s making. As viewers repeatedly watch Carter appearing to twirl around, run through a forest, and slice a line in a mirror using her nail, they are made to muse on what kind of feminism is really being offered by the show from which these segments came. Midway through, Birnbaum loops a short clip of an explosion, then follows it with a sequence set to the Wonderland Disco Band song “Shake Thy Wondermaker!,” whose lyrics scroll karaoke-style, with no images to match them.
Birnbaum had intended the video to question the hidden politics of Wonder Woman. “I wouldn’t call that liberation,” she said of the show, speaking to ARTnews in 2018. “How dare you confront me with this supposedly super-powered image of a woman who is stronger than I am and can also save mankind? I can’t do that, and I won’t—and there’s no middle ground in between. The middle ground is what we need to work from.”
Technology/Transformation is now regarded as a touchstone, both within the history of feminist art and video art. In 2019, T: The New York Times Style Magazine labeled the work one of the defining art pieces of our era. Lori Zippay, the former director of the video art–focused organization Electronic Arts Intermix, told ARTnews that works by Birnbaum such as this one “profoundly affected the way we view images and culture.”
While video art is now a fixture in museums and commercial galleries, it was not that way when Birnbaum produced Technology/Transformation, which she first exhibited in the storefront of a SoHo hair salon in New York and later presented at Danceteria and the Mudd Club. But later works by Birnbaum did enter mainstream spaces, figuring at biennials such as Documenta. Artist Martha Rosler told T, “Dara figured out how to get her work into the art world,” unlike other video artists who “weren’t interested in that.”
Birnbaum’s innovations have been seen far and wide. She crafted what has sometimes been labeled the first video wall ever mounted in the US—a 1989 multiscreen installation that featured a live feed from CNN and various effects that appeared in an Atlanta shopping center—and aired her art on MTV. Her work acted as the cover of the catalog for a 2023 video art survey at the Museum of Modern Art, and Technology/Transformation has appeared in numerous surveys, including Hannah Gadsby’s controversial “It’s Pablo-Matic” show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023.
Her influence is so vast that it has shaped the way multitudes of artists—and even non-artists—think. In a 2023 Artforum conversation, Cory Arcangel, a leading digital artist, told her, “You anticipated the way people would express themselves today through technology.” That same year, also in Artforum, artist Martine Syms called Birnbaum “one of my heroes.”
Dara Birnbaum was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. Her father was an architect; her mother a scientist who became a housewife. She attended Carnegie Mellon University with the intention of becoming an architect and, upon graduating in 1969, moved to San Francisco and got a job at the firm Lawrence Halprin & Associates.
She said that “architectural planning always seemed to come down to economics and politics,” and so she decided to move toward the field of art, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute. Though she thought at the time that she might return to architecture, she never looked back. She got a BFA in painting and then went to art school in Florence.
Everything changed in 1974, when, while walking down a Florence street, she came upon a gallery with prints by Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci visible from the outside. Although the gallery was closed, she was invited in to watch a video by Allan Kaprow, spurring an interest in that medium. “This chance engagement changed my life,” she once said in an interview with Drawing Matter.
Birnbaum’s early videos, filmed using a Portapak camera, contain footage of her own making, and though they are lower-tech than the works that followed, these videos still are provocative in their own way. Attack Piece (1975) contains two channels: one displaying still images photographed by Birnbaum while being encircled by men and women with cameras, the other showing footage of Birnbaum snapping her shots. Produced two years after a famed essay by film scholar Laura Mulvey that theorized the “male gaze,” the discomfiting installation explores what it means to be an active viewer—and who gets to be one.
Around this time, Birnbaum had begun immersing herself in theory about art and film, religiously reading issues of October that she purchased using money accrued from her waitressing job. “After saving money to buy Screen and October by waitressing, I’d read these positions and say, ‘My gosh, they’re not talking at all about television!’” she told ARTnews. Thus ensued what she called a “rebellion.”
This was an age before streaming, when it was much more difficult to see reruns and obtain recordings of past televisual programming. “There was no direct access to television, and that meant a lot to me,” Birnbaum said. Her method of gaining access was not strictly speaking legal: she worked with sources cultivated at networks to procure hard-to-find tapes, then worked with the footage by hand.
Her targets were some of the most widely seen programs of her day: the sitcom Laverne & Shirley, the crime drama Kojak, the reality show Hollywood Squares. She scrambled these shows, ungluing sound from image and breaking shots free from the narratives to which they once belonged. Gradually, the art world took notice: she was one of two artists to show video art at the 1982’s Documenta 7, whose curator, Rudi Fuchs, notoriously geared that exhibition around painting.
While Birnbaum’s art had always been political, her engagement with current-day issues only deepened in the years that followed. In 1990, she made Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, a response to a student rebellion in China the year before. Footage of news broadcasts about those events appears on tiny monitors that dangle from the ceiling, their images disrupted occasionally when a switcher forces the video feeds to change out. A complete picture of the protests never emerges.
Later works by Birnbaum occasionally turned their attention to the digital sphere. Arabesque (2011), a wide-ranging video installation about female pianists across time, features YouTube clips of women instrumentalists alongside footage from Song of Love, a 1947 film starring Katharine Hepburn as composer Clara Schumann. Schumann has largely been sidelined in favor of her husband, the composer Robert Schumann, and Birnbaum now centers Clara, as well as other women who followed after her. Video, Birnbaum proposes, can help reorganize history.
While Birnbaum has long been widely acknowledged as a force within video art, she frequently received greater attention abroad. A 2009 retrospective appeared at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium, and the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, but it never made it to the US, the country where Birnbaum spent her entire career. It took 13 more years for a retrospective to appear in her home country, at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art.
Her output had slowed in recent years, but she remained committed to the beliefs that had always guided her art. The catalog for her Bard show quoted a 2020 Zoom lecture she gave to students at the school: “It is important to take this time to figure out what we all want to fight for, to pause, to slow down and set our sights on what is really important to stand up for.”